Last Friday, Rolling Stone magazine carried a story based on remarks that Dr. Jason McElyea made to a local station. He claimed that hospitals in Oklahoma were swarmed with patients overdosing on Ivermectin, causing other patients, such as gunshot victims, to be neglected.
Predictably Rachel Maddow and her myriad comrades on the left gleefully amplified this story on social media. (Drew Holden comprehensively chronicled this on Twitter.) The Guardian, Insider, Newsweek, and many other news outlets also carried the story. The propaganda balloon bulged so much that this became a national, perhaps even global story.
Fortunately, the pin of facts popped the balloon before it could bloat any further.
The Northeastern Health System Sequoyah issued a statement on its website refuting the allegations made in the Rolling Stone article:
Although Dr Jason McElyea is not an employee of NHS Sequoyah, he is affiliated with a medical staffing group that provides coverage for our emergency room. With that said, Dr McElyea has not worked at our Sallisaw location in over two months. NHS Sequoyah has not treated any patients due to complications related to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for Ivermectin overdose. All patients who have visited our emergency room have received medical attention as appropriate.
It must be remembered that, back in 2014, Rolling Stone magazine carried a story about the horrifying account of a gang rape at the University of Virginia student campus fraternity house. The story turned out to be false. The magazine then retracted the story and apologized to readers and “all of those who were damaged by our story and the ensuing fallout”. An investigation found Rolling Stone magazine guilty of defamation over a false article. The magazine ended up paying $1.65 million to the University of Virginia fraternity over the discredited rape story.
Rolling Stone magazine clearly failed at every stage including reporting, editing, editorial supervision, and fact-checking for both the gang-rape story and the Ivermectin overdose story. The question remains: Why do well-funded and well-staffed news organizations such as Rolling Stone fail so consistently?
The root cause of these failures is news organizations no longer consider reporting facts to be their function. Instead, they exist to propagate the Narrative. They have cultivated an audience that only wants its biases confirmed. Presenting their audiences with inconvenient facts may see them opt for another news outlet. Hence, they carry only those stories that fit the Narrative. All inconvenient stories are either killed or spun.
When they learn of a story such as the Ivermectin overdose, they are so overcome by a desire for it to be true that they abandon all due diligence. In their minds, the Ivermectin story is about anti-science dunderheads and a dog-whistle for Trump supporters foolish enough to treat COVID by consuming a drug meant for deworming horses. The implicit message is they received their deserved comeuppance by ending up in the emergency room. Trump supporters almost killing themselves is both satisfying and hilarious for leftist journalists.
They also know that to push the message that vaccinations are the only way to stop COVID, they must convince people that alternative approaches mean death.
My article also appears here
Comments
Post a Comment