Larry the Cable Guy Blasts Media's COVID Coverage - 'It Offends Me as an Idiot'
It’s a key question about the media coverage surrounding COVID-19: How are idiots taking it?
I know, it’s a question we don’t spend enough time thinking about. I usually don’t write for Democrats.
As Larry the Cable Guy pointed out, though, our media landscape of late has been offending the idiot-American community.
In a tweet Thursday, Larry — legal name Daniel Lawrence Whitney — said that if we were to react to every pandemic threat as we did to this one, we would be “toast.”
“I hate that we live in a time where the media creates an atmosphere where you can’t question anything or you’re a know nothing idiot,” he tweeted.
“It offends me as an idiot. Question everything. Honestly, are we gonna react like this from now on when a virus comes through? If so, were toast.”
I hate that we live in a time where the media creates an atmosphere where you can’t question anything or you’re a know nothing idiot. It offends me as an idiot. Question everything. Honestly, are we gonna react like this from now on when a virus comes through? If so, were toast.
— Larry The Cable Guy (@GitRDoneLarry) March 26, 2020
So, how have they reacted? What might be objectionable even to an idiot?
Well, let’s start with the media blaming the media. I mean, I’m aware that I’m part of this, but I’m at another level of remove — the media blaming the media blaming the media. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, perhaps you need to look at The Washington Post’s “The Fox News whipsaw on coronavirus: In another swerve, hosts push Trump to abandon shutdown.”
“For weeks, hosts scoffed at the looming coronavirus crisis, only to make an abrupt about-face last week when President Trump acknowledged the severity of the pandemic and declared a national emergency to fight it,” the piece stated.
“But now, Fox’s pundits have changed their minds once more — and Trump is listening.” [Emphasis ours.]
“The commentary dovetails with, and may even have encouraged, Trump’s expressing a desire for businesses to start reopening after the federal government’s 15-day, stay-at-home period ends on Monday. Trump made his intentions clear Tuesday during a town-hall style interview on Fox, saying he wants to have the country ‘opened’ by Easter — April 12.” [Emphasis ours, again.]
Fox News might have been setting coronavirus policy, according to reporters at The Post. That’s really their take on how things work.
At least they didn’t say that half of America may die, the way that MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did — a quote the network promoted via Twitter.
“There is no option to just let everyone go back out and go back to normal if a pandemic rages across the country and kills 50% of the population,” the network’s tweet quoted Hayes as saying.
Here’s the subsequent correction:
Correction: The quote tweeted is incorrect due to an editing error.
It should read: “if a pandemic rages across the country and infects 50% of the population, and kills a percentage point, at the low end”
The erroneous tweet is included for the record. https://t.co/ajvAfsmlKj pic.twitter.com/TFsk5Wk5lA
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 24, 2020
Wonderful.
This is idiotic coverage, made worse by the fact that there’s not a whole lot of agreement about the data regarding coronavirus.
For instance, how many people have caught it? A new Oxford study found that, according to its models, about half of the British population might already have been infected with coronavirus — and therefore built up immunity. That would make a huge difference if true, inasmuch as it would upend all of the models we’ve been talking about.
Also, what’s the death rate here? We’ve been looking at this through the lens of the World Health Organization’s 3.4 percent death rate. Yet, according to other models, that number could be as low as 0.06 percent, according to a model by Stanford’s Drs. Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya, put forth in a Wall Street Journal article published Tuesday. They called the 2-4 percent death rate postulated by the WHO “deeply flawed.”
Another Stanford doctor, John P.A. Ioannidis, wrote in STAT that the number could be as low as 0.125 percent, although this was “based on extremely thin data” from the cruise ship Diamond Princess.
There were other articles questioning the death rate for the disease, claiming that it was far less than that 3.4 percent number, too. I could rattle them off and it wouldn’t matter. The point is that they’ve gotten almost no attention from a media that claims to care about science — so long as it’s confirmation of their biases, of course.
These are points I would posit even an idiot can see — including a self-declared idiot like Larry the Cable Guy.
I don’t care who you are, that’s scary.
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