Study: The New York Times Stoked Fear Over Covid
Plus: GAINZZZ

A perpetually-frightened population is easier to control.

A 2018 Gallup poll found that 62 percent of Americans believe the media is biased. Did such bias affect coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic? I run a research team in the department of epidemiology at the University of California--San Francisco. In our report, the first to analyze a newspaper systematically, we found significant evidence of bias in the New York Times, considered by some to be the newspaper of record, on pandemic coverage--skewed toward overstating the threat posed by the virus.

Our study examined all corrections issued by the New York Times to articles relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. Between 2020 and 2024, the newspaper issued 576 corrections for 486 articles. Naturally, in times of crisis, facing uncertain and evolving information, reporters will get facts wrong. Sometimes they may, for instance, over- or underreport the number of children who have died or misstate the effectiveness of interventions like lockdowns. If news organizations are unbiased, one would expect such errors to occur with relatively equal frequency.

That's not what we found. Instead, the paper's errors tended to exaggerate the harm of the virus (or the effectiveness of interventions). Corrections were made for such errors nearly twice as frequently as for errors that downplayed harms. Fifty-five percent of errors overstated the harm of the virus, while only 24 percent understated (the rest were equivocal). In other words, when the New York Times got things wrong, it tended to do so in a way that falsely stoked fear and encouraged harmful social restrictions.

In October 2021, a particularly notable correction read as follows--inviting questions as to how such a remarkable mistake could make it into print at all:

An article on Thursday . . . misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children. It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic.

Glad they could straighten that out.

Not all reporters were equally culpable; some required more corrections than others. One in particular, Apoorva Mandavilli, was responsible for 7 percent of all corrections. When the "science and global health reporter" erred, she tended to exaggerate the risk of the virus:

This same reporter is known for inserting her feelings into her content. In 2021, she tweeted the following: "Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here." To my knowledge, the New York Times has not reassigned any reporter on the Covid-19 beat for getting things wrong--even when those errors appear to be byproducts of the author's underlying prejudice.

...

It should concern all of us that legacy media displayed such a strong bias during an unprecedented pandemic. Perhaps our research can prompt an internal audit at the Times to assess the paper's role in intensifying fear and legitimizing harmful social policies.

LOL. I wouldn't hold your breath, dude. Not a single "media" organization has done any kind of review for their gross, election-interference errors on the Steele Dossier, "Russia collusion, Hunter Biden's laptop, or covid.

Because they didn't make "mistakes" -- they told exactly the lies they meant to tell.

Meanwhile, the Regime is hiding information from parents about just how badly children are doing after the Fauci-demanded school lockdowns.

A new study shows that many parents are unaware of their children's academic performance following COVID-19 due to states' failure to provide accessible school data. The lack of transparency hinders parents' ability to evaluate schools and hold them accountable.

Key Details:

A study by Arizona State University found that 35 states received a grade of "C" or lower for transparency in school performance data.

13 states, including Maine, New Mexico, and North Dakota, received an "F" for providing little to no accessible information.

Only 7 states received an "A" for making school performance data easily available to the public.

...

The fallout from COVID-19 extended far beyond school closures, exacerbating existing challenges such as teacher shortages, unequal access to technology, and growing achievement gaps. Student absenteeism soared, graduation rates fluctuated, and proficiency among English learners declined significantly. Yet, despite these concerns, states have largely failed to provide parents with the information needed to gauge their child's educational standing or the effectiveness of their local schools.

Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at USC Rossier and lead researcher for the CRPE study, emphasized the problem, stating, "We've been doing testing and accountability for like two decades, and the fact that you still have so much data that's just missing...is problematic."

Anyone have any GAINZZZ?

I have at least started keto again. There's a simple key to keto: You have to buy and make almost all of your own food. If you order out, like I've been doing since covid, you're almost certainly going to order something carbohydrate-filled. Yes, you can order lower-carb stuff, but if you're ordering from Chick-Fil-A, there's going to be a strong temptation to order the regular chicken sandwich instead of the low-carb non-breaded grilled chicken. (In either case, you wouldn't eat the bread.)

It's not huge pain in the ass making most of your own food, especially because you can make three or four meals of something in one cooking sesh. But it does take some time.

Anyway, I've been doing that again. I refroze my ice cream maker bowl to make some keto coffee chocolate chip ice cream. I'm going to make that tomorrow.

And your GAINZZZZ...? Or any upcoming PLANZZZ or PROJEXXX?

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:00 PM

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