A liberal immigration activist forced NPR to change a photograph on a news article because it had an “inflammatory” image of a migrant caravan.
Attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council objected to the use of a photograph of a migrant caravan on one of NPR’s articles on Thursday.
“And it begins—NPR uses an inflammatory picture of a caravan that was broken up days ago for a story about a deportation moratorium that only applies to those here months ago and a policy reversal that wouldn’t have affected almost all of the caravan even if they had made it here,” he tweeted. Editors who draft headlines and choose pictures for stories, please, I beg you, these small choices matter a LOT.
I guarantee you that 99% of the people who saw this tweet did not click the story, and as a result will leave with a completely false opinion about what happened. pic.twitter.com/kA9VrHsrmV — Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) January 21, 2021 The article reported the announcement of the Biden administration to rescind the policy of the former Trump administration to keep non-Mexican applicants for amnesty in Mexico for the duration of their application being processed.
Reichlin-Melknick explained in a further tweet that the caravan was down to approximately 3,200 migrants in one report after starting with 7,000.
“That’s up from 3,000 reported on Tuesday—so that number will keep climbing,” he said of the migrants leaving the caravan and returning to their home country.
Several hours later Reichlin-Melnick praised NPR for changing the image to one that is less “inflammatory” in his estimation. Extremely pleased to see that NPR has now changed the picture on this article in response to the critique! pic.twitter.com/LYEVbC5rVm — Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) January 21, 2021 “Extremely pleased to see that NPR has now changed the picture on […]
Every news channel is ablaze this week with the FBI threat assessment about the inauguration of Joe Biden. Headline after headling about extremist group plots, etc. However, the actual threat assessment report says the exact opposite. There are no identified credible threats. No threats from extremists, no cyber threats, no threats using drones … none. Had any ‘journalist’ taken a few minutes to actually read the report they’d know that and stop spreading panic porn all over the country.
Mixed in with the stories of some previous incidents, many that left out many contexts, are the actual threat assessments. They are found on pages 2 and 6.
Basically, it’s a standard threat assessment. There are no identified credible threats but authorities must be on the lookout for threats missed leading up to the event. This is a vanilla and routine threat assessment. They warn about the usual suspects, including Islamic terrorists. This isn’t stopping the media from distorting what the report actually says.
This is something I’ve highlighted for years. Radicals, extremists, and terrorists have always been able to roam Facebook and Twitter freely. A few years ago, they finally started working to remove ISIS accounts. However, death threats against conservatives or hunters are often allowed to stay up. I’ve highlighted personal experiences with this many times over the years.
If Apple and Google want to take Parler down because of what happened at the Capital, they have to take Facebook and Twitter down too. Both failed to remove Capital organizers for weeks. Both failed to remove thousands of violent threats. Both failed to remove racist posts. Far more violations happen on Facebook and Twitter, and for much longer periods of time, than on Parler. Therefore, they must be taken down if the attack on Parler was actually about what they claimed.
First, they came for Gab. Now they come for everyone else. Gab has a large and vibrant left-wing community. They aren’t ‘alt-right’ or a ‘right-wing’ platform in the least.
From WaPo:
In the days leading up to last week’s march on the Capitol, supporters of President Trump promoted it extensively on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram and used the services to organize bus trips to Washington. More than 100,000 users posted hashtags affiliated with the movement prompted by baseless claims of election fraud, including #StopTheSteal and #FightForTrump.
The details, emerging from researchers who have combed the service in recent days, shed new light on how Facebook services were used to bring attention to and boost attendance at the rally, which turned violent when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol while Congress was in session. The attack resulted in the death of a Capitol Police officer and four other people.
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has sought to deflect blame, noting the role of smaller, right-leaning services such as Parler and Gab.
“I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency,” Sandberg said in an interview Monday that was live-streamed by Reuters.
Riiiiight.
The far bigger platform with far more users who was used far more than Parler and Gab SHOULDN’T be held to the same standards as Parler and Gab because they do remove posts sometimes. Well, so do the other platforms. Posting illegal activity is a violation of everyone’s terms of services and aren’t permitted or allowed in any capacity. Actually, Sandberg’s deflection of blame is really an indictment of Facebook.
