Media Offers No Apologies

[StevieRay]

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[h=3]Media Offers No Apologies As Georgia -- Which They Scolded for Practicing "Human Sacrifice" in Reopening -- Posts Lowest COVID Numbers In a Month[/h]

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The tone of the many media reactions to Erickson, Carlson, Trump, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, and others who've suggested lockdowns and strict shelter-in-place laws are either unnecessary or do more harm than good, fits with what writer Thomas Frank describes as a new "Utopia of Scolding":In the Trump years the sector of society we used to describe as liberal America became a giant finger-wagging machine. The news media, academia, the Democratic Party, show-business celebrities and masses of blue-checked Twitter virtuosos became a kind of umbrella agreement society, united by loathing of Trump and fury toward anyone who dissented with their preoccupations.
Because this Conventional Wisdom viewed itself as being solely concerned with the Only Important Thing, i.e. removing Trump, there was no longer any legitimate excuse for disagreeing with its takes on Russia, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, Joe Rogan, the 25th amendment, Ukraine, the use of the word "treason," the removal of Alex Jones, the movie Joker, or whatever else happened to be the #Resistance fixation of the day.
When the Covid-19 crisis struck, the scolding utopia was no longer abstraction. The dream was reality! Pure communism had arrived! Failure to take elite advice was no longer just a deplorable faux pas. Not heeding experts was now murder. It could not be tolerated. Media coverage quickly became a single, floridly-written tirade against "expertise-deniers." For instance, the Atlantic headline on Kemp's decision to end some shutdowns was, "Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice."
At the outset of the crisis, America's biggest internet platforms -- Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit -- took an unprecedented step to combat "fraud and misinformation" by promising extensive cooperation in elevating "authoritative" news over less reputable sources.
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We have a lot of dumb people in this country. But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set ingesting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic, is that the jackasses among the "expert" class compound their wrongness by being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along. In other words, to combat "ignorance," the scolders create a new and more virulent species of it: exclusive ignorance, forced ignorance, ignorance with staying power.
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We've become incapable of talking calmly about possible solutions because we've lost the ability to decouple scientific or policy discussions, or simple issues of fact, from a political argument. Reporting on the Covid-19 crisis has become the latest in a line of moral manias with Donald Trump in the middle.
Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we�re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous. Or we're politicizing the framing of stories in a way that signals to readers what their take should be before they even digest the material. "Conservative Americans see coronavirus hope in Progressive Sweden," reads a Politico headline, as if only conservatives should feel optimism in the possibility that a non-lockdown approach might have merit! Are we rooting for such an approach to not work?