Over the span of a few days, the SF Chronicle went from a headline emphasizing “Winter Covid surge” to a new title emphasizing “the endgame”, and a new illustration, removing the fear and negativity focus. Sadly, the media always goes for fear and negativity and manages to spin good news into bad. This time they got caught at it.
The news media has labeled any discussion opposing generic cloth facial coverings as motivated by conservatives. In this case, they mislabeled an Open Schools group of mostly progressive Democrats (this is San Francisco where almost no other perspective exists) as “conservative” – because they oppose continuing to force cloth facial coverings on school kids who are fully vaccinated.
Scientific American reports on how government agencies use “media embargoes” to control reporting.
An earlier claim from NOAA that July 2021 was the hottest month ever appears to no longer be true after more temperature data was collected. The issue here is: the initial claims made headlines all over the media landscape. The revision, and effectively a correction, has received no publicity. This is unfortunately how media works – and why I consider most news stories to be false until they withstand the test of time.
Yes, they actually went here.
CNN’s Brian Stelter says that TV anchors were the national leaders on 9/11. Unbelievable.
A widely reproduced story says 0.2% of Israel’s population tested positive for Covid-19 in one day, and horrors, they are “the most vaccinated country in the world” (actually, no, but that’s a separate error). Wednesday was the start of school classes in Israel. All 1.9 million students were given a Rapid Test kit to be performed, at home, with in 48 hours of the first day of classes. These kits have a higher false positive rate than PCR tests. Regardless, if the prevalence of a diseases in the population is less than the false positive rate of your test, then the majority of your test results (when used to screen the entire population) will be false positives. Read more here to understand why this is a fake news report – and why reporters should never, ever be allowed to work with a number, by themselves – reporters are innumerate idiots.
CNN runs a prominent news story about the 5 states where ICU beds available is less than 10%. They conveniently left out many states that are also in that situation, apparently to make a point about Southern states?
The media has concluded that the Sturgis SD motorcycle event was a superspreader event. At this point, however, it was not. Meanwhile, the media has ignored other large events. So why the focus on Sturgis?
Snopes has just destroyed its own reputation. Their co-founder was plagiarizing dozens of articles from elsewhere, plus writing fake columns and article on the site under a pseudonym. I may no longer link to Snopes except to note that Snopes is now officially an Internet misinformation service.