When she says Parler and Gab a ‘smaller’ and ‘don’t have our abilities to stop hate’ she’s admitting that Facebook failed even though they are far more capable than the other two. If Facebook can’t possibly prevent this content, how are Parler and Gab expected to given their small size and lack of abilities to stop it?
The legacy press, such as the New York Times, and activist groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, each also blamed two challenger sites – Gab and Parler – rather than the big sites like Twitter and Facebook where rioters actually planned their activities.
The reality of app store bans is and always has been that Big Tech moderation policies are selectively applied. Big Tech responds not to reality but to the demands of far-left activists who clog the proverbial phone lines of Apple and Google every time a handful of offensive or illegal posts appears on our sites, while ignoring when hundreds of thousands of illegal or offensive posts appears on theirs.
We are documenting millions of illegal posts in our Liberal Hate Machine project which shows just how much hatred and bile is spewed on Twitter, one of our most major competitors. We have been collecting and analyzing over 100 million tweets in the replies section of President Trump’s Twitter account for about a year. We applied sentiment analysis to detect violent and hateful replies. Wait until you see what we found.
Twitter and Facebookboth have huge contracts with Amazon. Facebook has a data deal with Amazon that they kept secret. Twitter uses the same AWS services that Parler used. Yet Amazon hasn’t taken Twitter off the internet for far more violations over a longer period of time than Parler. Why? Probably money. A bigger customer of Amazon asks them to remove the competition and stop the bleeding from the mass exodus away from Twitter and Facebook. Amazon complies with its bigger customer’s requests.
It’s a tale as old as time and may give more teeth to the government’s anti-trust case.
Holcomb was so committed to getting his message across Wednesday that even when Indiana Department of Transportation Commissioner Joe McGinnis delivered a report that focused on roadways with no discussion of facial coverings, Holcomb responded with this line: “You did say masks are working. I just want to get that in there for the third time.”
Welcome new people.
The two articles and corresponding charts above already prove my point. Those results are duplicated globally.
Let me put a couple of things to bed right away since I already know how some of you will react.
I’m not anti-mask. I’m pro-science.
I wear my mask all the time to put people at ease, not because it’s effective.
COVID is real and no one is actually denying its existence beyond a few online. This is a childish red herring argument used when you are desperate.
My goal has always been to inform my audience of the actual clinical facts so they can protect themselves. There is no other motivation.
I started regular coverage of the virus in December 2019.
I started daily coverage on January 14, 2020. This is long before anyone in US media I’m aware of (for daily coverage), and far sooner than almost any politician considered COVID a threat.
I promoted the masks early on before we knew the virus was airborne while reminding everyone to only use their mask once.
I’ve been reminding everyone about the single-use of the mask from the very beginning. Reusing a contaminated mask defeats the purpose and can spread infection.
My opinions about masks or mask fines don’t come from my politics or my ideology. They come from peer-reviewed clinical research, not preliminary lab results with problematic methodology, which have never been considered scientifically valid in any scientific field. As well as real-world data.
Everything I said in this interview is backed up with scientific research and real-world data. None of it is baseless opinion. None of it is taken from unsubstantiated posts from social media, or some conspiracy website yapping about Bill Gates.
While many of you may be new here, I’ve already addressed the issues you’ll likely post … many, many times. I simply don’t have time to go over 12 months of work I’ve done on this in a single interview or post.
The reality … officials are in a tough spot. They don’t have any answers. They can’t stop the virus. It’s career suicide to say that out loud so they must come up with, what I call, ‘busy work’ to make it seem like they are trying. Often, as is the case with fines, this busy work pushes the blame on an innocent population in order to pass the buck and buy time.
The experts went from correctly telling you a mask was your last hail mary to prevent infection but wasn’t all that effective. Every other step is more important in prevention but the mask is the least effective tool in your tool chest. Now, they’ve all but abandoned those other steps in favor of indoctrinating people into the Cult of Mask with a form of religious dogma that masks are the most important and effective tool you have. Cases continue to spike and they keep neglecting to tell people to only use their mask once.
