hussyknee:

[Screenshots of Twitter thread. Transcript given below.

Quoted Tweet: NBC News (@NBCnews):

4 people in Oregon have tested positive for the coronavirus after receiving both doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, health officials said. https://t.co/bZKxw3POS6

Post-Culture Review (@PostCultRev):

Because the vaccines are not 100% effective, a widely publicized fact. The goal is to build herd immunity through mass vaccination. Every single headline like this is a choice a news outlet makes to scare people for attention, and undermines that effort. It’s pure fear mongering.

Let’s say it’s a world where most people aren’t wearing seat belts when they drive. And let’s say wearing a seatbelt saves your life in an accident 96% of the time, while not wearing one aligns to a 25% casualty rate. So you’re doing a big campaign to get people to wear them.

This is basically a news story that looked at 100 accidents involving people wearing seatbelts and started with the headline “Four People Die In Auto Accidents Despite Wearing Seatbelts.”

While that’s true, it’s also not surprising. And it also doesn’t report on the fact that in that 100 accidents, if none of them had been wearing seatbelts it’s likely 25 of them would be dead instead of four.

So despite the fact the seatbelts have saved a net of 21 lives, the article has undermined faith in seatbelts because the didn’t save all 25. And in a low-trust environment where people are already doubtful of the efficacy of seatbelts, fewer will now wear them.

So this article, and every one like it, will ultimately have a body count attached to it. Because they aren’t reporting news, as there’s nothing surprising about this, but reporting a fact in a way that pushes all the stress buttons in a lot of terrified people’s brains.

If the vaccines were wholly ineffective that would be one thing. But this is just reporting “Vaccines Work Exactly As Expected” as if it were a prospect we should be frightened of.

Now the article isn’t as bad as the headline (though it literally doesn’t explicitly mention vaccine effectiveness percentages or put these cases in any real context) but 99% of people who see this won’t read past that headline and the publisher absolutely knows this.

As I said, framing it this way is a choice they’re actively making to prioritize attention over public trust. It’d be easy to say this is because of the way social media has weaponized holding our focus with pure fear and outrage, but this is basically how the news industry works

It’s the same reason people spent most of the 1990s thinking violent crime rates were skyrocketing when they actually dropped year by year. Because while violent crime dropped, the amount of reporting on violent crime quadrupled.

Subsequently gun ownership goes up, surveillance systems become more acceptable and ubiquitous, police get more leeway, incarceration is increased to astounding levels, because everyone is in a terror-filled feedback loop that leads them to irrational and paranoid choices.

And others can use that terror to advance their own ends. This shit is exploitation. And it will kill people.

• 15 Feb 2021 •]