Why the Profession of Journalism Is Corrupt, and Why People Have Contempt for the Media—a Case Study

We live in a time of the corruption of many Western institutions, including one of the most important that needs to be free of corruption: the news media. Truly freedom cannot survive in the United States if journalism is not held to a higher standard. 

I have read many articles on sites like Yahoo.com where the intent of the article is to actually confuse or mislead the reader instead of enlighten. As an example, I would like to point to an article I recently read on Yahoo.com.

 

The article is titled: “Iowa teacher, 38, dies days after testing positive for COVID-19: 'There's a lot of sadness'. I was interested to read the article, because the headline was written in the wishy-washy passive way that so many online headlines are written nowadays. I thought that if the teacher died of Covid, the headline would more clearly say: “Iowa teacher, 38, dies of COVID-19: ‘There’s a lot of sadness”.

 

So I read the article, and unsurprisingly, there was no place in the article where it actually said how the teacher died. 

 

“We sent him home early that Thursday and checked on him that Thursday night and that was the last time we heard from him," Frazier said.

 

On Sunday, police were called to Englert's home to perform a welfare check after he did not return his father's calls, and police found his body. Police concluded he died suddenly a day or two earlier, Frazier said.

 

If you read the last sentence carefully, an intelligent reader would come to the conclusion that the teacher died in a way that was unrelated to COVID-19.

 

I’ve never heard of a person dying suddenly from Covid, usually it is a drawn-out affair with hospital stays and ventilators. This sounds more like an accidental death or suicide.

 

The article on Yahoo.com was written by a reporter for the Des Moines Register, so I clicked the link and read his article on the newspaper’s website. Interestingly, the third paragraph of the Yahoo.com article does not appear in the Des Moines Register article:

 

An outbreak at the district's secondary school was reported the previous week, Frazier said, believed to be linked to students who were getting together outside school and spreading the virus. He said some of the students brought the virus to school.

 

That paragraph was just for Yahoo.com. And if we are being honest, that paragraph is the reason this article is considered nationally interesting. I think the effort by this journalist to insinuate that teenagers are responsible for the teacher’s death is reprehensible.

 

When I first read the story on the Des Moines Register’s website, there were three comments to the article, one was explicitly political:

 

“So sad and so unnecessary. His death can be blamed directly on those in his community who refuse to wear a mask and keep their distance.  He most likely was exposed to the virus from a student who contracted it from a family member or a friend who belongs to the "I don't have to wear a mask if I don't want to! It's my RIGHT!" club.

 

Why is it that the likes of Trump, Meadows, Rand Paul, and the others who have been lying about and downplaying this virus for months can get this virus and get through it with virtually no ill effects, and good decent honest people like this teacher will get it and are gone within a few days? Life is truly not fair! When we do venture out we need to automatically assume that EVERYONE, including ourselves, is carrying this virus and act accordingly. Its the only way well ever get through this with the least amount if deaths.” 

 

If you use Google to search this story, here is the first page of results:

 

 

 

Note that this story of a small-town teacher’s death is showing up in People magazine, the NY Post, and USA Today. Subsequent search pages show it appearing in The Hill, The L.A. Times, and the Daily Mail (UK).

 

But I guess nothing is out of bounds when it comes to pushing the Corona Virus Panic Narrative. News outlets, for whatever reason, are searching high and low for stories that make people perceive COVID-19 to be bigger and more dangerous than it is, and to slap down people who want to live their lives as normally as possible. In contrast to this narrative, many Americans believe that we have rights that even a flu outbreak does not take away.

The Battle Unfought

Minnesotans are two days into Governor Tim Walz extended Minnesota’s stay-at-home order, which was set to expire on May 4. The current stay-at-home order is an extension of the previous extension of the initial stay-at-home order.

More people are beginning to question the necessity of continuing the stay-at-home orders. We now know that the virus is most deadly to the elderly and those with underlying health issues.

Here is some insight from a Washington Post article.

Kevin McCullough, a columnist for the conservative website Town Hall, wrote. . . . “Nearly everything we’ve been told about models, rates of infection, deaths, and recoveries was inaccurate,” he wrote. “The death rate in New York State isn’t 7.4%, it is actually .75%.”

