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.
