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April 21, 2022

The New York Times falters, again

By Rajan Laad

Early this Monday, U.S. district judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the Biden administration's mask mandate for airplanes and other public transport.

A Twitter user called Jared Rabel reacted to the news by posting the following: 

Anybody with a moderately functioning brain would be able to deduce that the tweets were comic hyperbole.  But deep-rooted bias often impairs rational thinking.

New York Times "journalist" Victoria Kim is one such individual deeply immersed in an ocean of bias known also as the New York Times.  Kim swung into action, contacting Jared, wanting to speak to him over the phone about what happened on his flight that evening.

Rabel publicly posted his reply, where he informed the journalist he was "pretty upset about the whole thing," but it was satire that only someone at the NYT would believe.

Kim wrote her piece anyway, making a passenger called Brooke Tansley the protagonist of her story.

Tansley was on a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles on Monday night with her two children, a 4-year-old and an 8-month-old.  Kim reminds the readers that the 4-year-old was "too young to be vaccinated, the baby too young for a mask."

Tansley says that halfway through the flight, the pilot announced that the government was "no longer requiring masks on planes, and passengers were free to take them off if they'd like."  The announcement was met with a smattering of claps and some jubilant cheers, and about a third of the people aboard immediately removed their masks.

Kim writes that Tansley apparently "felt a jolt of fear and alarm."  She was on her way to a work meeting involving a colleague with a rare autoimmune disease, and her family had undergone PCR tests because they were worried about potentially infecting him.

Tansley said her family hadn't been on a flight since Christmas 2019 out of concern about the virus.  She has asthma and said she wasn't sure whether she would proceed with her work meetings, or what her family would do about their return flight home on April 25.

Kim quotes Tansley saying, "It's not that the mask mandate has changed that upset me, it's that we boarded the plane under one set of rules and made a decision as a family and as a workgroup.  The decision was made for us midflight."

Of all the people flying that day, it is quite amazing that Kim managed to find a passenger who is an asthma patient with two young children beyond masking and vaccine age, on her way to meet an individual with a compromised immune system.  Tansley seems like a character in a pro-mask activist short film.

Could Tansley be a figment of Kim's imagination?  Not likely.  Tansley has a Twitter account and a website that describes her as "a founder, co-founder, or early employee of six arts & media startups and has a track record for growth."

Tansley also tweeted the story, which means the claims Kim made are authentic.

But Kim, Tansley, and mask fanatics must understand the following:

Removal of mandates doesn't prevent travelers from masking up; it merely offers a choice.  Those who believe that the mask is effective can still cover up totally.

It has been proven that masks don't necessarily work.  A recent Danish study found no evidence that wearing a face mask minimizes the risk of contracting COVID-19.  They also found no statistically significant difference in coronavirus infection rates between mask-wearers and non-mask-wearers.

The WHO states that prolonged usage of masks could have short-term issues such as headaches, rashes, and nausea and long-term adverse effects such as respiratory disorders and impaired cognition and social skills.

They also need to recall the precautions they took prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 when they had to meet someone with a compromised immune system.  They consulted with the patient's doctors and followed instructions assiduously.  If the patient was in such poor health, perhaps she could have settled for a Zoom call instead of traveling with her children.

Back to Kim.  She is obviously pro-mask.  The way she fell for the satire proves that she was desperately looking for a way to peddle a narrative.  The inference she expects her readers to draw is that disaster has struck since anti-intellectual and anti-science-supporting ignoramuses have taken over.  A Trump-appointed judge removed the mask mandates.  A Trump-supporting pilot gleefully announces it.  A Trump-supporting air hostess sneezes into her hand and celebrates with other Trump supporters who have no empathy for fellow passengers.  But the sufferers are regular people who care for their colleagues and children.

It is probably meant to scare people from voting Republican in November and for Trump in 2024 by making people wonder: if "they" can do this now, imagine what "they" can do when they get power.

This isn't journalism; it is propaganda.  But we knew that already.

Any responsible editor would have asked Kim to broaden her story by consulting those who suffered due to the mask mandates who welcome the repeal of the mandate.  He would have also asked Kim to state scientific facts about the masks not being foolproof.

But nothing of the kind occurred.

The NYT and Kim already have an agenda — i.e., the Democrat agenda.  They have drawn their conclusions.  When they see even satire, they are so overcome by the desire for it to be true that all skepticism is abandoned.

They have also developed a loyal subscriber base who read the NYT only to have their biases confirmed.

They also know if caught, they will not receive much punishment.  The NYT  even has a column that claims that Trump is testing the norms of journalistic objectivity.

So what do you, the consumer, do?

You assume that all that you read is false until proven true.

You consume a myriad of media outlets and do your own fact-checking before arriving at your conclusions

Staying away altogether may not be a bad idea.  If you do not have the time, no information is better than misinformation.

A very sad state of affairs.

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