Questioning the NYT COVID Narrative

Glenn Greenwald offers Jeremy Beckham's look at the official NYT COVID narrative. That NYT narrative tries to make the case that COVID vaccine resistance is largely a politically partisan problem and that Trump voters are the villains. An excerpt:

The corporate media has worked very hard to propagate the liberal-pleasing narrative that COVID has become a partisan disease due to vaccine hesitancy on the right, often ignoring the inconvenient truth that large percentages of politically diverse groups, principally African-Americans and Latinos, remain resistant to vaccination. Recent reporting from The New York Times serves to further this distorted narrative, dubbing the positive correlation between support for Donald Trump and COVID death rates “Red COVID," and brandishing it as evidence of a partisan pandemic. But the Times’ report misleads readers through statistical manipulation and data games, as illustrated by this meticulous analysis, presented in an Outside Voices contribution by Jeremy Beckham . . .

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“The News” Has Become Two Head-Butting Religions

Matt Taibbi explains that the modern version of "news" is religion. All honest people know this. That is why so many smart people of all political persuasions lament that there is far too much "fake news," many of them telling me that they now longer watch "the news." Taibbi's article: "The News is America's New Religion, and We're in a Religious War - When political narrative replaces faith, truth becomes heresy." Here's an excerpt:

News in America used to be fun to talk about, fun to joke about, interesting to think about. Now it’s an interminable bummer, because the press business has taken on characteristics of that other institution where talking, joking, and thinking aren’t allowed: church. We have two denominations, both as fact-averse as real churches, as is shown in polls about, say, pandemic attitudes, where Americans across the board consistently show they know less than they think.

Surveys found a third of Republicans think the asymptomatic don’t transmit Covid-19, or that the disease kills fewer people than the flu or car crashes. But Democrats also test out atrociously, with 41% thinking Covid-19 patients end up hospitalized over half the time — the real number is 1%-5% — while also wildly overestimating dangers to children, the percentage of Covid deaths under the age of 65, the efficacy of masks, and other issues.

This is the result of narrative-driven coverage that focuses huge amounts of resources on the wrongness of the rival faith. Blue audiences love stories about the deathbed recantations of red-state Covid deniers, some of which are real, some more dubious. A typical Fox story, meanwhile, might involve a woman who passed out and crashed into a telephone pole while wearing a mask alone in her car. Tales of each other’s stupidity are the new national religion, and especially among erstwhile liberals, we take them more seriously than any religion has been taken in the smart set in a long, long time.

BTW, check out the video in Taibbi's article for a reminder of how networks used to report the news.

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About Our Corrupt COVID Supply Chain

Matt Stoller's antitrust blog should be required reading for every American. Today's topic is the corrupt system behind COVID medical shortages. Here's an excerpt:

Today, corruption in these markets is so extreme that hospital executives themselves are often offered a cut of the fees from GPOs. In 2013, one analyst said that “many hospital executives who are part of the Premier alliance have learned to rely on that share back as an integral part of their annual compensation.” In other words, hospitals are buying supplies at inflated prices, and those suppliers use some of that extra money in direct bribes to hospital executives.

The legalization of kickbacks happened as a series of mergers in the 1990s consolidated power within the industry. In 1995, Premier Health Alliance, American Healthcare Systems, and SunHealth Alliance merged into the nation’s largest GPO, Premier. By 2017, the giants in the industry - Vizient, Premier, HealthTrust, and Intaler - came to manage $300 billion of hospital purchasing for 5000 health systems, or 90% of total medical supplies in the United States. These GPOs have deals with the three major distributors - McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health - which precludes any smaller distributors from getting into the business. At this point, 90% of generic medicines are bought by just four firms.

And this consolidation and restructuring of hospital buying has ruined the American supply chain, and prevented the ability to rebuild it.

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Politico Comes Full Circle on Hunter Biden Laptop Archive: Provides Window into Massive Corruption by News Media

Now that the presidential election is over, Politico's reporter has admitted that many documents found on Hunter Biden's laptop were authentic. This finding reverses the pre-election position of Politico, and is not a mere factoid. Rather, this admission corroborates Glenn Greenwald's analysis and evidence that left-leaning media was corrupt and complicit with the deep state leading up to the election. In sum, reporters refused to do their jobs as reporters and it led to fake news. I used to hate that term, but I can no longer deny that large swathes of our "news" is concocted . . . fake (e.g., several years of hysterical fact-free reporting on alleged Trump-Russia connection). The motivation was always clear - - left-leaning legacy news outlets hated Trump and made it their mission to avoid four more years of Trump.

Do I need to repeatedly write that I voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and that I find Trump deranged, incompetent and dangerous? My concern in this post is not about who would make the better president. My concern is that the news media should always do its job, publishing important facts regardless of who the evidence helps or hurts, allowing the voters to decide what is important. The opposite of that happened regarding Hunter Biden's laptop, part of a growing trend. In the new way of discussing important national issues, one denies or hides evidence that conflicts with one's preferences. Proud and arrogant confirmation bias is the way many of us make decisions now, instead of relying on Enlightenment values. These are sad days, indeed. It reminds me of how we formerly ridiculed Pravda, the official newspaper of the communist party of the USSR.

Greenwald's Tweet on the Politico reversal is the first of a long thread that makes an airtight case against the news media. I highly recommend the entire thread:

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How to Lie While Reporting the News

Do I need to start this post with a reminder that I voted for Hilary Clinton and that I consider Donald Trump a generally dispicable person with whom I rarely agree on an issue?

Michael Sussmann has been indicted. The New York Times reputed this true fact but merely indicated that it's significance was limited, explaining that Sussman falsely told the FBI that he was not representing any client when he reported that there was a covert communications channel between Donald Time and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution.

Compare the above NYT version of Sussmann's indictment to Glenn Greenwald's detailed analysis of the meaning and ramifications of Sussmann's indictment. These two accounts are night and day. Greenwald connected the dots to demonstrate the long-term mendacity and complicity of the left-leaning legacy news media regarding the supposed Trump-Russia connection, as well as the inescapable conclusion that Hillary Clinton delivered four key lies only eight days before the election.

Greenwald's story is one that he has told repeatedly, but this is yet more evidence showing how our news media is organized into two teams tethered to our two main political parties.  Here is the link to following Greenwald's tweets on Twitter:

Greenwald has often lamented that reporters who make shit up are rarely punished. Much more often, they are promoted.

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