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Theodora30's avatar

The media is helping make this problem worse with this kind of reporting. Also, as Eric has pointed out, the media is giving tons of coverage to lockdown protesters despite polls showing they represent a tiny portion of the public. And now the anti-vaxxers are getting the spotlight. Today’s WaPo has an article highlighting the anti-vaxxer protests which was placed prominently at the top of their website. These people also represent a teeny, tiny percentage of the American people but they are giving the spotlight which gives them even more influence.

Paul Krugman’s column today points out that the media isn’t making it clear that the many of the people advising Trump are longtime pillars of the conservative movement. He cites the example of Kevin Hassett, the man Trump appointed to be in charge of epidemiological modeling despite having no background in that field. The WaPo made that fact clear but not the fact that Hasset has a long history of being seriously wrong about his real field of expertise, economics, but that he is still an influential conservative voice. I noticed that the media made a big deal of the fact that Trump disbanded the pandemic response team when it was actually John Bolton, a powerful neocon and Bush’s former ambassador to the UN, who actually made that disastrous decision. He is as prominent a conservative as it gets and has been seriously wrong about a lot, especially the Iraq War yet media is portraying him as a good guy because he is critic of Trump, ignoring the fact that he is one of the people responsible for the mess we are in.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/opinion/trump-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

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Deb's avatar

The press, or "Main Stream Media" has failed America. They have simply become a mouthpiece or megaphone for Trump. They parrot his talking points as if he is the absolute authority instead of doing the footwork and finding an authority of their own. Instead of being champions of the truth and uncovering it, the press simply looks the other way and covers these "press conferences" as if they are legitimate sources of knowledge instead of as the circus side shows they are. What happened to the Woodward and Bernstein style search for the truth and the balls to buck the powers that be? These tv talking heads have become lazy and uninspired. They no longer search for anything remotely resembling truth, instead they wait for it to be dropped in their laps. When Trump goes, so should they. It is time for a fresh start all the way around.

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