Tag: mainstream media

NY Times forced to admit that COVID-19 immunity is better in red states that opened sooner

It appears as though the left-wing New York Times is reluctantly admitting that Americans living in “red” (meaning Republican) counties around the country have developed longer-lasting immunity from COVID-19 than Democrat (“blue”) counterparts.

In a recent edition of the Times’ ‘The Morning‘ flagship e-mail newsletter, columnist David Leonhardt notes:

There is one big new development. When I last wrote about red Covid, in November, I told you that the month-to-month partisan mortality gap might be peaking, for two main reasons.

One, the availability of highly effective post-infection treatments, like Pfizer’s Paxlovid, has been expanding; if they reduce deaths, the drop may be steepest where the toll is highest. Two, red America has probably built up more natural immunity to Covid — from prior infections — than blue America, given that many Democrats have tried harder to avoid getting the virus.

Keep reading

‘I know this sounds crazy’: NBC medical expert says carry extra masks on planes, coerce your neighbors to wear them

Physician Dr. Kavita Patel, an NBC News medical contributor, says that you should bring extra face masks with you when flying and essentially demand that the people sitting next to you on the plane wear them.

During a recent interview on MSNBC, Dr. Patel advised airplane passengers to self-enforce the travel mask mandate that a federal judge vacated this week.

Admittedly, Patel said her idea sounded “crazy.”

“If people want to stay safe, the best thing they can do — high quality mask. And that when possible carry some extra masks,” she said.

“I know this sounds crazy, but if you tell someone next to you on a plane — N95 mask or surgical mask and just say, ‘I’ve got an elderly mother at home. I’ve got a child with cancer at home, please do me a favor.’ Having the people at least closest to you in that row protecting yourself and them can be the best safety,” she continued.

Keep reading

‘Straight Trash’: Twitter Explodes As Washington Post Reveals Who Runs Libs Of TikTok Account

The wildly popular Twitter account known as “Libs of TikTok” simply holds a mirror up to the radical Left, but apparently that’s just too embarrassing for one media figure who doxxed the woman behind it.

The move, by Taylor Lorenz, a reporter at The Washington Post and formerly of The New York Times, prompted a massive backlash from prominent figures on Twitter. Critics say revealing the identity of the woman, who scours TikTok for extreme hot takes from the far-left and posts them without comment, serves no newsworthy purpose.

“This is wrong,” Tim Pool wrote in response to the Post article. “One of the most important journalistic ethics is to minimize harm. The story is not served by exposing a name, the story is served by explaining their background and motives. Based on the responses to the story you can see the true motivation was to cause harm.”

“So today the @washingtonpost decided to doxx an anonymous Twitter user who got popular for reposting TikTok videos, complete with a link to her professional license listing. Straight trash. Who’s the editor that gave this the green light? I’ll have more shortly,” Ed Morrissey shared.

“Taylor Lorenz is a terrible journalist and worse human. Targeting a Twitter account that literally just posts Leftists owning themselves because that account damages the Left is pure Lorenz,” The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro tweeted.

Keep reading

Twitter’s Chickens Come Home to Roost

Elon Musk has reportedly attempted to purchase Twitter, and I have no idea whether his influence on the company would be positive or not.

I do know, however, what other media figures think Musk’s influence on Twitter will be. They think it will be bad — very bad, bad! How none of them see what a self-own this is is beyond me. After spending the last six years practically turgid with joy as other unaccountable billionaires tweaked the speech landscape in their favor, they’re suddenly howling over the mere rumor that a less censorious fat cat might get to sit in one of the big chairs. O the inhumanity!

A few of the more prominent Musk critics are claiming merely to be upset at the prospect of wealthy individuals controlling speech. As more than one person has pointed out, this is a bizarre thing to be worrying about all of the sudden, since it’s been the absolute reality in America for a while.

Keep reading

‘Censorship is free speech’ is the establishment’s Orwellian line on Elon Musk’s Twitter crusade

“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the motto of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post. It may sound like a warning, but more and more it seems like a summary of the left’s aspirations to control debate and shut down any opposition.

