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This Is Why No One Trusts the Media
While I’m drinking my coconut and vanilla tea this morning, I typed “Kentucky COVID tests” into my browser and here’s what I got:
What you see are three nearly identical headlines pushing the exact same narrative on the exact same day. When you actually click on the articles, there’s not a shred of proof that: 1) any of the protesters are infected with COVID-19, or 2) they infected anyone else with COVID-19.
Instead, you get hearsay and innuendo posing as news. From the International Business Times:
“The question that some are asking: Are the spike in cases and the protests connected in any way? [. . .] An actual link tying the protesters to the following spike would support those who fear easing the pandemic prevention measures too early might cause more outbreaks or a second wave of infections to areas hit hard by the initial wave. Gov. Beshear, a Democrat, appears to be one of several governors who take this view.”
Note that the author is actually rooting for the protesters to be infected. And who are the “some” that are asking?
From Yahoo News:
“Now, it seems that those protests, which appear to lack social distancing efforts, may have lead to a projected increase in COVID-19 cases.”
Again, there is no evidence that this is the case. This is simply blind accusation bordering on slander.
None of the stories bother to mention that Kentucky has had a surge in testing since the protest, which most likely led to the sudden increase in cases. Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, Kentucky has been lagging behind other states on the amounts of tests made available to citizens. Only in the wake of protests did Gov. Beshear bother to push for more testing. Perhaps those headlines should have said something like: “Beshear increases the amount of testing in an effort to smear protesters.”
That at least has the ring of honesty.
Published in General
Wasn’t the protest just a week ago? Are they testing people who are asymptomatic now?
I saw Beshear on MSNBC the other day, (I have the good fortune of being quarantined at a house with a relative who watches the news all day!) and, perhaps naturally, he was quite dismissive of the plaintiff’s obvious case.
His words were to the effect of: “why are we talking about this one group who didn’t follow the rules? Everybody else did the right thing.” By that he means, did what Beshear told them to do.
Brandon,
Really this lying by the media is no different than the lying the media has been doing all along. However, because lives depend on the flow of good information right now (both physically and economically) we are unconsciously assuming that the media will behave better. Forget it. These are spoiled banal lazy lying jerks. They aren’t going to change their stripes for the pandemic because they can’t.
Brainless, spineless, and corrupt, the media continues on its clueless way.
Regards,
Jim
I don’t know if I can accept you as a conservative if you drink such girly tea.
In the mornings I am a consumer of tea or coffee, depending on my mood, while I teach poetry and rhetoric to teenagers.
By evening I am digging post holes on the farm and feeding horses.
By night I’m writing political posts on Ricochet from a conservatarian point of view.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I saw the same kind of garbage in our local paper (although it was probably from AP) . The headline said something like, “City Commissioners choose science over politics.” In reading their statements, they basically repeated what we’ve hard from Trump and his doctors. And said nothing about politics. Finding these lies has become a morning ritual of my husband’s, and then he passes it on to me. It’s unconscionable.
The new statement from the Governor is that Kentucky has likely plateaued.
https://www.kentucky.com/news/coronavirus/article242179936.html
May have led (past tense) to a projected increase? In other words, the protests have already caused something that hasn’t happened yet?
Exactly what I wondered when I read that sentence.
This was not just sloppy writing. The wording of the headlines makes it clear that the intent was to lead readers to draw an unproven connection between any “spike” and the protests. Disgusting.
Nice catch. It’s sooooo painfully obvious that the author wants to write something like “These protesters are causing people to die; it just hasn’t happened yet!”
Similar:
Remember how two weeks ago the election in Wisconsin was going to kill everyone?
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/04/22/covid-19-hasnt-spiked-after-wisconsin-election-experts-urge-caution/2997394001/
Everyday I see a corporate media article telling me there is no way that Wuhan Flu virus was engineered in a lab. This stories are based on some random doctors opinion based on their feelings. Who is pushing these articles? The more of these I see, the more suspicious I get.
I’ve seen enough media coverage on matters of life and death (but fewer deaths) in which the media demonstrated a preference for narrative over useful information that I harbored no illusions that in a pandemic the media would perform better. Nonetheless in this pandemic the media has sunk even lower than I thought probable.
Tom Cotton had an op-ed in the WSJ on his belief that there is plenty of evidence that it is likely it came out of a lab, and not from the market. Conclusive, no, but highly suspicious.
Gov. Beshear is a sanctimonious twit. In March he poor mouthed Tennessee, telling people in Kentucky that they should not travel there because there was no social distancing and we had a higher incidence of Covid19. Well, you’re not going to show a high incidence of a disease that you purposefully avoid diagnosing. Gov. Lee (TN) was aggressive in testing.
There is room for debate on the timing of reopening, but we get precious little of that. Instead it is the same old demagoguery.
Two weeks ago and a week ago I posted peer reviewed science articles authored by Chinese virologists then in Australia, now working at Wuhan, showing that they had learned to modify the viral genomes of bat Covid viruses to increase binding to the ACE receptor, as in human lung cells. That is to say, they learned how to weaponize the viruses, moved to a new lab in China and then the virus mysteriously appeared in the same mother loving city.
This was deliberate, this is biological warfare and the Chinese are winning, while we refuse to put two and two together.
Nuke Wuhan. It won’t solve the crisis but would be a good first step to preventing another.
As of April 21 numbers on Worldometer, Kentucky has 719 cases per million, which is 40th out of the 50 states.
Not only will it make us feel better, according to a sensitive unclassified but nevertheless unreleased report in the CDC, viruses are destroyed by heat and light.
How’s the weather in Kentucky?
Beautiful. Sunny and 67 degrees. Perfect farm work weather.
I think that, when this is all over, Kentucky is primed for an investigation into the testing practices of the Beshear administration. It’s fairly evident that early in the process, when Beshear wanted to use Tennessee as a foil, the state made it damn near impossible to get a test. Beshear would then parlay those low test numbers into positive press coverage. Suddenly, when it suited the “protesters are bad” narrative, a glut of people are tested in Kentucky. The guy played life and death games with the citizens of Kentucky for the sake of his approval rating. Repugnant.
I recently moved to Louisville, Ky from New Jersey. I feel a greater sense of freedom in this state, but have been disheartened by this state’s response to the virus. Governor Beshear is a coward who is now hiding behind a group of midwestern Governors and whatever they decide about opening their states. The Mayor of Louisville is even worse. He is of the “if it saves one life, it will all be worth it” mindset. The local paper, the Louisville Courier-Journal is so in the tank for the democrats it is hard to stomach their reporting. Overall, a very sad state of affairs in a flyover state.
Every day my facebook has yet another person complaining about all those violating quarantine.
I just shrug my shoulders.
We’re just a million shrugs away from freedom.
It’s only girly if he holds his little finger out while sipping . . .
The time for protesting is when there is something to protest about. It is good, right and just, to peaceably protest without fear of retribution. The right to assembly is important to redress wrongs. I might be at one of these if this goes on much longer.
Most anti war protesters do so during a war.
Just to be sure.