Data Data Data

There’s never enough for STEM geeks, amirite?

Even most people in the US understand that putting a barrier between your respiratory system and someone else’s will very significantly reduce your chances of getting sick or getting someone else sick.

But for some ridiculous reason, people who watch Fox News or listen to Rush Limbaugh are getting a different message. WaPo has some disturbing news on this front:

Three serious research efforts have put numerical weight — yes, data-driven evidence — behind what many suspected all along: Americans who relied on Fox News, or similar right-wing sources, were duped as the coronavirus began its deadly spread.

Dangerously duped.

The studies “paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others,” wrote my colleague Christopher Ingraham in an analysis last week.

Here’s the reality, now backed by numbers:

Those who relied on mainstream sources — the network evening newscasts or national newspapers that President Trump constantly blasts as “fake news” — got an accurate assessment of the pandemic’s risks. Those were the news consumers who were more likely to respond accordingly, protecting themselves and others against the disease that has now killed more than 123,000 in the United States with no end in sight.

Those who relied on Fox or, say, radio personality Rush Limbaugh, came to believe that vitamin C was a possible remedy, that the Chinese government created the virus in a lab, and that government health agencies were exaggerating the dangers in the hopes of damaging Trump politically, a survey showed.

Of course you only believe the research if you trust the source, right? And who are you going to believe? The Washington Post that has one of the best reputations for journalism in the world or a blonde flanked by two beta males that look like they’re going to do a threesome after the camera is off?

The huge number of papers that say that hydroxychloroquine is quackery and that remedisivir and dexamethasone are the only modestly effective treatments for COVID-19 or an irreverent, obscene and psychopathic radio show host without a life sciences degree who is pushing vitamin C?

I guess that it’s up to each individual to determine but if it were me, I’d be pissed to find out I’ve been “duped”.

Your mileage may vary.

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Two things:

1.) Minority governments no matter how “duly elected” by an electoral college and not by the popular vote are congenitally unstable.

2.) REAL Republican conservatives are not Trump lovers and do not defend him.