Consider this … everywhere mask mandates have been in effect, where COVID is an issue, has now been hit by a new spike in cases. This includes places with universal compliance like Japan. If masks worked the way the dogma currently dictates, the spike would be impossible.
Everywhere that installed mask mandate fines on businesses and/or individuals hasn’t reduced their number of cases. The policy is ineffective and causes unnecessary tension, strife, and hardship with zero tangible results. It’s just throwing matches on a powder keg.
We had lockdowns because the Imperial College released a study showing hundreds of millions might die. Oxford proved their study wrong and the IC retracted it, but lockdowns remained.
We have mask mandates because we thought the virus was spread through droplets alone and asymptomatic people were superspreaders. We now know it’s airborne and all of the research shows asymptomatic spread, while possible, is not a major source of infections.
I’ve included just a few links to get you started on your journey if you really want to dive in.
Prior to the pandemic, there was a mountain of research showing masks of all kinds don’t prevent aerosol viral spread. This research has now been completely abandoned and ignored in favor of preliminary lab results that are never considered scientifically acceptable to draw conclusions from. I can’t include all of the links to those studies but some are mixed in below.
Dr. Brosseau is a national expert on respiratory protection and infectious diseases and professor (retired), University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Sietsema is also an expert on respiratory protection and an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“The evidence from…laboratory filtration studies suggests that such fabric masks may reduce the transmission of larger respiratory droplets. There is little evidence regarding the transmission of small aerosolized particulates of the size potentially exhaled by asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals with COVID-19.”
We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility (Figure 2). However, as with hand hygiene, face masks might be able to reduce the transmission of other infections and therefore have value in an influenza pandemic when healthcare resources are stretched.
Tom Jefferson is a senior associate tutor and honorary research fellow, Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford. Disclosure statement is here
Carl Heneghan is Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford, Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and Editor in Chief of BMJ EBM
In 2010, at the end of the last influenza pandemic, there were six published randomised controlled trials with 4,147 participants focusing on the benefits of different types of masks. 2 Two were done in healthcare workers and four in family or student clusters. The face mask trials for influenza-like illness (ILI) reported poor compliance, rarely reported harms and revealed the pressing need for future trials.
Despite the clear requirement to carry out further large, pragmatic trials a decade later, only six had been published: five in healthcare workers and one in pilgrims. 3 This recent crop of trials added 9,112 participants to the total randomised denominator of 13,259 and showed that masks alone have no significant effect in interrupting the spread of ILI or influenza in the general population, nor in healthcare workers.
A study conducted by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in cooperation with the Naval Medical Research Center sought to test lockdowns along with testing and isolation.
What were the results? The virus still spread, though 90% of those who tested positive were without symptoms. Incredibly, 2% of the CHARM recruits still contracted the virus, even if all but one remained asymptomatic. “Our study showed that in a group of predominantly young male military recruits, approximately 2% became positive for SARS-CoV-2, as determined by qPCR assay, during a 2-week, strictly enforced quarantine.”
The study actually suggests the quarantine may increase the spread of the virus.
Our results suggest that the recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home among others did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in mask wearers in a setting where social distancing and other public health measures were in effect, mask recommendations were not among those measures, and community use of masks was uncommon. Yet, the findings were inconclusive and cannot definitively exclude a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection of mask wearers in such a setting.
The use of masks only makes sense in confined places, where it is not possible to have certainty and guarantee necessary physical distancing or outdoors when physical distancing is not possible. I tried to look for scientific evidence on the use of open air mask and potential benefits of virus transmission, but I couldn’t find any.
Making the mask mandatory across Italy outdoors without any distinction between the higher and lower endemic circulation areas is wrong.
Conclusions: This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks. This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. Further research is needed to inform the widespread use of cloth masks globally. However, as a precautionary measure, cloth masks should not be recommended for HCWs (Health Care Workers), particularly in high-risk situations, and guidelines need to be updated.
Jacobs, J. L. et al. (2009) “Use of surgical face masks to reduce the incidence of the common cold among health care workers in Japan: A randomized controlled trial,” American Journal of Infection Control, Volume 37, Issue 5, 417 – 419. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19216002
N95-masked health-care workers (HCW) were significantly more likely to experience headaches. Face mask use in HCW was not demonstrated to provide benefit in terms of cold symptoms or getting colds.