A recent example of those aspirations appeared in a column by former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich on Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s big buy of Twitter stock. The original headline — changed after widespread mockery — was this: “Elon Musk’s vision for the Internet is dangerous nonsense: Musk has long advocated a libertarian vision of an ‘uncontrolled’ internet. That’s also the dream of every dictator, strongman and demagogue.”

The mockery was understandable. “Libertarian visions” of “uncontrolled” speech haven’t actually been the stock-in-trade of dictators, strongmen and demagogues. Typically, those authoritarian figures want to silence their opponents and ensure that their own voices, and those of their satraps and sycophants, are the only ones heard.

Reich’s defenders, to the extent he has any, might claim the headline is a poor summary of his real argument, which is this: “In Musk’s vision of Twitter and the internet, he’d be the wizard behind the curtain — projecting on the world’s screen a fake image of a brave new world empowering everyone. In reality, that world would be dominated by the richest and most powerful people in the world, who wouldn’t be accountable to anyone for facts, truth, science or the common good.”

The thing is, what Reich describes is what we have now: a world in which unaccountable oligarchs like Amazon’s Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — people who are in fact “the richest and most powerful people in the world” — use opaque algorithms to mute criticism and disagreement.

Keep reading

How Much Are We Prepared To Sacrifice To Help The US Win A Propaganda War Against Putin?

Ask a properly brainwashed liberal why they support the censorship of someone who disputes US narratives about Russian war crimes in Bucha or Mariupol and they’ll probably tell you something like “Well, it’s disinformation!” or “Because it’s propaganda!” or “How much is Putin paying you??” But what they won’t be able to do is articulate exactly what specific harm is being done by such speech in the same way that they could when defending the censorship of Covid skeptics or the factions responsible for last year’s riot in the Capitol building.

The one argument you’ll get, if you really press the issue, is that the United States is in a propaganda war with Russia, and it is in our society’s interests for our media institutions to help the United States win that propaganda war. Cold wars are fought between nuclear powers because hot warfare would risk annihilating both nations, leaving only other forms of war like psychological warfare available. There’s no argument that this new escalation in censorship saves lives or protects elections, but there is an argument that it can help facilitate the long-term cold war agendas of the United States.

But what does that mean exactly? It means if we accept this argument we’re knowingly consenting to a situation where all the major news outlets, websites and apps that people look to for information about the world are geared not toward telling us true things about reality, but toward beating Vladimir Putin in some weird psywar. It means abandoning any ambitions of being a truth-based civilization that is guided by facts, and instead accepting an existence as a propaganda-based civilization geared toward making sure we all think thoughts that hurt Moscow’s long-term strategic interests.

And it’s just absolutely freakish that this is a decision that has already been made for us, without any public discussion as to whether or not that’s the kind of society we want to live in. They jumped right from “We’re censoring speech to protect you from violence and viruses” to “We’re censoring speech to help our government conduct information warfare against a foreign adversary.” Without skipping a beat.

Keep reading

Study: Major Newspapers Deliberately Bury Race of Homicide Suspects, Unless They’re White

The study found that half of the reports about homicides committed by white offenders mention the race within the first 15 per cent of the article, while, “Half of the articles that mention a black offender’s race do not do so until at least 60 percent of the way through, and more than 20 percent save it until the last fifth of the article.”

The investigation also found that a white offender’s race is mentioned in 1 out of 4 articles, while a black offender’s race is only mentioned in 1 in 17 articles.

After the George Floyd riots, newspapers were seven times more likely to mention a white offender’s race than a black offender’s race. Before May 2020, they were only likely to mention a white offender’s race twice as often.

“A similar study analyzing media coverage from 2013 to 2015 found that the national media only picked up 9 percent of stories where a black police officer shot a black suspect but covered 38 percent of stories where a white police officer shot a black suspect,” writes Chris Menahan.

“Their bias is far worse now.”

Keep reading