Every time someone who did not support face masks is diagnosed with Covid-19, the media points this out:

The “maskless” part is the defining characteristic of the story.

But conversely, when 100% of the participants are wearing a face mask and get Covid-19, the face mask portion of the story is disappeared:

That latter item took place inside a hospital Emergency Room area where 44 staff members contracted Covid-19. You can be 100% certain that all 44 person were wearing a fully compliant face mask – yet they contracted Covid-19.

Here is another hospital outbreak – again, even though this environment was a 100% mask wearing area – there is no mention of face masks: 36 staff members and 13 patients became ill. “But it’s also been devastating, he said, to catch COVID despite his meticulous attention to safety.”

If they did balanced reporting, they would write:

Here’s the costume that may have infected 44 health care workers who were wearing face masks yet contracted Covid-19

But the media does not do balance reporting.

The media has turned itself into the enforcer of face masks and allows this to drive their biased reporting.

According to the CDC, 90% of those who contracted Covid-19 always or frequently wore a face mask. And compliance on face masks has gone up much higher since that study was done.

In other words, whether you wore a face mask or not is not relevant to these stories. Nearly everyone who contracts Covid-19 is wearing a face mask.

The reality is that a large indoor party led to an outbreak of Covid-19 – with or without face masks, people almost certainly would have contracted Covid-19 (again, look at the ER, above, where 44 people wearing professional grade PPE contracted Covid-19).

By promoting the “face masks prevent Covid-19” meme, the media is, unintentionally also promoting that it is okay to have parties – as long as you are wearing a face mask. This, in fact, was the response to 2020 protests where dozens and sometimes hundreds of protesters linked arms, in direct contact with one another – it’s okay, they and public health said, because they are wearing face masks.

Surprisingly, the CDC itself said it has no quantitative data on which to base the effectiveness of face masks and to compare, say, social distancing with face mask usage. But the media is promoting the idea that as long as you were wearing a face mask, you will not get Covid-19 – which is a very dangerous bit of unsupportable propaganda.

Unfortunately, biased media reporting turns into propaganda – and the propaganda message is that face masks work, and shall not be questioned.