Thursday, April 2, 2020

China Claims Get Repeated Ad Nauseum In Media

China Claims Get Repeated Ad Nauseum In Media

China Claims Get Repeated Ad Nauseum In Media
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Guess what, everyone! China has beaten COVID-19, their own special Wuhan coronavirus! They have no new cases, they say! And if you believe that, I would like to have you look over this bridge I’m selling.

The news that the United States had surpassed China in total number of COVID-19 deaths was spread far and wide over the media, who seem to have no problems simply accepting China’s numbers at face value, even though this entire debacle SHOULD have taught people that NOTHING that China says should be accepted at face value. Also, the World Health Organization, which was happy to repeat China’s party line about coronavirus initially, should really examine their own role in this mess.
The best guess as to why China no longer has new cases? There are anecdotal reports – from Asian news sources – that China has simply stopped testing for COVID-19. It’s amazing – no test, no new cases to be reported! It’s a miracle! With a complete lack of skepticism, NBC has truly swallowed China’s propaganda hook, line, and sinker.

Also happy to repeat communist Chinese lies about lack of new cases while slamming Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton. (Oh, dear, mislaid my shocked face.)

China is busy reporting that all is well and life is going to return to normal and all is hunky dory here in happy communist world. Well, no.

Leaving the internal strife within China aside, there is absolutely no reason that any claims coming out of the communist Chinese government should ever be taken at face value. This is the same regime, now being lauded by NBC as some kind of “world leader” after unleashing this plague upon us all with their incompetence and inability to shut down the wet markets, who also sold Spain and the Czech Republic thousands of faulty test kits.

China is now saying that the firm that sold the test kit wasn’t licensed to actually do that. Tell that to Spain, whose numbers are starting to spike in a manner similar to Italy. The testing delay only kills more people, so, way to go, China!
The amount of naiveté involved by the media in simply taking China at its word at the moment is just gobsmackingly stunning. It’s little wonder that the media poll numbers regarding their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic are cratering right now, even while the liberal media’s most loathed target, President Trump, is rising in the polls. The media has been full of bad actors from day one, not just for their blame of the president at every turn (and it should be noted that while Trump has not handled this situation perfectly, the media was busy blasting him at the very beginning for “overreacting” by shutting down travel from China and for not being “diverse” enough when assembling a coronavirus task force), but for their willingness to believe a communist dictatorship without any critical thinking involved.
To put it bluntly, the media sucks right now, and they deserve every single bit of their ranking at the bottom of the polls as they tiptoe around the truth and sing China’s praises.
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Wednesday, April 1, 2020

The Political Media Are Failing America

The Political Media Are Failing America
By DAVID HARSANYI
President Donald Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence and members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, delivers remarks at a coronavirus update briefing at the White House, March 21, 2020. (Tia Dufour/White House)

 Their ineptitude, bias, childishness, and outright stupidity have become a genuine danger to the health of the republic.
Here are some of the public figures and institutions that Americans hold in higher esteem than the media according to Gallup:

 Hospitals

 Their child’s school and daycare centers

 State governments

 Their employer

 CDC and NIH

 Mike Pence

 Donald Trump

 Congress

 Only one institution that Gallup asked about, the media, had negative approval rating — sitting 19 points behind its archenemy Donald Trump. And there are likely many other people and places that the public has more trust in than journalists.

 This reality is a disaster for a liberal democracy, and much of it is brought on by the press’s own blinkered, sanctimonious, and transparently partisan temperament. On this topic, I could provide a book-length list of grievances. Every day brings an exasperating number of misleading and bad-faith takes by political journalists and “fact-checkers.”

 But for now, I’ll just note that it’s not merely a problem of traditional bias among reporters and cable news networks, which preach exclusively to their choirs (no one is innocent on that count.) I’ve long read major newspapers, whose nonpolitical product is often amazing, through a filter. The institutional bias at the Washington Post and the New York Times certainly isn’t new. But there used to be a corresponding level of professional gravitas that engendered reader trust.

 Some of that trust has been corroded over years of Obama adulation, echo chambers, conspiracy mongering, and knee-jerk partisanship. Some of that trust has also been corroded by the litany of Trump-slaying “bombshells” that have fizzled over the past years. I don’t know how many times I’ve recently heard people affix “if it turns out to be true” to a breaking news story.

 Sorry, it’s difficult to trust a newspaper that allows its headline writing to be controlled by left-wing Twitter mobs or one that sends a senior editor from the Washington Post to write a piece on some Twitter rando with 400 followers to own Trump — and then track down his poor parents for good measure. How do we trust producers who believe Dan Rather — a man who pushed multiple forged documents, which smeared Bush 43, on the American public  — is the perfect guest to lecture Americans about accuracy?

