Birdbrains in the press

No, there is no killer measles epidemic sweeping the nation

The Daily Caller reported yesterday, “Social media users called out the Associated Press on Sunday after the media outlet avoided stating that an illegal immigrant was charged with murdering nursing student Laken Riley.

“Illegal immigrant Jose Antonio Ibarra was arrested and charged Friday by University of Georgia (UGA) authorities for the death of Lake Riley, 22, who was found Thursday afternoon.”

It should be a pretty simple headline to write: “Illegal alien arrested for the murder of UGA nursing student.”

AP couldn’t pull it off. Editors slapped a headline on the story that delved into the Twilight Zone: “The killing of a nursing student out for a run highlights the fears of solo female athletes.”

Reporter Janie Hur in her story could not bring herself to identify the accused as an illegal alien. She did not mention his immigration here at all, identifying him merely as a resident of Athens, Georgia. The premise of her story — women are attacked while jogging alone — was destroyed in Paragraph 6.

Hur wrote, “Crime statistics indicate that these types of attacks are rare, but they underscore the hypervigilance women must take when going out, even for a run on campus.”

Birdbrain. Once AP could get away with it, but thanks to Elon Musk buying Twitter, the AP no longer gets away scot-free with misleading people. Christina Pushaw, spokeswoman for deSantis, tweeted, “The corporate media will blame a woman for exercising alone before blaming an illegal alien for killing her.”

Of course, Hur and her editors are not the only birdbrains in the press who underestimate their audience. Nate Cohn of the New York Times looked at Nikki failing to take the state she once governed as a loss by throwing shade on guess who.

His headline said, “Three Theories for Why Trump’s Primary Results Are Not Matching Expectations.

“He has underperformed the polls in each of the first three contests”

Cohn blew off the probability of polling error by beginning, “It’s still early in the primary season, but a whiff of a possible polling error is already in the air.”

He didn’t say it because it would have undermined his narrative, but the size of a shellacking is difficult to predict.

Instead, Cohn dumped on Trump, writing, “Anti-Trump voters are highly motivated to turn out this cycle. It wouldn’t mean the polls will be wrong in November, but it would be good news for Democrats nonetheless.”

And, “Another possibility is that the polls simply got the makeup of the electorate wrong. In this theory, pollsters did a good job of measuring the people they intended to measure, but they were measuring the wrong electorate. In particular, they did not include enough of the Democratic-leaning voters who turned out to support Ms. Haley.”

By Democratic-leaning, the birdbrain meant Democrats.

And, “If you’re a Democrat hoping that the polls are underestimating Mr. Biden in the general election, your best-case scenario is the polls are wrong because there’s a Hidden Biden vote, or at least a Hidden Anti-Trump vote.”

While Cohn gave three reasons, he left out the most likely explanation. Trump supporters skipped the presidential primary because he had it in the bag.

Let’s get real. South Carolina is a Republican state. As such, it reflects little on how Trump will fare in the new swing states of neighboring Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania and a half-dozen others.

A third example of birdbrain reporting comes out of Florida. Channel 6 in Miami’s reporting was typical. It said:

Florida’s controversial surgeon general is drawing criticism for his handling of an elementary school's measles outbreak, telling parents of unvaccinated children it is their choice whether their students attend class — a contravention of federal guidelines calling for their mandatory exclusion.

Dr. Joseph Ladapo, nationally known for his outspoken skepticism toward the COVID-19 vaccine, sent a letter this week to parents at Manatee Bay Elementary School near Fort Lauderdale after eight students contracted the highly contagious and potentially deadly virus. Such outbreaks are rare in the United States, though reported cases have spiked from 58 for all of 2023 to 35 already this year.

The letter notes that when a school has a measles outbreak, it is “normally recommended” that unvaccinated students who haven't previously had the disease be kept home for three weeks “because of the high likelihood” they will be infected.

But the letter then says the state won't turn that recommendation into a mandate, at least for now. The Broward County school district said Friday that 33 of Manatee Bay’s 1,067 students don’t have at least one shot of the two-dose measles vaccine. The vaccine also covers mumps and rubella and is highly effective against measles even after one dose. The school is in Weston, an upper-middle class and wealthy suburb, with a median household annual income of more than $120,000.

Its report was pure panic as are all reports on this measly measles outbreak. 35 cases nationwide in a shade under 2 months in a country of 328 million people is far from an epidemic because this places the odds of getting measles at 1 in almost 10 million.

Likewise, 33 kids in a school of 1,067 is only 3%. They should pose no threat to the 97% who are vaccinated. I say should because actual vaccines — not the shots that Biden mandated for covid — work. This one does. The first vaccine, smallpox, eradicated the disease in two centuries, which is excellent work.

NBC turned the measles outbreak (33 cases — not deaths — in 2 months) into an attack on the anti-vaxxers. I agree that they are wrong, but this is not the example.

Nevertheless, the peacock brains at NBC wrote, “How the anti-vaccine movement is downplaying the danger of measles.

“Wellness influencers and anti-vaccine activists have reacted to measles outbreaks by spreading misinformation about the disease.”

33 cases in 2 months is not misinformation. They are the facts.

By the way, five years ago, the CDC reported, “During January 1–April 26, 2019, a total of 704 cases were reported, the highest number of cases reported since 1994. Outbreaks in close-knit communities accounted for 88% of all cases. Of 44 cases directly imported from other countries, 34 were in U.S. residents traveling internationally; most were not vaccinated.”

We ended the year with 1,274 measles cases.

The next year, we had 13.

In summary, the birdbrains at AP left out the fact that Georgia police charged an illegal alien with a murder, NYT ignored the possibility of Trump supporters skipping the primaries due to his huge lead for the nomination, and the media played up 35 cases of measles as if they were the Black Plague.

And that was just this weekend.