Durham - Fake news
~IS~ everywhere.
It always has been. Call it propaganda or selective editing. Even the choice of words used in an official release or coverage by a state/establishment-backed news venue may be tuned to send a less-than-liminal message. (The BBC have been masters of this talent for decades. As are VOA, RT, DW, etc.) Most of the private-sector major media outlets have agendas - their editors are not free to report whatever they wish, the owners do control their strings. So an outlet that has an anti- or pro-Trump owner is not going to be publishing articles/media pieces that fly against the owners' wishes - or the editors will be out of a job, pronto. Usually it's just politics, so I don't care about it too much. But this has gone beyond politics.
Example: The CDC has issued travel guidelines for US citizens. Their original proposed release warned elderly and persons with existing health conditions to seriously consider not traveling long distances on airlines or taking cruises. Trump's people insisted the airline reference be edited out. So it was, and the announcement made no reference to long distance travel or airlines, only cruises. That is what has gone out over most of the airwaves in the USA. [Protecting the airline industry. Obviously the cruise ship industry can be sacrificed.] Only one network that I saw made mention of the cutting of the recommendation against long-distance and air travel out of the announcement and that it was ordered by the White House. Until recently, the CDC was generally a respected federal government entity. I can only hope their reputation is not irreparably damaged by the continued meddling by the WH. [I've also seen coverage showing that airplane air was hepa-filtered several times an hour, and so was probably safer than a restaurant. So, .... is cutting airline travel out of the advisory a reasonable or an unreasonable thing to do? The fact that it was reported as cut, with no other info, smacks of fake news. But is it really?]
Example: Current reporting even in the mainstream US press is showing only a very few confirmed cases in the USA. [Which, technically, is accurate. They are reporting the numbers, but there is, proportionally, very little testing so the numbers are not officially there. People assume that testing is ongoing - I assume because they just can't believe this has been botched so badly.]
New York Times: ‘It’s Just Everywhere Already’: How Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response
A series of missed chances by the federal government to ensure more widespread testing came during the early days of the outbreak, when containment would have been easier. By Sheri Fink and Mike Baker Published March 10, 2020 Updated March 11, 2020, 3:26 a.m. ET. Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, knew that the United States did not have much time. In late January, the first confirmed American case of the coronavirus had landed in her area. Critical questions needed answers: Had the man infected anyone else? Was the deadly virus already lurking in other communities and spreading? As luck would have it, Dr. Chu had a way to monitor the region. For months, as part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region. To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China, where the infection began. By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval. What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it. “It must have been here this entire time,” Dr. Chu recalled thinking with dread. “It’s just everywhere already.” In fact, officials would later discover through testing, the virus had already contributed to the deaths of two people, and it would go on to kill 20 more in the Seattle region over the following days. Federal and state officials said the flu study could not be repurposed because it did not have explicit permission from research subjects; the labs were also not certified for clinical work. While acknowledging the ethical questions, Dr. Chu and others argued there should be more flexibility in an emergency during which so many lives could be lost. On Monday night, state regulators told them to stop testing altogether. The failure to tap into the flu study, detailed here for the first time, was just one in a series of missed chances by the federal government to ensure more widespread testing during the early days of the outbreak, when containment would have been easier. Instead, local officials across the country were left to work in the dark as the crisis grew undetected and exponentially.
Even now, after weeks of mounting frustration toward federal agencies over flawed test kits and burdensome rules, states with growing cases such as New York and California are struggling to test widely for the coronavirus. The continued delays have made it impossible for officials to get a true picture of the scale of the growing outbreak, which has now spread to at least 36 states and Washington, D.C. Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview on Friday that acting quickly was critical for combating an outbreak. “Time matters,” he said. He insisted that despite the rocky start, there was still time to beat back the coronavirus in the United States. “It’s going to take rigorous, aggressive public health — what I like to say, block and tackle, block and tackle, block and tackle, block and tackle,” he said. “That means if you find a new case, you isolate it.”[/size]
More at
https://www.yahoo.com/news/seattle-lab-uncovered-washingtons-coronavirus-053628224.html [I really hate the emotional trigger words they use in this piece, though. And all this was going on while Trump's official news announcements were saying there were plenty of test kits available, when they were not. At one point a few weeks ago officials indicated there were only 20 kits available in the State of California.]
