Just about all of the numbers in this USA Today “news report” are wrong, and easily cross checked for the correct numbers. This. Is. Journalism. Where facts are strictly optional.
“27 police officers injured during largely peaceful” protests. Or something. Several examples of creative reporting, including the MSNBC reporting saying protests are not unruly as a building burns behind him. Words used to have common meanings but apparently not any more. This post is not about the protests about the reporting.
Reporter standing in front of burning buildings says in live broadcast “I want to be clear on how I characterize this. This is mostly a protest. It is not generally speaking unruly.”. Setting fire to buildings is not unruly. Got it.
A national TV reporter hyperventilates on a live broadcast about people not wearing masks as someone walks by and points out his own crew isn’t wearing masks either. Because this is faked news intended to get your emotions going one way or another. Television news is just a big act now days. I may not be a real TV reporter but I play one on TV …
Headline makes it sound like there is only a 50% chance the Oxford vaccine will work against Covid-19. But that is not what this is about – at all. The real world incidence of Covid-19 is falling rapidly and might be so low that they are unable to see how the vaccine effects individuals contracting Covid-19 – because you can’t get the disease if the disease has largely vanished.
The researchers think that because of this, there is a 50% chance they will have insufficient data by September to say the vaccine meets requirements by then – and the tests may take longer. The headline is intended to lead you astray and emotionally thinking “Oh no! Vaccines won’t work”, which has been a mainstay of speculative scary reporting for the past 2 months.
Time Magazine ran with the headline “Accidental Poisonings Rise After Trump Disinfectant Comments”; the headline, however, is refuted by the story’s own text. In fact, the rise in accidental poisoning began six weeks before Trump’s bizarre comments, and was part of a longer term trend in an increase in accidental poisoning. The sharp increase that began in February was due to many people acquiring and misusing (and making accessible to children) alcohol-based sanitizers and bleach.
CNN says Greta Thunberg is an expert on corona virus. Face plant. This. Is. Journalism. What. A. Joke.
The media focuses on doom and gloom based frequently on rampant speculation. No one “reports” anymore. Instead, they prognosticate and speculate about the future with made up gloom and doom, most of which makes no logical sense. The reason for the gloom and doom is due to an odd bit of psychology. Negative information always takes precedence over positive information – it is a basic survival mechanism to pay attention to bad things. The media know this. And strangely enough, news consumers seek out more bad news to validate their feelings of anxiety.
NY Times headlined story, widely distributed, misquoted the scientist featured in the story, and drew the wrong conclusion.
Two photographers demonstrate how many “Covid-19 crowd” photos have been faked to make it look like crowds of people are in close proximity to one another.