Being mindful of our specific news sources.

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That doesn't get the media off the hook for not checking a story that they wanted to be true.

Here's a ridiculously scrupulous look at the Ivermectin story that blew up over the weekend:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/t ... y-in-three

n the process, they may have gone a little overboard and portrayed it as the world’s deadliest toxin that will definitely kill you and it will all somehow be Donald Trump’s fault.

Not on anything specific, but this one is really good too:

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad ... formation/

Here's a ridiculously scrupulous look at the Ivermectin story that blew up over the weekend:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/t ... y-in-three

Am I naive in saying there *used to be a time* when most journalists had integrity?

This one was interesting as well...
https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/columnists/the-great-ivermectin-deworming-hoax/article_19b8f2a6-0f29-11ec-94c1-4725bf4978c6.html

I haven't had time to look into the (many) linked sources within it, so can't pass any judgement on certain claims it contains, though.

It was a story that appeared to confirm many of the mainstream media's biases about the recklessness of the rubes. But it's extremely misleading. There is, in fact, little reason to believe a purported strain on Oklahoma hospitals is caused by ivermectin overdoses; one hospital served by the doctor quoted in the KFOR article released a statement saying it has not treated any ivermectin overdoses, nor has it been forced to turn away patients.

This is yet another example of the mainstream media lazily circulating a narrative that flatters the worldview of the liberal audience, without bothering to check on any of the details. Additional reporting was sorely needed here, and has now completely undermined the central point of the story.

It's instructive to take a closer look at what went wrong. Rolling Stone's version of the story, for instance, quoted from McElyea's interview with KFOR and did not provide any additional reporting or independently verified information. The image that accompanied the article on Twitter featured people waiting in long lines while wearing winter coats—which does not inspire great confidence that Rolling Stone knows what season it is in Oklahoma at present—and was summarized thusly: "Gunshot victims left waiting as horse dewormer overdoses overwhelm Oklahoma hospitals, doctor says."

Rolling Stone has now appended an update at the top of the story, clarifying that there were 459 case of ivermectin overdoses in the U.S. during the month of August, and though a state-by-state breakdown is not available, it would be surprising if this was straining the Oklahoma medical system. That's because the state is currently experiencing a seven-day average of 1,528 hospitalizations due to COVID-19. If they're running out of beds and ambulances, it's because of the virus, not ivermectin. This was something Rolling Stone could have figured out on its own had the magazine bothered to contact any hospitals in Oklahoma, but alas.

The only news sources I trust nowadays are Deutsche Welle (when I can catch their English stream) and NHK (ditto), since, to me, they don’t have an ax to grind, as compared to US, Canadian, UK, Irish, and Ozzie sources.

Here's another, less polemical take on it:

https://reason.com/2021/09/06/ivermecti ... tone-hoax/



If you click through, they go into some detail about the original quote, it sure looks like the local media that originated the story spun it pretty hard, and then the nationals just republished it without checking any of it, and ended up with egg on their faces.

Here's a ridiculously scrupulous look at the Ivermectin story that blew up over the weekend:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/t ... y-in-three

Mistakes happen and Rolling Stone at least did the right thing and owned up to an issue, while Maddow as of this writing still has her tweet up, as do others on the list, who clearly don’t care. The story in a vacuum appears to be a garden variety series of misunderstandings, in which perhaps-real tales of ivermectin overdoses got conflated somehow with an also-real overcrowding story. But as Rolling Stone pointed out, a brief glance at statistics should have given reason to be skeptical of tales of gunshot victims turned away by tidal waves of Trump-loving consumers of veterinary medicine, especially given that such patients everywhere are competing with an exponentially larger actual flood of Covid-19 patients.

The problem lay in the reason the error spread, which happens to be the same reason underlying innumerable other media shipwrecks in the last five years. These include everything from wrong reports of Russians hacking a Vermont energy grid, to tales of Michael Cohen in Prague, to the pee tape, to Julie Swetnick’s rape accusation, to the Covington high school fiasco, to Russian oligarchs co-signing a Deutsche Bank loan application for Donald Trump, to Bountygate, to the “mass hysterectomies” story, and dozens beyond: the media business has become a machine for generating error-ridden moral panics.

News has become a corporatized version of the “Two Minutes Hate,” in which the goal of every broadcast is an anxiety-ridden audience provoked to the point of fury by the un-policed infamy of whatever wreckers are said to be threatening civilization this week: the unvaccinated, insurrectionists, Assadists, Greens, Bernie Bros, Jill Stein, Russians, the promoters of “white supremacy culture,” etc. Mistakes are inevitable because this brand of media business isn’t about accuracy, but rallying audiences to addictive disgust. As a result, most press people now shrug off the odd error or six — look at Maddow leaving her tweet up — so long as they feel stories are directionally right, i.e. aimed at deserving targets.

I never thought this could happen, but people like Maddow, Reid, and the editors of the New York Times opinion page have taken over the role once occupied by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. As a kid I tilted blue in my politics in significant part because I couldn’t stand (or understand) crusading moralists like Falwell, whose entire raison d'être was driving millions of followers to hate and fear people they not only seemed to know nothing about, but claimed they hoped never to meet: gays and lesbians, punk and rock musicians, rappers, comics who used naughty words, fantasy gamers, and scariest of all, goth teens who drew pentagrams on their Trapper-Keepers.

Falwell and his imitators mixed a conspicuously un-Christian unforgiving attitude with undisguised glee at the suffering of anyone they understood to have brought divine retribution upon themselves. Sound familiar? Remember the fundamentalist opinion on AIDS patients, that “if the homosexual community would stop doing what they are doing, they would stop getting what they are getting”? Then there was Falwell’s take on New York after 9/11, that “when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad,” and “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians [and] the ACLU… I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

That brand of pious sadism is now baseline norm in the wing of the media business where I once worked. Today’s press constantly makes religious icons out of tendentious bureaucrats like Bob Mueller and “Saint” Anthony Fauci, strives all the time to turn changeable news narratives into inflexible Holy Writ, and delights even more than Falwell in its own version of divine retribution stories.

Source: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/moral-majority-media-strikes-again-cd2

Taibbi is great, are you also a subscriber? He's actually the one who facilitated a major change in my politics over the last few years, I got onto him through an earlier article, subscribed, and then started reading his books, which made too much sense to write off even when they clashed with some of my old beliefs, and lead me to more work that helped shift my views.

Here's the one that started things for me:

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news- ... ing-itself

Another interesting take on the recent issue(s) with the media:

Source: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/moral-majority-media-strikes-again-cd2