“There were 17 eligible studies. … None of the studies established a conclusive relationship between mask/respirator use and protection against influenza infection.”
Smith, J.D. et al. (2016) “Effectiveness of N95 respirators versus surgical masks in protecting health care workers from acute respiratory infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” CMAJ Mar 2016 https://www.cmaj.ca/content/188/8/567
“We identified six clinical studies … . In the meta-analysis of the clinical studies, we found no significant difference between N95 respirators and surgical masks in associated risk of (a) laboratory-confirmed respiratory infection, (b) influenza-like illness, or (c) reported work-place absenteeism.”
Contrary to popular opinion on social media, in our tribalist political arena, news media, or local officials … Americans actually wear masks and comply with mask mandates much higher than much of the world. Over 80% wear their mask now. The latest spike in the U.S. started September 14 when 77% of Americans were adhering to the mask mandates. That number is exactly the same as July 31 when U.S. COVID cases began to decline drastically and before the AP and Gov. Holcomb credited masks for the decline in cases.
In other words … the same percentage of Americans who wore masks during the big decline in COVID cases over the summer were also wearing masks at the beginning of the latest surge in cases. There was no change, no fluctuation at all in the number of Americans wearing masks during a decline and a surge in COVID cases. The number of people wearing masks had no effect on the number of cases of the virus.
I said the same thing three times, three different ways so everyone understands the actual data on mask-wearing. Sorry about being redundant.
I know you all just came here to listen to the interview with Mayor Roberson. You weren’t expecting all this to be thrown at you. However, it’s important that you know what I said during that interview is factually correct. While I can appreciate the Mayor is just taking the advice of his advisors, those advisors have no actual data backing up their policies. I do.
The mandates we are being given by public officials are unscientific and, dare I say, emotional.
Lockdowns didn’t work and the preponderance of research says they are ineffective and actually worse for people long-term.
Mask mandates simply don’t work.
Blaming innocent people for those two failed policies with fines simply because you’ve run out of ideas and are trying to hold on until the vaccine/herd immunity happens is not a legitimate way to govern. It’s tyrannical. While Mayor Roberson may not be seeking to be tyrannical, the end product is just that.
Journalists and other liberal activists who spend an unhealthy amount of time online expressed outrage this weekend over a Wall Street Journal op-ed urging Joe Biden’s wife to stop referring to herself as Dr. Jill Biden.
Dr. Biden, who holds a doctorate degree in education (Ed.D.) from the University of Delaware, has long insisted on being identified as a doctor. Apart from being married to Joe Biden, it is perhaps her most defining feature as an individual.
Democrats immediately seized on the Journal op-ed, which was authored by celebrated essayist Joseph Epstein. A spokesman for Dr. Biden demanded an apologize for the “repugnant display of chauvinism.” Biden’s own spokeswoman denounced the op-ed as “patronizing, sexist, elitist drivel.”
Most journalists agreed and rallied to the doctor’s defense, as did the Merriam-Webster Twitter account: The word ‘doctor’ comes from the Latin word for “teacher.” https://t.co/wUihrn6Hyq — Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) December 12, 2020.
Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Ph.D., a prominent Trump adviser, was routinely mocked for demanding proper recognition for the political-science doctorate he earned at Corvinus University of Budapest.
A Washington Post analysis from 2017 found that mainstream media outlets refused to identify Gorka as a doctor and noted that journalists have long frowned on the notion of conferring the title on anyone who isn’t an actual physician.
I predicted the blue checkmark brigade would circle the wagons and claim James O’Keefe listening in on CNN meetings and posting a video where he asked Jeff Zucker a question in that meeting was somehow wrong, immoral, or illegal.
Not surprisingly, social media is ablaze with those frivolous accusations.
Any, so-called, ‘journalist’ who is upset with O’Keefe’s actions here is a dishonest and untrustworthy waste of your time.
I live stream my radio show on 95.3 MNC every afternoon at 3pm ET.
