Items tagged with: coronavirus

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Context and summary Toward the end of February, 2021, a major US-national media entity published a short interview of a US senator (fewer than 1500 words). Interviews can be news done well, and there were good parts of the interview in question, yet it stumbled into three major errors that fail as news: The interviewer, whom I’ll refer to as J, failed to take the interview where J — and even […]

Real Fake News, No. 1

Public Discourse
As one style of Real Fake News, "use the interviewee as a prop" offers several ways for media folk to make it seem the interviewee is saying things that they're not, to push an agenda, and to avoid real issues by introducing off-topic, vague, and sensational content. Here we break down a recent media report.
Science, when sincere, principled, and dispassionate, is a beautiful tool. And it’s beautiful whether the conclusions are right or wrong; that’s part of the process. But how science is used in political discourse can turn it ugly. A little while back, I wrote about a politician’s fallacious appeal to science while advocating a particular COVID-19 response. In a tweet, the politician did what I call “playing the science card” — […]

They said “Science” — Did You Not Hear That?

Society & Politics
Science is a beautiful tool, but well-meaning societal concern does not justify political advocacy masquerading as science.
I must open this piece by clarifying three things off the top: I agree that strict measures were needed in an attempt to stem the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. Further, action or not, there are many intricate concerns about how to equitably distribute the pain of the pandemic. Even more, there are deeply difficult questions about how alternative courses of action may trade off lives lost to coronavirus against […]

De-Weapon­izing “Prepared by Science”

Society & Politics
The image is a tweet dated 23 Mar 2020 @ 4:11am. The tweeter is blurred and the text is cropped and partially blurred. What we can see reads: "Good morning, Texas...prepared by science...move as a state from...#StaySafeStayHome...430,000 deaths"
If good science supports it, indeed we should believe it. But weaponized appeals to authority don't make for good science or healthy society.
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