Virus Reporting Should Raise Doubts About Climate Reporting
Wednesday, July 07, 2021
"Whoever is careless with truth in small matters cannot be trusted in important affairs." -- Albert Einstein
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The Foundation for Economic Education has run a short piece about a study of American media coverage of the pandemic and its effect on public policy. The short post is useful for memorializing both the tenor of the coverage and the consequences of the insane policies it inspired/panicked so many into accepting:
Cue memories of me yelling at the television set about eighteen months ago. I could not believe how fact-free and emotionally manipulative the reporting was."The negativity of the U.S. major media is notable even in areas with positive scientific developments including school re-openings and vaccine trials," the authors found. "Stories of increasing COVID-19 cases outnumber stories of decreasing cases by a factor of 5.5 even during periods when new cases are declining."
Image by Ferdinand Schmutzer, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The trend toward pessimistic news coverage was so acute, James Freeman noted in the Wall Street Journal, that the media mostly missed the amazing vaccine development story that took place right under their nose. [my emphasis]on
Onward:
[T]he lockdowns were worse than useless. While they did little to nothing to slow the spread of the virus, their collateral damage speaks for itself. A global collapse in economic output. A projected 150 million people falling into extreme poverty. A historic surge in depression and social isolation that will have consequences that reverberate for decades. Millions of children thrust into learning environments that appear to be even worse than their previous situations, despite the fact that health officials have for months said closing schools is not an effective way to curb the spread of the virus.We have just seen how the media and many politicians behaved regarding a relatively small matter -- at least to hear journalists and politicians say it -- compared to the allegedly world-threatening "climate crisis."
After this mercifully short chapter of history, we should at the very least consider the reliability of what the media are saying -- and the wisdom of the remedies our politicians are pushing -- to be suspect.
-- CAV
2 comments:
Hey Gus:
This is something I have known since this mess began. It's bad enough the Chinese Communist Party and its authoritarian ways was not forthcoming about this virus. I had to return to Illinois during this; the way this was handled, I am still feeling the consequences financially. I knew with Illinois' governance they would handle this badly, and true to form they did not disappoint. It's becoming absurd. It just shows how we as Americans have elected individuals who lack wisdom, and have a penchant for totalitarianism. As with the so called "climate change", I believe nothing. Now they(leftists, and their media sycophants) are going after air conditioning. It's never ending.
Bookish Babe
BB,
I didn't discuss it here, but one thing I think is going to be very helpful is the idea Alex Epstein discussed in this recent podcast: his conception of the news media as part of our "knowledge system," which he argues is badly broken. I highly recommend that podcast, if you haven't already listened to it.
The media are a major PART of the problem, and I think that by tying them into the knowledge system, Epstein can more easily show how bad ideas and thinking methods are causing the problem -- and pivot more easily to fighting these bad ideas and methods.
And that will be a big improvement over the constant, impotent complaining about the media that we get from most conservatives. It's useful to point it out, but in the end, we have to fight back. Correctly naming the problem is half of the battle.
Gus
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