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Tuesday, October 17, 2023

The Media and the Pandemic

 For next Monday: Dunaway, ch. 8. (ch. 10 of 10th ed.)


THE EVERYTHING VIRUS

Early stages:  why did it take so long to catch on

Crying wolf: previous pandemics that did not happen in America.  


Trump State of the Union February 4, 2020:

Protecting Americans’ health also means fighting infectious diseases.  We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the coronavirus outbreak in China.  My administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.

In private, however, Trump was different:

Press conferences were different WH COVID coordinator Dr. Birx reacts to the bleach comments


Cuomo:

What he did not say

The uncertainty of a developing story:

Experts and journalists often pushed back bluntly on right-wing COVID lies, wielding “The Science” as justification. But in reality, the multifaceted, messy nature of science means that there’s no such thing, in the singular. “That line of ‘following the science’ is so hopelessly naive,” Yong says. “But it’s very quotable, so we end up using it.”

Very early in the pandemic, Kai Kupferschmidt, a colleague of Jon Cohen’s at Science, wrote about major flaws in a study suggesting that COVID might spread asymptomatically. It soon became clear that COVID does spread asymptomatically, but that didn’t stop anti-maskers, months later, from circulating Kupferschmidt’s old story as grist for their cause. The article went viral; Science had to append a clarification. “It’s Greek tragedy stuff,” Kupferschmidt says, “but you can imagine a world where someone reads my story, decides he doesn’t need to wear a mask, goes to a store, meets my dad, infects my dad, and my dad dies of COVID-19 because of a story I wrote.”


Allsop on Fauci:

Last year, I called Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and, by now, President Biden’s top COVID adviser. We spoke the day after he had appeared on three of the five Sunday shows (I thought he’d sounded tired) and amid a barrage of deranged attacks on his character in right-wing media: Lara Logan, then a Fox News commentator, had just compared him to the infamous Nazi scientist Josef Mengele; Tucker Carlson had compared him to Benito Mussolini. “Breitbart wants to cut my head off, Fox News tries to discredit me virtually every night, and there are all kinds of conspiracy theories like I created the virus or something like that,” Fauci told me. “I mean, that’s crazy.”

Then came the murder of George Floyd

Then came general-election season

Vaccines and antivaxxers



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