Originally Posted by Mecca
To add to honestly just how ****ing stupid people really are these days.
The fact that handling a deadly pandemic has been turned into a culture war and partisan issue in the States on a level that no other major country has any parallel to is a searing indictment of the way news is covered in the US.
The people leading the "protests" against quarantines right now are militia nuts, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and people getting paid by billionaires looking for an astroturf opportunity, but we'll still get the New York Times interviewing both the governor of Michigan and a leading protestor and giving them equal billing in their headlines, since "both sides need to be heard."
Spoiler alert: NO, THEY ****ING WELL DO NOT BOTH NEED TO BE HEARD, NOR GIVEN EQUAL CREDENCE, YOU INSUFFERABLE COWARDS.
There's an old article about the failure of American media over the past few decades called "The View from Nowhere"; basically, the longtime accusation that the media is "liberal" has created an atmosphere where editors want their journalists to avoid ever making anything even resembling a value judgment, so coverage has to be "Well, Side A says that oxygen is necessary for human beings to breathe and live, while Side B argues that giraffes emit high-frequency, tumor-inducing microwaves and thus must all be hunted to extinction. Who's correct? Really, who can say? We're just shining daylight on the issue."
Basically, they're afraid of offending partisans and potentially losing their business. Instead, the biggest media coverage will go to stories that aren't as likely to set off partisan rancor, like celebrity scandals, plane crashes, college aged girls going missing during Spring Break, etc.
This goes along with an old lie, that "sunlight is the best disinfectant", the idea that if you put the spotlight on a ridiculous, awful, or downright evil set of ideas that it'll get people talking about them and reveal to the world how bad they are, that you'll "start a conversation" about them and that will fix everything. Problem is: there is zero evidence of this being effective. If anything, the evidence points to giving a stage to conspiracy theorists, Nazis, climate change deniers, misogynists, anti-vaxxers, and other assorted tools leading to, get this...more people getting exposed to their uninformed or harmful opinions and agreeing with them, because you've just leant them credibility by giving them space on your TV network/newspaper/etc. What a twist! But since the paper/channel/news outlet gave them a platform, they'll use that to say "You can't accuse us of being biased, we heard from BOTH SIDES!"...again, when one side says "Clean water is good" and the other argues "**** that, drink mercury, it's great", no, there are not two sides to that issue.
So, yeah, even though literally over 2/3rds of America believes businesses mostly need to remain closed or otherwise highly limited during this (and percentages are much higher with regards to keeping things like schools closed and other places that aren't directly tied to people's ability to make money), the protests were still given breathless coverage by our news media, and surprise-surprise, they're being used by nihilistic politicians to turn what should be a unified national effort to save lives into a partisan fight over "muh freedoms", guns (for some reason), conspiracies about communism, and "very good people" storming statehouses and threatening to kill a duly elected governor. It's a goddamned disaster.
And now I'm rather sure I probably offended someone with that take on the dumbassery of people during all of this.
|