The fruits of COVID-19 propaganda

 

 

Far from possessing what George Orwell wrote as ‘the power of facing unpleasant facts’, something that all journalists should strive towards, the US mainstream media cannot even muster the juices to face relatively pleasant ones where COVID-19 is concerned.

 

This is not simply because the media is unduly morose, but because the facts counter their grand narrative. The narrative seems to be that COVID-19 is still a major threat, and to be safe requires ceding liberties to the liberal lobbyists, unelected technocrats, and a Democrat-led government that the biased media clearly had a hand in putting into power.

 

And the mainstream media propaganda on COVID-19 certainly has had its effects. The victims are those who still take the media at face value, in this case, mostly Democrats.

 

A poll surveying 35,000 Americans for the Franklin Templeton-Gallup Economics of Recovery Study found that, when asked to estimate the percentage of COVID-19 infected people that would require hospitalization, 41% of Democrats estimated this number to be more than 50%, and a further 27.5% estimated that between 20-49% infected people would need hospitalization. Less than 10% of Democrats surveyed chose the correct answer, based on epidemiological data, which is only 1-5%. In contrast, 25.6% of Republicans surveyed, almost tripling the number of Democrats, got the right answer.

 

This finding aligns with the fact that the Democrats are the demographic that has the highest trust in the mass media. Compared to Republicans and Independents, who have steadily lost trust of the mass media, as shown by Gallup polling, more than 70% of Democrats still proclaim a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust. This is more than double the proportion of Independents (at 36%) and more than seven times the proportion of Republicans (at 10%) who expressed trust of the media.

 

Indeed, the media paints a calamitous picture. A study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that nearly 90% of news articles from US news organisations were negative, compared to 50-60% from international media sources, and weaves a bleaker version of reality than scientific reports would indicate. Even when overwhelmingly positive developments occur, such as the vaccines receiving approval for use, the media would quickly hone in on the negatives, such as emphasizing new virus strains, or the vaccine’s rare side effects.

 

So when Democrats are harangued by negative coverage of the COVID-19 situation by a hysteric media, they are more likely to think that the situation is much worse than it is. Hence the chance of getting the wrong answer about the true danger of COVID-19 is directly proportional to how much you trust the media. That a majority of Americans have been led to believe that the hospitalization rate of a disease perpetually on the news cycle is 10 times the actual rate, in a world where news is always available, should be astounding.

 

It is with these reasons that the people who are bamboozled by the dishonest media are allowing their liberties to be leeched away. In California, New York, and many other states, a two week lockdown to “flatten the curve” has turned and passed 12 months old. In many states, kids are still not allowed back in schools.

 

All these radical actions have been allowed to take place because people are scared by the media of a pandemic that, while terrible, is not as drastic as it is being portrayed, and in any case is easing in the US, thanks to a successful vaccination program that has seen half of the US population having received at least one shot.

 

And the ultimate irony is that lockdowns, the gift of the authoritarian-minded that never stops giving, have been shown by multiple studies to have minimal impact on COVID-19 related mortalities. On the other side of the ledger, what the media seldom portray is the horrendous consequences of these harsh lockdown laws, which include vast increases in unemployment, businesses that will never reopen, increases in mental health issues in children as well as in adults, record levels of overdose deaths, thousands of additional dementia deaths unrelated to COVID-19 but due to isolation caused by lockdowns, and a huge educational gap that will have lasting consequences, not only for American children, but for millions of children across the world.

 

The mass media’s increasing bias towards the Democrats has been apparent for decades. Now, during a pandemic, their mendacity in the service of party politics is having direct, devastating, and avoidable effects on entire societies. Perhaps in response, according to the latest US news ratings, Americans are turning off their television sets in droves – welcome news, as such a media is not worth having.