A few days back my daily walk turned into a head-shaking experience when I talked with a long-time acquaintance.
It was a sunny day and he was occupying a lawn chair in his driveway when I waved and called out. He came over to join me for a brief conversation about world events, an interaction that turned into a COVID-19 debate.
Unexpectedly, the discussion devolved into facts (me) vs. feelings (him) with his bottom line: “You read too much.”
This indictment of researching a subject, coming from a guy whose job was as an educator, pretty much floored me.
Well, I’m still reading, including today, when zerohedge.com had a story on a study showing COVID-19 media reports in the United States had been overwhelming negative, to the tune of 87 percent. By way of comparison, that study found 51 percent of stories outside the U.S. falling into the negative category.
No doubt traditional leftist apologists will try to impugn these messengers. But that’s going to be difficult because the researchers are from Dartmouth College and Brown University, two Ivy League institutions that are generally on the left end of the political spectrum.
The story on the study is replete with examples of how the media put a negative slant on even positive developments in fighting COVID-19 and how such things sowed misinformation among the populace.
This misinformation seems to have found fertile ground in the mind of the man I spoke with during that walk.
It’s heartening that some academics have found what I anecdotally recognized — the slant being put on news. It’s disheartening that so many sheep won’t bother to consider the evidence and instead cling to their media-fed fears and misinformation.
Such media bias and agendas is pretty apparent across the board, but often is harder to quantify than with the COVID-19 example.
Inciting racial tensions and political divides is another media favorite, one that backfired when some rushed to social media to bash white guys in the wake of last week’s Colorado mass shooting. The man arrested in the case, is not white, but Syrian.
In a surprising bit of responsibility, USA Today has fired its “race and inclusion” editor for hitting Twitter with her screeds about it always being white men pulling the trigger in mass shootings. After the fact, she deleted the tweets, but that ship had sailed.
I’m sure this fired editor won’t be out of work long. There always seem to be radical outlets eager to give succor to such extreme types, as long as their extreme leanings are to the left.
That seems to be the reason for existence of too many media outlets, deconstructing this country.
But even before it became public knowledge that the alleged Colorado shooter was not a white guy, only an idiot (Kamala Harris’ niece included) would have jumped on their digital soap boxes to proclaim mass shooters “always” are white guys, or words to that effect.
According to statista.com, there have been 121 mass shootings in the United States from 1982 through developments this month.
Sixty-six of those shooters (54 percent) have been white, which is a little more than one-half, well short of “always.” Twenty-one of the shooters have been black (17 percent) and 10 Hispanic (8 percent).
The shootings don’t comport with the racial breakdown of the population, as cited in that statista report. It referred to 61 percent of this country’s population as white and about 14 percent black.
This means the social justice warriors should be on their Twitter and Facebook accounts, or in front of microphones, proclaiming that whites are UNDERREPRESENTED statistically among mass shooters and blacks are OVERREPRESENTED.
That doesn’t fit the narrative, the agenda, so they’ll just ignore it.
But there I go again, arguing that statistics – facts – should carry the day vs. feelings, emotions and media-fed, irrational fears. How retro of me.
Sam Ross Jr's site 