{"id":1291741,"date":"2023-05-21T11:11:50","date_gmt":"2023-05-21T15:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/looking-back-on-the-sadism-of-the-covid-19-shaming-campaign\/1291741\/"},"modified":"2023-05-21T11:11:50","modified_gmt":"2023-05-21T15:11:50","slug":"looking-back-on-the-sadism-of-the-covid-19-shaming-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/looking-back-on-the-sadism-of-the-covid-19-shaming-campaign\/1291741\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking Back On The Sadism Of The COVID-19 Shaming Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Looking Back On The Sadism Of The COVID-19 Shaming Campaign<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea via Racket News<\/a>,<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a scene in videographer Matt Orfalea\u2019s arresting new \u201cNobody is Safe!\u201d compilation in which Jeff Van Gundy \u2014 one of the sharpest basketball announcers alive, and one of my favorites to watch \u2014 leans back and says, \u201cI don\u2019t even understand what means, \u2018<\/span>I\u2019m doing my own research<\/em>.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The whole quote, from a preseason Heat-Rockets game Van Gundy called in October of 2021:<\/p>\n

\n

What does that look like, you doing your own research? Are you doing studies yourself? <\/span>Are you in a lab on a nightly basis<\/strong>? What are you doing? I don\u2019t understand what that means, \u2018I\u2019m doing my own research.\u2019<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

How about this: we\u2019ve got really smart people\u2026 who\u2019ve already done the research.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The subtext of Van Gundy\u2019s quote was one of the many stages of the Covid-19 messaging campaign, a collective roar against \u201casking questions\u201d or \u201cdoing your own research.\u201d Just <\/span>a few weeks earlier, Brian Stelter on CNN<\/a> hosted a panel about \u201cfour little words that are hurting America\u2019s pandemic response.\u201d He showed evil always-villain Sean Hannity repeatedly uttering the \u201cseemingly innocent\u201d phrase, \u201cDo your own research.\u201d He then rolled tape of comic Trevor Noah saying, \u201cNobody who\u2019s saying that is getting in a lab and doing tests.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In hindsight, who knows, that might have been where Van Gundy got the idea. Make no mistake, however, there was and is an active campaign against people who do their \u201cown research.\u201d This was a mostly unexplored theme in the #TwitterFiles material, as we did repeatedly see anti-disinformation \u201cexperts\u201d identifying people who didn\u2019t quickly accept official messaging without question as already, in a way, spreaders of mis- or disinformation.<\/p>\n

We touched on this a little in a <\/span>report about the Stanford Virality Project<\/a>, which advised that \u201cjust asking questions\u201d was a tactic \u201ccommonly used by spreaders of misinformation.\u201d We also saw it in an Aspen Institute report on misinformation, which recommended \u201cstrikes\u201d against people they called \u201csavvy spreaders,\u201d i.e. those who used phrases like \u201cjust asking questions,\u201d evading censors by \u201ccouching\u201d misinformation as mere \u201cuncertainty\u201d:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I got the shot and never advised people not to get vaccinated. I couldn\u2019t imagine an area where I was less qualified to give advice. But this is the point: the same people Orf shows picking up torches and railing with bloodcurdling certainty against \u201cthe unvaccinated\u201d are nearly all people who knew as little as me, and whose beliefs about the vaccine were at best secondhand.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re disgusted at those who \u201cdo their own research\u201d? What do you think journalism is? None of us do lab experiments. The job is always an imperfect effort to figure out which sources are most trustworthy, and because even the most credentialed often screw up, we always need to leave room for consensus proving wrong.<\/p>\n

In this case one didn\u2019t need a microbiology degree to recognize something about Covid-19 messaging was off. From flip-flops about masks (an \u201cevolving situation,\u201d Dr. Anthony Fauci <\/span>said<\/a>) to unwillingness to be frank in discussing natural immunity or risks to children, even casual news-readers saw confusion in the ranks of senior officials. Later, a series of reversals on key questions \u2014 first about whether the vaccine prevented contraction, then about whether it prevented transmission \u2014 left even people who wanted<\/span> <\/em>to follow official advice unsure of what to do. <\/span><\/p>\n

I hope Matt\u2019s video survives as a warning.<\/strong> There is still a lot of investigation to be done, in particular about the origins of the pandemic \u2014 certain segments of the national audience may still be in for a shock or two there \u2014 but as Matt shows, we already see a cautionary tale about faulty information being used to gin up real hatred.<\/p>\n

Subscribers to Racket News<\/a> can read the rest here…<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nSun, 05\/21\/2023 – 13:30<\/span><\/p>\n

From:Zerohedge<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Looking Back On The Sadism Of The COVID-19 Shaming Campaign Authored by Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea via Racket News, There\u2019s a scene in videographer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1291741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbimBl-5q2x","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1291741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1291741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1291741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1291741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}