I have to regularly update my resolve to not respond to one of my ethics-rotted progressive friends when they say to my face, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! That’s just a conservative conspiracy theory,” “You’re not only an idiot, you’re an enemy of democracy.” It gets harder and harder by the day. This has been my ongoing struggle at least since the 2008 Presidential campaign, when the mainstream media kept mocking Sarah Palin’s alleged lack of qualifications to be Vice-President while never mentioning that Joe Biden was a babbling fool or that Barack Obama was objectively less qualified than Palin was.
The Miami Herald headline above isn’t unusual; there are these kinds of lies and public manipulation to assist partisan agendas that appear in the news media every day, all day long, and from more influential sources (boy, I nearly wrote “respected sources,” and no mainstream media source deserves respect) than the Herald. Nonetheless, the headline is unusually brazen.
You see, despite what the headline writers, the editors and the paper wanted readers to think, there were not 901 Wuhan virus deaths on a single day. 901 deaths were reported on that day, but the actual deaths were spread across thirty-six days. This is spectacular deceit, and the intent is obvious: The idea is to turn the public against Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s handling of the pandemic in Florida, and to show that deaths are reaching catastrophic proportions. A good analogy would be if the recent report that there were an additional 12,000 pandemic deaths in New York nursing homes above what had previously been publicized generated a headline that said “New York Reports 12,000 Nursing Home Deaths in a Single Day!” Yes, the deaths were reported in a day, but they occurred over many days.
Nonetheless, the deceitful Herald headline was spread on social media, with tweets like this:
and this, from another Florida paper…
Twitter, of course, which rapidly bans conservatives (and President Trump) for what it calls “misinformation,” doesn’t mind this kind of thing at all.
The mainstream media and the occupation of journalism cannot and must not be trusted. One recent poll reported that 29% of Americans trusted them, which is ridiculously high. Anyone who trusts the news media is either ignorant beyond survival or gullible beyond belief. The sooner that figure drops to single digits, the sooner the industry might realize it is time to reform.
Ethics Alarms 
Here is a conversation about the media on the newsgroup
alt.rush-limbaugh on March 11, 1994.
http://groups.google.com/g/alt.rush-limbaugh/c/gZg_XyptjyU/m/NiPCvQIctwUJ
– Darryl Hamilton
– Christopher Charles Morton
I have not observed anything in the past twenty-seven years that
made Chris’s statement any lesstrue.
Anyone who trusts the news media is either ignorant beyond survival or gullible beyond belief. The sooner that figure drops to single digits, the sooner the industry might realize it is time to reform.
Many of those trusting the media will never change that opinion. I’d say that quite honestly, 25-30% is an absolute floor. At least that percentage of people are so invested in the narrative they are promoting that they don’t care to hear anything but negative reporting about the political opposition.
We have to learn that a full 25% at least of the American electorate are frankly opposed to this country as constituted, and any news source that supports that view, regardless of credibility (Vice or Young Turks, anyone?) will be trusted, not because they are trustworthy, but because they believe the correct things.
I’m not going to read The Herald (my trusted hometown newspaper growing up in Miami in the ’50s and ’60s) story, but I bet the numbers are even more inflated because the case increase is attributable to some new way of counting deaths dictated by the CDC, you know, that really reliable agency that has foisted St. Anthony of Fauci upon us. You know, if the person died and there was a C and an O in their name, it was a Covid death. Assholes.
I’ve been following the persistent discrepancy between the Covid deaths reported by the Florida Department of Health (here’s the latest report: http://ww11.doh.state.fl.us/comm/_partners/covid19_report_archive/covid19-data/covid19_data_latest.pdf) and the deaths reported by the NY Times (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/florida-covid-cases.html).
The plot of average deaths per day at the site I normally use to track Covid deaths (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/) shows a plummeting 7 day average death per day in Florida (with new cases still rising). The NY Times shows deaths ramping alarmingly up.
Curiously both sources show the same number of total deaths. This blog post makes it clear what is happening: the NY Times is attributing all of the adjusted deaths as having occurred on the day the adjustment was issued rather than distributing the deaths across the days they actually occurred.
One interesting question is what is the cause of the rapid reduction in daily deaths (unlike any other states or countries I’ve seen — generally increasing cases leads to, with several weeks delay, increasing deaths)? Maybe the monoclonal antibody therapy that is being rolled out across Florida actually works? If so, can we stop the hysteria and go back to normal life?
On a related note.
http://groups.google.com/g/Sci.Med.Cardiology/c/k8Od9t3kPtU/m/LvhGBpg6AgAJ