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August 17, 2020

The media are dangerously misleading the electorate

By Andrea Widburg

On Saturday night, President Trump, who has the amazing vitality of an Energizer Bunny™, held one of his many press conferences.  I happened to catch this one and was stunned.  Although my job means that I consume an unusually high amount of media output, I was unaware of many of the facts he stated.

The media will not cover any news that might be favorable to his administration.  As a result — and I've included a couple of videos, below, to make the point — Americans are staggeringly uninformed and misinformed.

Here's the press conference (and you can find the transcript here):

In the first few minutes, before he took questions, President Trump informed the media of these facts:

  • Eighty-five percent of reporting jurisdictions report a steep decline in Wuhan virus cases, despite almost 70 million tests.  This number of tests is greater than those administered in all of Europe combined.
  • Nationwide, cases declined by 6%.
  • Test positivity is 6.5%, which is a 71% reduction from April and a 15% reduction from mid-July.
  • Hospitalizations have been halved since April.
  • Nursing home and long-term care facilities have 1% of the U.S. population but account for almost 50% of fatalities.
  • Retail spending is at an all-time high, with auto production alone surging 28%.
  • The stock market is peaking again, and the NASDAQ is at an all-time high.
  • China is struggling and has been buying massive amounts of corn, soybeans, and cattle from America.
  • The administration continues to cut regulations.
  • Small business optimism is higher than at any month in the Obama administration.
  • Industrial production is increasing at the fastest rate ever recorded.

Had Obama been president, that information would have been at the top of every TV news report and on the front page of every print or online newspaper.  But because it was Trump, if the media reported it, they buried it so deeply that only the most diligent media consumer could find it.

There's no doubt that media have been hiding pro-Trump stories:

A pro-Trump Boat Parade in Clearwater, Florida on Saturday set the record for the biggest boat parade of all time, shattering the previous world record. Organizers of the Clearwater boat parade said that over 1,600 boats signed up for the event, and that didn't include last minute arrivals and those who joined in along the route. All told, as many as 2,000 boats took part, organizers told Fox 13. 

[snip]

The massive Trump flotilla in Clearwater was not a one-off.

Huge, grassroots boat parades have been popping up all across the country in recent months, with patriotic Americans expressing support for the president and enjoying a popular summer recreational activity at the same time. While these pro-Trump rallies have gotten some local media coverage, the corporate media have been ignoring the Trump boat parade phenomenon, focusing instead on "mostly peaceful" Democrat-favored anti-Trump demonstrations.

When the media report on stories favorable to Trump, they state information in a way that, while technically accurate, nevertheless misrepresents the facts.  Mollie Hemingway and Jerry Dunleavy have tracked some examples:

Or as Scott Adams said:

And then there's this disgrace:

This kind of misinformation has a profound effect on people's understanding of life and politics in America.  Lionel Shriver wrote that the Wuhan virus is no worse than 1957's Asian flu, and it's not as bad as 1968's Hong Kong flu.  Nevertheless, consumers of modern media grossly overestimate it:

In a recent Kekst CNC poll, British respondents estimated that nearly 7 per cent of the UK population has died from the coronavirus. That would be 4.5 million people. Scots supposed that more than 10 per cent of the UK population has died. That would be seven million people. Astonishingly, Americans believed that Covid has killed 9 per cent of their compatriots, or almost 30 million people! The real US total has indeed crossed the milestone of 150,000, but for pity's sake, 'only' 20 million people died in the first world war.

(PowerLine also writes about the media's intentionally misleading people about the Wuhan Virus.)

These two videos demonstrate how young people are shaped entirely by propaganda untethered to facts — and, once they have the actual facts, they promptly reshape their narrative to mesh with the propaganda:

Despite Americans knowing that the media are utterly untrustworthy, they’re nevertheless like acting like Charlie Brown.  No matter how often Lucy pulled that football away, he kept believing her lies.

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