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Matt Taibbi: Moral Majority Media Strikes Again (Ivermectin Fake News)
Related: COVID medications, ethics in medicine, gears of the machine, Matt Taibbi, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus
re: “Why Has "Ivermectin" Become a Dirty Word?”
re: Matt Taibbi
Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.
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Matt Taibbi: Moral Majority Media Strikes Again
by Matt Taibbi, 2021-09-07
When Rachel Maddow, Rolling Stone, and others jumped on a dubious report of ivermectin overdoses, it was just the latest in a string of moral mania mishaps
Citing a report of Oklahoma emergency rooms so overwhelmed by ivermectin overdoses that gunshot victims were going untreated, MSNBC anchor Joy Ann Reid Sunday proposed sticking the swallowers of “horse paste” at the back of the line in order to prioritize the more deserving, “rather than allowing the ivermectin people” — she spoke the words as if holding a vile wriggling thing with tweezers — to “take up all the beds”: <video>
This was a network anchor despising a group of people so much that she itched to deny them medical care, not only despite having never met them, but despite the fact that they may not even exist. The “overwhelmed Oklahoma E.R.” tale later seemed to go sideways, the latest in a line of crackups by media lost in the throes of a moral panic.
...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 ,... 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...
...
WIND: media violence is the norm these days; it is the business model. It should repulse anyone with a shred of decency. And watching “the news” these days can only lead to mental illness and physical illness over time. Journalism is all but dead.
Of course, Twitter, Facebook, etc do nothing for this kind of misinformation, let alone suspending sociopath Rachel Maddow.
BTW, anyone (including MDs) calling Ivermectin “horse paste” has ZERO credibility and should be ignored as the jackass they are. Whether or not Ivermectin is an effective anti-COVID agent is the core of the debate being avoided (I don’t have a view on it either way). But Ivermectin has been used for over 35 years as an anti-parasitic with great success, has an excellent safety profile. There is tremendous financial incentive for it to be shown ineffective against COVID, so count on studies designed up-front to show what. And please don’t ingest the horse version of Ivermectin ("horse paste")—that’s a really bad idea for both dosage and contamination reasons.
The end of rational debate and the end of science are upon us, courtesy if the perfect storm of politics + COVID. How long can the USA survive before crumbling into an unworkable mess?
