Eddie Scarry of the Federalist isn’t buying a recent narrative describing the reasons for recent mainstream media failures.
What’s great about Steve Krakauer’s new book dissecting the media is that it comes with a lot of thoughtful commentary from prominent journalists. What’s bad about it is that, like Anne Frank, the author still somehow believes the worst people are truly good at heart. If not for that, the book might be perfect!
In “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People,” Krakauer maintains that the corruption of the national press is mostly a matter of groupthink, geographic location (Washington and New York), and ego.
I don’t think so. Nothing exposed the media — The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and on and on — for the deceitful, manipulative group of people it is than the pandemic. A grave and urgent emergency that should have been the most pressing time since 9/11 for national unity was instead exploited by the media for the purpose of winning an election. The cost: Half the country was trained to accuse the other of willfully spreading death.
Kraukauer goes over much of our Covid nightmare in a section that recounts the corporate press’s dishonesty when covering some prominent commentators who proposed using the prolific drug ivermectin as a potential treatment for the virus, rather than risk using any of the new vaccines. Although it’s been around forever and is generously prescribed to humans in every first-world nation, all it took was for popular podcaster Joe Rogan to suggest ivermectin as an alternative to the sacred vaccines for cable news hosts to denounce it as a dangerous toxin solely used by veterinarians. It was suddenly a hazardous “livestock drug,” as endlessly repeated on CNN.
The network’s “chief medical correspondent” Sanjay Gupta memorably appeared on Rogan’s podcast shortly thereafter and made a complete ass out of himself by refusing to admit that he and his colleagues had lied to their audiences not only about ivermectin but also the risk that Covid represented, especially in young people.