But the two numbers describe different things: The first is a case fatality rate, reflecting deaths among people with confirmed diagnoses of covid-19. The second is the infection fatality rate, extrapolated from the antibody surveys.
In other words, both numbers can be correct, and useful.
. . .
Moreover, the fatality rate of a virus, however it is defined, is not an innate feature of the pathogen. It depends on many variables, including the age and health of the population and access to health care. Timing matters, too: In China the fatality rate was high during the initial phase of the outbreak, when hospitals were overwhelmed and doctors struggled to cope with the crisis.

We can say with confidence that there will continue to be spread of the virus and deaths attributed to it. So by the logic of Governor Walz and his team, I expect the order to be extended again and again.

The last point of the Washington Post article gets to another point that is irksome: how the governor keeps moving the goalposts. The original order, which most people agreed with, was done with the expressed purpose of “flattening the curve,” which would allow the health care system to prepare for the wave of sick people. But extending the order and extending it again shows that the new logic is no longer to flatten the curve but to suppress the spread of the virus. This would make sense if we could stay inside for a month or even two months, and then the virus would be gone. But the virus could be around for another 18 months. At that point, what will be left of our society? I’ve never heard that any local media people have asked the governor about this change. I guess we’re just supposed to go along with it, and the people of the state have questions or concerns, the answer is the same as Darth Vader gave to Lando in the Empire Strikes back:

Lando: That wasn’t part of the deal!

Darth Vader: I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.

Another point about “flattening the curve” is that it is meant to spread out the infections and deaths over a longer period of time, but I think that Walz and others are trying to mitigate the deaths, which comes at a huge social and economic cost, and it may not actually suppress deaths in the final tally. I am sympathetic to the governor feeling responsible for the deaths that are reported day after day, but the responsibility for those deaths are not on the governor or the president or any other official. They are only the responsibility of the Chinese that loosed this virus on the world.

To me, we either fight the virus now, or we fight it later. It’s not going away any time soon. Looked at this way, I can't help but compare Governor Walz to General George McClellan of the Civil War. McClellan was famous having a well-drilled army, for overestimating the strength of his foes, and for always looking for ways to not engage the enemy. Lincoln’s frustrations at McClellan’s dithering around so infuriated him, that Lincoln finally dismissed McClellan after he failed to follow up on the fighting at Antietam.

My preference in all this would be to protect the most vulnerable citizens, and then open up. There may be an initial spike in infections and deaths, but then we will be over and done with this, instead of having it hanging over our heads for the next 18 months.

A Proposal for a 1–10 Scale of Response to the Virus

I listen to a local sports station when driving in my car. Since the different sports leagues have shut down, most of the talk has been about the Coronavirus. Over the last couple of weeks, the basic tenor of the hosts’ commentary is to shelter in place and follow the governor’s guidelines to a T. They get frustrated when people call in and wonder if it’s wise to tank the economy by having everyone shelter in place, and the hosts’ responses to emailers or callers are usually somewhere along the lines of you either follow what the government says or “let it rip”! By “Let it rip,” the host is saying that people want to do nothing to slow the spread of the virus.

My worry is that with the black or white choice of quarantine and “let it rip,” it logically follows that we must remain under quarantine until the virus is completely gone/defeated. This logic will keep pushing the quarantine back further and further.

I think this is a false choice. It seems to me that there are many levels of gradation between “letting it rip” on one end of the spectrum and having everyone sit in their houses for weeks or months on the other end of the spectrum.

I am not a doctor or an epidemiologist, but I propose the creation of guidelines numbered from 1–10 with each increase showing a higher level of response:

1. Wash hands, sneeze or cough into a tissue, avoid touching face
2. Disinfect surfaces regularly
3. If you feel sick/have symptoms, do not go to work or school
4. Do not visit nursing homes, hospitals, long-term care facilities unless providing critical assistance
5. Avoid discretionary travel
6. Avoid social gatherings of more than 10 people
7. Avoid eating or drinking in restaurants and bars
8. Workplaces institute some sort of varied work schedule to minimize number of people in office at one time
9. Work or study from home
10. Shelter in place/quarantine

I would be interested in seeing the curve models with each of these implemented, and see what each level of response would do to the overall number of cases/deaths.

Another benefit about preparing a scale like this is that it would allow different cities/states to choose a response that is somewhere between shutting down everything and “letting it rip.”

Finally, it would also give cities/states a way to walk down the restrictions when the virus is still present, but no longer as prevalent.