12 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
DEPT.OFSCRUTINY
GLASSHOUSES
T
here was a TV commercial for
Renuzit air freshener that ran half
a century ago and scarred everyone who
saw it. In the ad, a housewife has invited
friends over to play bridge. But, as the
ladies enter her home, they sniff, wrin-
kle their noses, and make mortifying
comments along the lines of “Fried fish
last night?” and “I thought George gave
up cigars.” The message was clear: any-
time you allow people to enter your home,
it—and you—will be ripped to shreds.
Such pitiless scrutiny is precisely what
the coronavirus lockdown has forced on
America’s media personalities: if they
want to remain on our screens, they must
invite us, and our judgments, into their
living rooms, bedrooms, and, in some
cases, bathrooms. News shows are a spe-
cial problem area, with viewers whip-
sawed between Trump said what? and
Who thought those sconces were a good idea?
Fortunately, an authoritative Twitter feed
appeared in April to codify our cattier
impulses. It’s called Room Rater (@rate-
myskyperoom), and, although often gen-
erous, it has earned a reputation as the
pandemic’s Mr. Blackwell.
For instance, when Beto O’Rourke
did an interview from what looked like
the dank basement in “The Silence of
the Lambs,” Room Rater gave him a 0
out of 10, and commented, “Oh, dear
god. Organizing rescue mission. Blink
twice if you can hear me.” When Ann
Coulter streamed herself positioned in
front of a large black TV screen in a
room painted a putrid yellow-green, she
got a 0, too. The review—“Pretty much
what you’d expect. Puke and a big TV”—
received more than ten thousand likes.
Renuzit is no help here. Neither is
sticking a ficus in the corner, although
Samantha Vinograd, a national-security
analyst on CNN, earned Room Rater
bonus points by adding orange tulips to
a handsome bookshelf. “She was defi-
nitely upping her game,” said Claude
Taylor, who launched the feed with his
girlfriend, Jessie Bahrey. Taylor started
Room Rater from a place of love, after
admiring the wood-panelled den of a sci-
entist he saw on cable news, and also the
depth of field in the scientist’s shot. The
ratings are freely subjective, Taylor ex-
plained, and largely unburdened by pro-fessional expertise. He once worked as a
travel photographer, so he tends to “think
in terms of lighting/perspective/compo-
sition. Jessie has good taste. But that’s
all.” The couple is quarantining apart:
Bahrey manages a commercial green-
house in British Columbia, and Taylor,
who is based outside Washington, D.C.,
runs Mad Dog, a progressive political-
action committee. (Mad Dog sponsored
a billboard in Kentucky that dubbed
Mitch McConnell “PUTIN’S MITCH.”)
Taylor admits to naked partisanship—
Room Rater gushed over the “lovely”
view of some unexceptional shrubbery
visible through a window in Hillary Clin-
ton’s study—but, regarding bookshelves,
there is one hard-and-fast rule. “You’re
going to get whacked on Room Rater if
you put more than one of your own books
cover forward,” he said. “A little self-pro-
motion is fine, but don’t push it.”
Welcome advice, since members of
the TV-news workforce have been set-
ting up their laptops with no apparent
guidance from their bosses. “It’s been
pretty ad hoc,” William Brangham, a
correspondent for the “PBS NewsHour,”
said. He lives in a tidy-looking house
and has a knack for using baskets as dec-
orative accents. A “NewsHour” execu-
tive asked him to send an image of what“To stop China, you have to stop Joe
Biden.”) Unnamed Administration offi-
cials floated revenge fantasies to report-
ers, such as abandoning U.S. debt ob-
ligations to China, an act that, investors
noted, would gut America’s financial
credibility. As Adam Posen, the presi-
dent of the Peterson Institute for Inter-
national Economics, told the Washing-
ton Post, “In economic terms, this is worse
than telling people to drink bleach.”
In the riskiest line of attack, members
of the Administration, conservative law-
makers, including Senator Tom Cotton,
and Fox News have promoted an un-
verified theory that the coronavirus may
have originated in an accidental leak from
a Chinese virology lab. On April 30th,
Trump said that he had seen convincing
evidence of this, but gave no details. Sec-
retary of State Mike Pompeo followed
up three days later, claiming simply that
there was “enormous evidence” to sup-
port the theory. More credible voices—
including those of Anthony Fauci, the
government’s top expert on infectious
diseases, and General Mark Milley, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—
have declined to endorse that view.
Yet Trump and Pompeo’s rhetoric has
some in the intelligence community con-
cerned that the Administration may try
to push on the origins of the virus much
the way that, in 2002, Vice-President
Dick Cheney and his chief of staff,
Scooter Libby, pressured intelligence
agencies to provide material that might
support the theory that Saddam Hus-
sein had weapons of mass destruction.
Chris Johnson, a former China analyst
at the C.I.A. who now heads the China
Strategies Group, said, “If we have a
smoking gun, the Administration would
have leaked it. There are specters of Libby
and Cheney, and it worries me.”
More worrying, perhaps, this month
in Beijing the Ministry of State Secu-
rity presented to Xi and other leaders
an assessment that reportedly describes
the current hostilities as creating themost inhospitable diplomatic environ-
ment since the Tiananmen Square mas-
sacre. According to Reuters, some mem-
bers of China’s intelligence community
regard the assessment as a Chinese ver-
sion of the Novikov Telegram, a 1946
dispatch that the Soviet Ambassador to
Washington, Nikolai Novikov, sent to
Moscow, forecasting the advent of the
Cold War.
To John Gaddis, the dean of Cold
War historians, America’s advantage over
the Soviet Union hinged less on aggres-
sion than on competent governance. “The
country can be no stronger in the world
than it is at home,” he said. “This was
the basis for projecting power onto the
world scene. We’ve lost that at home
right now.” If the Trump Administration
uses the coronavirus to heighten its
conflict with China, it will not only have
ignored a basic lesson of U.S. history;
it will expose America to yet another
crisis for which it is plainly unprepared.
—Evan Osnos