the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, one thing we all know is there’s been an unrelenting torrent of bad news about the coronavirus. It’s a pandemic responsible for half a million deaths, so you’d expect a lot of negative news.
But a new study by Dartmouth College finds that a stunning 87% of COVID-19 coverage in national U.S. media outlets last year was negative.
The fact that nine of 10 stories were negative contributed mightily to a climate of fear and even panic. People were routinely misinformed about what risks were real and which weren’t – most notably the inability of the media to explain that the elderly were at high risk and that children were at almost no risk.
Hysterical media stories discussing Donald Trump and hydroxychloroquine alone outnumbered all the stories on vaccine development that were produced up until success was announced in November.
Consider this recent poll and how badly Americans – especially Democrats – overstate hospitalization risk:
The media have paid scant attention to the enormous medical and psychological harms from the lockdowns in use to slow the pandemic. Despite the enormous collateral damage lockdowns have caused, England, France, Germany, Spain and other European countries are all intensifying their lockdowns once again.
It is notable that the New York Times — which spent the summer seemingly on a mission to keep schools closed and succeeded in disrupting an entire academic year for millions of American children — called attention yesterday to the Dartmouth study and its own bad news bias.
The Times included this chart, showing what an outlier the U.S. national news is:
The Times writer, David Leonhardt concludes: “I am grateful to Sacerdote, Cook and Sehgal for doing to us journalists what we normally do to others — holding up a mirror to our work and giving us a chance to do better.”
The is what you say when you believe your own BS. We’ll believe it when we see it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/briefing/boulder-shooting-george-segal-astrazeneca.html
If someone dies of ANY ailment, such as a stroke, heart attack etc while testing positive for covid, its added to the list of ‘covid’ deaths.
Numbers are manipulated and the press eats it up to push their narrative.
But its still cool to kill babies via abortion?
Right?
That’s not scary or a pandemic, right?
Just asking for a friend