 All three of those things happened this week.

 Worse than all that — or maybe it’s for the best — everyone can now see the hive mind of political journalism at work on Twitter.

 For years, media organizations have whined about the lack of White House press briefings, which were mostly childish spectacles that pitted pompous media personalities against disingenuous government personalities.

 Once the coronavirus crisis hit, the White House began daily press briefings with the president and his task force. These have featured Trump’s usual braggadocio and exaggerations, but they have also been quite informative — especially when Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx have spoken. The briefings bring in big ratings.

 From the start, the ostensibly serious press often focused on frivolous gotchas rather than pertinent questions — why is the president calling a virus unleashed by the Chinese communists a “Chinese virus?” and so on. At yesterday’s White House briefing, a reporter — I couldn’t track down the name or publication of the journalist, but he had all the pretensions of serious reporter — asked the president of the United States, “How many deaths are acceptable?”

 This stupid query might have seemed strange to anyone who didn’t exists in Twitter’s zeitgeist, where mainstream journalism’s agenda is dictated by left-wing punditry. But the question was a manifestation of a talking point pushed by leftist pundits: Their hot take is that Trump wants to sacrifice your grandparents to pump up the Dow.

 Trump — who had never once told anyone to stop social distancing or ordered people to go back to work (as if he even could) — mentioned his perhaps unrealistic hope of the economy beginning to open by Easter. A legitimate question regarding societal balance, one inherent in nearly every debate over public policy, was quickly reduced to a childish false choice.

 Here is how CNN covers it now:
CNN Politics
✔
@CNNPolitics
Obama urges Americans to continue social distancing, despite President Trump's wishes about opening up the country https://cnn.it/3buyxzK 

 In any event, the media’s inane and badgering questions may well have helped Trump’s poll numbers. As soon as the media organizations saw that public wasn’t reacting in the way they had hoped, stations such as NBC and CNN began debating whether they should cover the pandemic press briefings at all. This is, of course, their prerogative. It also is the latest example of why so many Americans don’t trust them.

 The media’s ineptitude and malfeasance — merely damaging and divisive during an impeachment hearing or a Supreme Court nomination fight — are dangerous during a pandemic.

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-crisis-political-media-failing-america/
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CUOMO IS NO HERO

CUOMO IS NO HERO

New York Governor Andy Cuomo, like President Trump, is delivering daily coronavirus briefings. Unlike President Trump, he is being swooned over by liberal reporters. At American Greatness, Julie Kelly collects some examples. Here is just one:
“If social media is a reflection of how people are feeling, Cuomo’s image during the coronavirus outbreak is one of authority, yet hope—a role people value enough to begin visualizing his presidency,” one smitten CBS News reporter cooed.
This is odd, if only because New York is the epicenter of COVID-19 infection in the U.S. The disease is more widespread there, and more problematic, than anywhere else. According to the CDC, New York has 38,977 COVID-19 cases out of the country’s 85,356, vastly more than any other state. California has 3,777, and Washington 3,207. So why would those in charge of New York’s response to the epidemic be held up as heroes, and Cuomo touted as a replacement for Joe Biden as Democratic presidential nominee?
The fact that New York is the epicenter of the COVID crisis in the U.S. is no coincidence. It flows from the policies of Governor Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio, as well as New York City’s nature as an international hub and a closely-packed city. Back to Julie Kelly:
[N]either Cuomo nor New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio deserve attaboys. A toxic combination of Big Apple hubris, devotion to open borders regardless of the imminent threat, and Trump-hating obstinacy fueled a stubborn strategy that left their citizens vulnerable for months.
Further, New York’s political leaders have acknowledged that the world’s financial capital—a city home to nearly 9 million people, the most densely populated city in the country—has no comprehensive plan to deal with a pandemic or any viral public health threat.
Governor Cuomo came very late to the effort to shut down the Chinese virus:
By January 31, the day President Trump suspended flights from China, “outbreaks were already growing in over 30 cities across 26 countries, most seeded by travelers from Wuhan,” according to one model by the New York Times.
But even by late February, Cuomo boasted about his state’s accessibility to foreign travelers—his state, the governor said on February 26, is the “front door” for visitors from around the world—while only instituting voluntary quarantines for suspected coronavirus carriers.
“Our operating paradigm has always been, prepare for the worst but hope for the best,” Cuomo said.
That paradigm, apparently, did not include prohibiting hundreds of thousands of potentially infected travelers from entering his state since January. Tourists and business travelers continued to pour into the Big Apple during the first several days of March without any comprehensive screening or restrictions.
Cuomo this week again bragged about his state’s open arms, which resulted in New York’s current crisis. The reason New York now has so many more cases of coronavirus, even more than California, is “because we welcome people from across the globe,” he said on March 25. “We have people coming here, we have people who came here from China, who came here from Italy, who came here from all across the globe.”
Nice going, Governor! Open borders take priority over everything, including your own constituents’ lives.
New York’s hospitals are overburdened and experiencing problems, but this is not a recent development:
A public policy researcher in 2015 detailed long waits in New York City emergency rooms. The head of the emergency department for the Mount Sinai hospital system quit in 2018 after less than a year on the job.
“I had to follow my moral compass and leave and decide this is not an organization that cares for patients,” Dr. Eric Barton told the New York Post.
Last year, city nurses threatened to strike due to overcrowding at three major hospital systems. “Nurse Anthony Ciampa said he had to choose recently between feeding an elderly patient at New York Presbyterian and treating several acutely ill patients because there weren’t enough other nurses on duty,” according to a March 2019 report in the Daily News.
And the outcry about ventilators? State officials were informed several years ago that the stockpile of ventilators was woefully inadequate to handle a severe pandemic. But instead of preparing for a looming crisis and buying 16,000 ventilators, the state’s health commissioner formed a task force to develop a system to ration the life-saving equipment. The task force “came up with rules that will be imposed when ventilators run short,” the New York Post reported last week.
Now, of course, the same incompetent reporters who are swooning over Cuomo blame President Trump for longstanding problems in New York’s hospital system.
In a sane world, the idea that the governor of the state with by far the worst coronavirus record would be singled out for praise by reporters would be unthinkable. But of course, we do not live in a sane world–not a sane media world, anyway.
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Cuomo wonders if coronavirus quarantine may have backfired in some cases

