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Friday, February 12, 2021

Double Standards Wrecking America

Once again, Democrats have done what they used to hyperventilate about Republicans potentially doing.

Yesterday, the NY Post published the accusation (from a whistleblower) that Governor Cuomo and his team hid data for political purposes. Ask yourself, how serious is this.

Now compare this to the announcement over the summer that the HHS would take over data reporting from the CDC. If you don't remember, there was a ten-alarm outrage fire from the media about politicizing data collection and hiding data. All of which was worried speculation based on the belief that Trump is the most evil and cynical human being that has ever lived.

Anyone who was outraged by the possibility that Trump would hide data should be even more outraged by Cuomo actually doing it! But they're not. Are there calls from Democrats or the media for an investigation or just Republicans? Do you know any Democrats? Is their reaction proportional to the events?

Also, consider the reaction to and follow-up investigations of Chris Christie when someone on his staff closed a bridge.

This is just a single example from the past fortnight. Over and over again, we were warned that Trump doesn't believe experts and puts politics ahead of science. Yet, Biden does the exact same thing, dismisses the well-documented position of the director of the CDC as just a personal opinion and minimizing it because he didn't want to run afoul of the teachers' unions. That is absolutely his right, but the media should call him out on it. It should apply at least 50% of the scrutiny it applied to Trump.

Gina Carano was fired because "her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable." This was the post she shared:

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views”

Do you think this statement is "abhorrent" or that it denigrates anyone, let alone denigrates them based on their cultural and religious identities? Some make the argument that any comparison of today to what happened to the Jews is itself abhorrent. Firstly, to be totally clear, this post does not say that what is happening today is the same as the violence against the Jews, the concentration camps, or the genocide itself. Read literally, it is comparing only the existence of neighbor on neighbor hate. But secondly, if any comparison is off-limits, then Pedro Pascal should also be fired.

There is a great chasm in the reactions from the media and left-leaning people. They may agree with everything in this post, but because of their political affiliations, their level of outrage is highly correlated with not the events themselves but the affiliations of the people involved. Their blood boils when it's the other side and when it's on their side, they nod and move on.

This leads to a huge disparity in consequences. Republicans get fired and ridiculed, and oftentimes Democrats skate on without punishment. For this country to continue to work, the consequences have to depend on the offense and not the offender. There cannot be different punishments depending on the political affiliation of the criminal. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is rampant, both in the media and in the public, and the only step towards solving it I can imagine is to continue to push people to look at themselves, consider whether they are part of this problem, and try to overcome it.

Update:

Yet another example: White House Press Secretary TJ Ducklo threatened a reporter writing a story about him. His threats included "I will destroy you" and that he would "ruin her reputation." Pre-Biden, any threats made by a White House official against a reporter would have been met with a day of stories and opinions about the end of democracy. In this case, there's no coverage on the main page of Google News; I had to search for Psaki to find the details. This gap in the level of caring by Democrats and the media will lead to disaster in the long-run.

Thursday, January 21, 2021

The Resumption of the Unskeptical Press

President Biden has made it a goal of his to vaccinate 100 million people in the first 100 days of his first term. This, obviously, would require an average of 1 million people per day. Given the number of vaccinations that are occurring daily, however, this goal doesn't seem especially ambitious.

In the past week, the average daily doses were 939,973. In fact, more than 1 million doses have been administered five times already. The average so far for this business week (Monday was a national holiday) is 1.3 million.

In light of this, it doesn't seem like it would take much effort to achieve Biden's goal. This can never be proven, but I would bet it would be achieved simply by making no changes to the current personnel or plan, but that won't be done.

This all seems pretty straightforward. Perhaps the above analysis has a tinge of bias to it, but even many on the left wonder how ambitious this goal is, and any responsible journalist would surely point out that Trump left a system that was producing nearly 1 million per day, correct?

Doing a google search on "100 million vaccines" produced the following (in order)

All of these headlines at least imply that this is very ambitious. The first article though, to its credit, does explicitly say this isn't very ambitious, and goes even further to say, that that goal would itself waste tens of millions of vaccines. The Independent article makes no mention of the current state of vaccinations. NBC News explicitly calls it ambitious, then doesn't provide the current state of vaccinations, but does talk about the daily and total deaths so far. The KTLA story also mentions daily and total deaths but not vaccinations.

The WebMD story calls it "attainable" yet "extremely challenging." It calls a 1 million/day pace "somewhat of an increase over what we're already doing." Then does mention the total number of shots given and shipped since December 14th, which wouldn't provide the context of how difficult it would be for Biden's administration to build on where we are now.

The NYTimes Opinion piece goes an extra step, and provides the average number of vaccinations per day since mid-December--447,000. This is quite a misleading statement. Of course vaccinations were slower in the beginning days. Omitting the current pace of vaccinations should earn this opinion piece a "Misleading" label from the fact checkers.

Like several of the others, The Hill article includes the total number of Americans who have died, and the total number of doses distributed. It also quotes CNN claiming "Biden is 'inheriting a nonexistent vaccine plan' from the Trump administration." It's a good thing The Hill's readers aren't told that Trump's non-existent plan is producing the same number of vaccinations as Biden's "bold" goal.

The other indirect source of the poor reporting might be Google's search itself. Of the top ten stories returned, only one of them actually provided the context of the current daily vaccination rate, and no link to the information itself. These figures are not hard to find. Simply searching "vaccination progress" produces them. The only explanation for not including them is egregiously bad reporting or the lack of interest in actually informing the public for fear of making Biden look worse than Trump.

Again, kudos to the NY Times first article. They get today's good journalism award: Sharon LaFraniere and Noah Weiland. Joseph Guzman wins the award for bad journalism. Thomas J. Kollyky, Jennifer B. Nuzzo and Prasith Baccam win the "Too Biased to be Informative Opinion" Award