.
I won't be re-answering questions that have already been answered above. You can read the posts on this thread and on the Operator Kos thread. It's clear enough why Mac is suspended, also clear that material he posted and claims about the world weren't the reason. Flooding and his treatment of others here was. There is another old thread for talking about your moderation concerns, by the way, and an announcement coming.
---
Meanwhile, this here was supposedly about a subject. How big is the thing going on? How full are the hospitals in given places?
Like HS, I, too, I "can't help but wonder if there is some serious exaggeration going on" regarding the extent of the pandemic, especially in the statistical measures and claims of projected impact.
Projected is an important concept here. How fast is the doubling time, how high will it go, how much preparation will be enough? These are all to be determined, vary by place greatly, and are subject to artifactual factors (including unintentional ones).
Currently or sometimes empty facilities in places where there are no big claims of high case loads tell us nothing. The question is what will they look like at the claimed peak of cases? Currently empty reserve facilities, just set up, do not yet indicate anything. We want reserves, right? If they don't all get used up, that's good, no? (I hope there isn't too much disappointment if the numbers turn out to be on the low end of the predicted ranges.) And outside the facilities? During a pandemic lockdown, it's hard to tell what empty streets or quiet corners are supposed to indicate.
Can exaggeration (and manipulation) only happen in one direction? Let's have a look-see at this video.
Mixed bag!
Good discovery of use of stock footage of hospital rooms by the corporate media. Same footage, apparently from Italy, is shown also by another network when talking about New York, days later. It's not identified as footage from either, per se. So their excuse might be that it's illustrative footage ("b-roll") that they don't have current footage, perhaps that they didn't notice. They didn't bother to look. It's lazy and unethical and casts doubt on them generally -- always important to do, though maybe less so here -- though it doesn't in itself refute specific claims they state, which in this case are lightly rewritten repetitions of official reports.
Now, how about those citizen reporters? (CRs) What are they doing to get to the real story?
In the first minute of this video, the CR asks questions of an ambulance EMT while pointing his cell phone at him from 20 feet away. --
Hey, guy at that ambulance there! How many Covid cases you been seeing? -- The EMT figures a couple, doesn't really know. This in-depth encounter lasts like 20, 30 seconds. Does it need be said EMTs don't diagnose Covid, or test for it, or process anyone, once they have brought a patient in? What is this minor pestering of a guy on his break supposed to show?
There's a lot of this as it goes on -- here is a CR making fun of hospital drivers for sitting in their cars looking at phones, "they're probably watching Netflix," ha ha hilarious. Again, it's like a few seconds. How is this evidence of anything?
We see TV media pictures of long lines outside Elmhurst Hospital waiting for tests. A day later, at an unspecified time of day, a CR shoots the same place with no line at all. What is that evidence of? Nothing. Why is the video maker (the host, I mean) narrating as if it is a smoking gun?
Around 2:30, a CR walks into what is obviously the Elmhurst Hospital
lobby. This is exactly the part of the building one would expect to be
empty during mass quarantine measures. It is NOT the ER room. It is the lobby. Remember, hospitals currently allow no visitors. And what do we see in this lobby? My god, there is almost no one there! Just a couple of cops! Astonishing! (Mission accomplished! All it took was a couple of seconds. Phew, let's run home and upload this so the world can know.)
Is this, like, a test of whether the viewer is clinically awake?
Then we have footage from the other video, already posted above: the fellow wandering around the outside of a hospital in Brooklyn and pretending his footage of empty streets is evidence of low numbers of sick people inside, or sick at other facilities. Or something ominous.
Let's jump directly to a couple of small towns in Kentucky. Totally comparable, right? (There are currently 600 cases claimed for the state.) A guy films himself outside a couple of hospitals, fleetingly -- we're talking seconds for each snippet -- and claims nothing's going on there, so there must not be such a big pandemic. Done! Run and upload!
Oh, god, the Irish one. Another hit-and-run technique. If it even merits that name. Run into a space that is empty. Speak dramatically in a harsh voice about how it's empty, so there is therefore no reason for this space, it's all tehater. Nothing must be going on. I can't.
We've seen how this works. Put an idea into the world, it never dies. This stuff may still be recycled as the real deal in videos 20 years from now.
Thing is, much about the larger claims may be true.
But what people think constitutes evidence is a different matter, and it's a problem not just with the corporate media.
.
