Mehdi Hasan Blasts Media for Giving Outsized Coverage to the Few Who Defy Covid Mandates: You’re ‘Emboldening Anti-Vaxxers’
MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan went on a mini-rant against the “annoying and inaccurate” coverage of how many Americans are refusing to follow vaccine mandates, at the seeming expense of attention provided to just how successful Covid vaccine efforts have been thus far.
Hasan makes the salient point that the media’s bias towards conflict and “if it bleeds, it leads” ethos has had a pernicious effect on vaccines by giving an unbalanced amount of coverage to the small minority of those who are refusing, and as a result, are “emboldening” anti-vaxxers.
“Fellow media people! It’s like we sent a man to the moon, and your front page says ‘Still Nobody on Mars!'” Hasan exclaimed.
Hasan opened by calling out The Washington Post’s coverage of North Carolina Health company Novant Health, which features the breathless headline that “175 employees had been fired” for not getting vaccinated. But only in the third paragraph do they then note, “Novant Health spokeswoman Megan Rivers told The Washington Post that more than 99 percent of the system’s roughly 35,000 employees have followed the mandatory vaccination program.”
“The people who quit are less than 1% of all staff. 99% complied. I’m no mathematician but isn’t that an almost 100% success rate? So why do we keep seeing headlines that focus on the few instead of…how well these [vaccine] mandates work?” Hasan noted.
He then proceeded to call out several other examples, for example, comments made by ESPN host Sage Steele who admitted to getting vaccinated but not without calling it parent company Disney for what she saw as a “sick and scary” mandate. “Sorry,” Hassan said after playing an audio clip of Steele. “All I heard from that was, ‘she got vaccinated.'”
Hasan then reiterated his excoriation of his fellow members of the press, saying, “It’s not just annoying and inaccurate but amplifying the voices that defy vaccine mandates, you’re emboldening anti-vaxxers.”
Watch above via PeacockTV
