CNN’s Stelter Blasts ‘Sloppy News Coverage’ of Vaccinated People With Covid: ‘Scary, Sensationalist Headlines’
CNN’s Brian Stelter lambasted the media and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the failures he saw from both in their efforts to properly convey the current state of affairs with the coronavirus pandemic.
In his Reliable Sources opening monologue, Stelter said on Sunday that the media needs “a reset” in how it covers Covid. Stelter specifically argued that the media needs to change the way it talks about outbreaks and Covid cases now that the pandemic has vastly different consequences for the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated.
Stelter made his point by approvingly referring to a New York Post cover that illustrated how hospitalizations and deaths have plummeted among the vaccinated.
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) July 30, 2021
After that, Stelter called out the Washington Post and other news outlets that ran “scary, sensational headlines” about Covid that “spark confusion” instead of conveying the full nuance of the situation.
“The problem starts with the CDC and its absolute failure to communicate clearly and effectively,” Stelter said. “Sloppy news coverage then makes a bad situation worse.”
Stelter continued by saying hospitalizations instead of case numbers are “a better metric” for the media to focus on now, though he warned that those figures require the full context of local vaccinations to be understood.
“This is why the coverage needs more nuance, because there is no single national story right now about Covid-19,” Stelter said. He concluded by emphasizing once more that the media needs to separate their Covid coverage to distinguish between those who are vaccinated and those who are not.
Watch above, via CNN.
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