Cuomo wonders if coronavirus quarantine may have backfired in some cases


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Sweeping statewide quarantine orders may not have been the most effective strategy to combat the coronavirus, Gov. Andrew Cuomo conceded on Thursday, as he weighed plans to restart the economy.
“We closed everything down. That was our public health strategy,” said Cuomo during an Albany press briefing. “If you re-thought that or had time to analyze that public health strategy, I don’t know that you would say ‘Quarantine everyone.'”
It’s the third day in a row that Cuomo has publicly mused about quarantines and how best to eventually restart the Empire State’s shattered economy.
But Wednesday, Cuomo’s answer during an hour-long news conference about quarantines — which are backed by city and state health officials — took a new turn as he speculated it might have spread the disease.
“I don’t even know that that was the best public health policy. Young people then quarantined with older people, [it] was probably not the best public health strategy,” he said. “The younger people could have been exposing the older people to an infection.”
So far, New York has clocked 37,258 confirmed cases and 385 deaths from COVID-19.
Cuomo’s office said the governor was referencing a study by a Yale professor, who wrote a column that appeared in the opinion section of the New York Times last week.
They pointed The Post to nearly identical comments Cuomo made about the topic during a press conference Monday, when he explicitly named the piece’s author, Dr. David Katz.
“There’s a theory of risk stratification that Dr. Katz who’s at Yale University is working on, which is actually very interesting to me,” Cuomo told reporters then. “Isolate people but really isolate the vulnerable people. Don’t isolate everyone because some people, most people, are not vulnerable to it.”
He added: “And if you isolate all people, you may be actually exposing the more vulnerable people by bringing in a person who is healthier and stronger and who may have been exposed to the virus, right.”
Cuomo has frequently countered his quarantine remarks by criticizing President Trump’s push to get business reopened by Easter, warning that the apex of the coronavirus pandemic in New York is still two to three weeks away.
“Why all of this? Because it’s 1 percent or 2 percent of the population. It’s lives, it’s grandmothers and grandfathers and sisters and brothers,” Cuomo said Tuesday, defending the lockdown. “And you start to see the cases on TV. It’s a 40-year-old woman who recovered from breast cancer but had a compromised immune system and four children at home. That’s what this is about. It’s about a vulnerable population.”
And he’s said that any restart would be conditioned upon the FDA approving tests that would allow doctors to determine if patients have immunity to the deadly disease.
“Younger people can go back to work. People who have resolved can go back to work,” Cuomo again said Wednesday. “People who — once we get this antibody test — show that they had the virus and they resolved can go back to work.
“That’s how I think you do it. … It’s not [that] we’re going to either do public health or we’re going to do economic development and restarting. We have to do both.”
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