ZH was talking about coronavirus way earlier than anyone else, which is bound to happen if you don’t validate as well—sometimes you do strike gold.
A comment I saw once about them was “ZH has reported five of the last three catastrophes”.
A comment I saw once about them was “ZH has reported five of the last three catastrophes”.
I've seen that claim too and found it questionable. Almost every major news outlet that would cover international news I found had some story about coronavirus pretty dang early. It wasn't a breathless story predicting the impact, but they covered it.
I feel like most media "media does this" or "didn't do that" is mostly just what passed in front of someone's nose.
Purely anecdotal experience of mine was a reddit story ages ago that was "The Media is too busy covering X to cover this story Y."
Purely out of curiosity I turned around and flipped on the TV and checked the news channels. The first 3 news channels, 2 were covering Y... but the claims about nobody covering it were constant.
ZH is the canonical example of a correct-twice-daily broken clock.
The question is if we want to prevent all news sources from evolving into that.
If you think China was lying about it, you should see the public statements of checks notes every head of state in the West.
There was a whole lot that people didn't know, especially early. There were quite a few failures of communication and delays.
China was certainly communicating warnings about the virus by early January.
For the very simple reason that there weren't enough masks for the people that needed them ( medical personnel), and the last thing you wants in such a scenario is for the public to freak out and fight over the already non-existing stocks.
Plenty of governments were too slow to react ( with lockdowns/limitations, or planning), but to say all Western leaders failed is simply wrong.
They’re still poorly managing it because they lack decent information. I’d argue it’s the fault of the civil service that they’ve been crippling and obvious cronyism (e.g. Dido Harding) not equipped to provide decent information that they need for decision making.
Yes, and there is a period between where they realize they are wrong, where they reformulate their message and then communicate that publicly. What we're discussing here is a similar gap of 2-4 days between evidence of person-to-person spread and communication.
Meanwhile, we have no idea when the US president even first tested positive for covid.
I don't recall many news outlets putting out official positions...
People like to write off 4Chan for all the shit posting and racism, etc. But if you can ignore all that there are truly some amazing Gems to be found.
Pretty quick, I'll give them that, but not before coverage - this is only a week or so before I became aware of the virus. Granted, I was traveling in China at the time, but it was known.
In my analysis I find these are examples of fitting events to predictions after the fact; the huge number of 'larp' threads on conspiracy forums allows for cherry-picking examples where some content later rhymed with reality.
[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/230585890/#q230593401
[1] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/141096258/#141102703
[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/4chan-user-prediction-las-...
sponsored in part by the Gates Foundation and reported by the Washington Post and others, retweeted by Joe Biden.
This was not secret insider information.
[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/237746333/#q237746818 (Warning, this link contains graphic hate speech like much of 4chan does and is not suitable for human consumption.)
https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-help...