Example: The Surgeon General was on national TV in the last few days saying people should "relax" because "it's just a virus" and we know how to deal with those. And that there were plans in place to deal with the plague ships full of old people, although when pushed couldn't say what they were. [Obviously negative on both counts, there.] There is STILL a contingent of the US media, that, by airing this interview, is telling people this is not real, or not so bad, or that it's being distorted. Fake news. [Yes, we know how to deal with viruses. No, we do not currently have the capacity or arrangement in place - that I know of - to deal with a pandemic effectively.]
Example: Trump spent time (including a weekend at his resort) with people who have come down with the virus, but is publicly refusing to be tested, saying it's no big deal. His spokesperson says he's not worried because "he gets a lot of sleep and uses hand sanitizer." A good proportion of people in the USA look up to the President, so if he's not taking precautions or treating this like it's a serious matter, they will tend to believe it's not a serious matter. The administration's spin doctors are getting that message sent out regularly. This is fake news.
Example: Even in generally more balanced coverage, the constant showing of low numbers of infection cases on usually reliable venues such as the NBC Nightly News, is misleading. They can only report what the numbers are, but
the numbers are almost assuredly not reliable, because the data collection is badly, badly flawed. Yet the numbers being on colorful graphics on the TV every evening on this and similar media venues is inherently misleading and giving people a false sense of security. I have been watching most of the major US media outlets quite a lot. (I'm stuck in the house, nothing else to do than pack. And also listening to some of the less main-stream audio ones - the broadcast talk radio stations in the USA are a whole 'nuther world.) They pass along the numbers, but don't mention at the same time that the number of people/doctors/clinics/health departments wanting test kits or to be tested is ridiculously backlogged. (Fortunately, last week they finally made something like a million kits available. In a country of 330+ million people. It's a bit late. Oops!) Fake news, even if not intentionally so.
And, of course, because so few tests are being done, there's no way to know how many people in the USA are carriers/have the disease. That skews the mortality rate - if you don't know the total population infected, you cannot accurately determine a mortality rate. So, yes, under that scenario, it could well be being blown out of proportion. (I seriously doubt it.) If you bring up Italy, you'll get the "well, that's just a second-rate medical system there that's causing it and it's not like that here" schtick. So if by design or incompetence, the lack of testing supports the "it's just not that bad" argument that's floating around. (I'm going with incompetence, at present.) And both sides of "the argument" can claim Fake News on it.
I recently had a conversation with an elderly, highly-educated, retired-from-government-service gent in the USA who has some serious existing health conditions and a wife of the same vintage who's literally just finished her third round of chemo. He insists this is "all blown out of proportion" and it's "just like that Y2K thing." I suggested he consider sourcing a way to have his groceries delivered and the response was "it's expensive". They're able to afford it, easily. As he's generally level-headed, I have to assume that the constant media circus in the USA has put him off the track. Unlike the UK, where (disregarding the papers here) TV news and radio coverage is pretty uniformly painting the same pictures on any given day even before this pandemic, the media in the USA has a tendency to be all the freak over the place. Fake News runs out of the drains from all quarters. So it tends to have some level of "disregard this nonsense" attached to all of it. (I am rather hoping the NY National Guard being called out gets his attention and that, if only for his wife's sake, he stops going out to the grocery store, etc, for a while.)
And then there's FaceBook....
I can't prove it, but I'd bet a fiver that more people read "news" on FaceBook than in the traditional printed press. And FaceBook is a cess pit of mis-information.
