Conservative media’s reaction to Rick Bright: Who’s that?

Rick Bright barely registers for President Donald Trump — “never met him or even heard of him,” he tweeted Thursday.

And if the last few days are any indication, Trump’s followers feel the same way about the ousted vaccine expert-turned whistleblower.

Like the president, the conservative media world has largely ignored Bright’s high-profile allegations the president misled the American people about the coronavirus outbreak, failed to act effectively to stem the disease’s spread and cost the country lives. And the few times Trump-friendly pundits have engaged, it has mostly been to question Bright’s credibility and character, or to portray him as a Democratic distraction from “Obamagate,” the amorphous charge that Obama-era officials in their final days crafted a plot to take down the incoming president.

The conservative outlet Breitbart relied on wire services to cover Bright’s testimony Thursday before a House subcommittee, along with a column from editor-at-large Joel Pollak dismissing Bright for not testifying under oath. Gateway Pundit and The Federalist, two of Trump’s most vocal defenders, didn’t even cover it. The White House barely sent out anyone to run opposition, with trade adviser Peter Navarro making one appearance on Fox News to call Bright a “deserter in the war on the China virus,” and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany saying Bright probably hadn’t been “paying attention” to anything the White House was doing to fight the coronavirus.

“Dr. Bright’s testimony is a media-driven sideshow,” Raheem Kassam, former Breitbart editor and co-host of the radio show “War Room,” argued in an interview, accusing the Democrats and media of “play[ing] up another phony whistleblower.”

Conservative radio host Dan Bongino encouraged his followers not to lose focus.

“Rick Bright’s credibility has already been shredded. This is a lib distraction from the explosive #Obamagate story. Ignore it and plough ahead on Obamagate,” he tweeted.

While Trump and his team often launch scorched-earth offensives against the president’s critics — former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, White House staffer-turned impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, former FBI Director James Comey, to name a few — they occasionally deploy another tactic: ignore. It’s a media strategy designed to downplay his accusations as not even meriting a response, and a sign to Trump supporters that they should not pay attention, either.

“Why give him any attention to the obvious PR stunt he tried to pull?” said one former White House official, comparing Bright’s actions to “burn[ing] the house down” as he was getting kicked out. “It’s kind of like not publishing a terrorist’s name because you don’t want to give him the satisfaction.”

Bright’s initial claims, made as the coronavirus death toll was rapidly escalating across the country in April, were striking. He argued he was abruptly removed as head of a department that invests in coronavirus vaccine development after he resisted political pressure to focus on hydroxychloroquine. Trump and his supporters had been promoting the antimalarial drug as a promising treatment for Covid-19, despite no scientific proof of its effectiveness.

Before a House committee on Thursday, Bright, whom the Trump administration has tried to move to a new government position, painted an even more damning picture beyond his initial complaint.

“By not telling America the truth … people were not as prepared as they could have been and should have been,” Bright testified. “We did not forewarn people. We did not train people. We did not educate them on social distancing and wearing a mask as we should have in January and February.”

“Without better planning,” he added, “2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history.”

A few conservative-leaning outlets and pundits — notably the less consistently Trump-friendly ones — treated Bright’s allegations seriously. For some time, the Drudge Report’s top link read “WHISTLEBLOWER OF DOOM! ‘We’re In Deep S**t.’” Fox News anchor Bret Baier called Bright’s testimony “significant”.

But that was one drop in the right-wing content ocean that day, noted the former White House official.

“He’s not someone who is relevant enough to move the needle,” the person said. “Coronavirus, China, Obamagate, Flynn, fake news, Biden, elections, Clinton, etc. They take precedence over some guy who was going to get reassigned anyway.”

Indeed, conservatives frequently pointed to mainstream media reporting indicating Bright’s ouster was already underway before the pandemic, due to clashes with department leaders. And according to public documents, Bright also asked the Food and Drug Administration to approve emergency use of the drug for coronavirus patients.

But primarily, they homed in on Bright’s attorneys and the fact that he’s not currently showing up at work.

For legal representation, Bright hired Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, the attorneys who represented Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault during his Supreme Court nomination — a fact not lost on some pundits. And, others noted, Bright has a guaranteed job running a coronavirus testing initiative at National Institutes of Health but has yet to show up. The White House focused on those details Friday.

“He takes a $285,000 salary,” McEnany told reporters. “That's extraordinary for a federal government salary, and he is still on taxpayer-funded medical leave so he can work with partisan attorneys to malign this president. So Mr. Bright, he should perhaps show up for the job he currently has.”

Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters who has tracked Fox News and conservative media for over a decade, said the decision to not go all in on Bright showed the priorities of Trump’s media boosters: Get people to stop talking about the mounting death toll of coronavirus, and to start focusing on Trump’s political enemies.

“They do not shy away from going at people when they feel that they have the opportunity to do so,” he said. “I think in this case, they don't want to talk about coronavirus. They want to talk about something else. And so even when you're going after a whistleblower who is talking about coronavirus, you're still talking about that subject.”