Media doing more harm than good

Rawstory.com reports:

One of the first deaths in Virginia from coronavirus was a 66-year-old Christian “musical evangelist” who fell ill while on a trip to New Orleans with his wife. As the Friendly Atheist’s Bo Gardiner points out, Landon Spradlin had previously shared opinions that the pandemic was the result of “mass hysteria” from the media.

On March 13, Spradlin shared a misleading meme that compared coronavirus deaths to swine flu deaths and suggested the media is using the pandemic to hurt Trump. In the comments, Spradlin acknowledged that the outbreak is a “real issue,” but added that he believes “the media is pumping out fear and doing more harm than good”

“It will come and it will go,” he wrote.

I guess we are supposed to laugh at how stupid he was.

He is dead, but he was also essentially correct. We are living in mass hysteria. That is why the stores lack toilet paper.

When this crisis is over, we can have a rational discussion about whether the public overreacted or underreacted to the Wuhan virus. My gut feeling is that officials have exaggerated the threat, and that the cure was worse than the disease. We shall soon see, as the New York city gets overloaded with cases. But the disease has run its course in China, and they only had about 3000 deaths from it.

It seems clear now that the govt overreacted to the 9-11-2001 crisis, and probably also the 2008 investment banking crisis.