Andrew Stiles of the Washington Free Beacon reports on the latest example of media malpractice.
It’s been a banner week for journalistic integrity.
A Gallup survey published last Thursday found that just 36 percent of Americans have at least “a fair amount” of trust in the media, the second-lowest figure in recorded history. As if on cue, America’s élite journalists proceeded to validate the public’s skepticism.
The same day the survey was published, the New York Times issued a lengthy correction to a story that had vastly overstated the number of U.S. children hospitalized with COVID-19, among other inaccuracies:
“An earlier version of this article incorrectly described actions taken by regulators in Sweden and Denmark. They have halted use of the Moderna vaccine in children; they have not begun offering single doses. The article also misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children. It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic.” …
… Apoorva Mandavilli, the reporter who wrote the story, earlier this year took charge of the paper’s COVID-19 coverage after its senior science reporter, Donald McNeil, was pushed out for offending a rich teenager the Times had forced him to chaperone on a trip to Peru. Mandavilli, on the other hand, was not forced to resign after she suggested it was racist to believe that COVID-19 may have leaked from a Chinese lab.
Over the weekend, CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter performed a dramatic monologue in which he attempted to spin the atrocious Gallup figures into a diatribe against Fox News. “Whenever anyone asks me about trust in media, I try to ask, ‘What do they mean by media?'” the journalist mused, thoughtfully. Maybe they just don’t trust Fox News, whose viewers are uneducated idiots who have been brainwashed into hating “objective” networks like CNN?
