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Comment by mint2 | Hacker News Reader

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Whether you blame Fox news, CNN, Trump, the deep state, the CDC, doesn't matter when addressing the failures of the state and the media. They lost trust with the public. This is measurable in polls and has created a divide in the American people. The result is that individuals and fringe institutions gained ground with millions of Americans; misinforming them and creating controversies that should not have happened.

If the mainstream media and the state didn't lose trust then why would people turn to less credible sources? Because everyone is dumb/crazy? If that is the conclusion people are coming to it seems rather harsh and elitist in my opinion.

Blaming the media as a whole when one well define group was promoting the misinforming is not sensical.

It is the media as a whole. It isn't accurate to insist that it's only Fox News promoting misinformation about election fraud or HCQ, in the face of MSNBC promoting misinformation about the mortality of COVID, or promoting misinformation about hydroxychloroquine, or CNN promoting misinformation about BLM riots, or both of them promoting misinformation about Russian active measures, etc., or vice versa. It is emphatically all media. To say otherwise is just engaging in partisan flamewar.

With regard to HCQ, the evidence supporting its use was from small scale studies and not reproducible (hence why Fox News's take was misinformation); however, there was evidence that it improved survivability, especially in some less-developed countries, so saying "no evidence" or even "bogus" like MSNBC did was also misinformation.

(Personal theory: Comorbodity of COVID and other conditions HCQ is effective against was a confounding factor in less-developed countries; and the remaining delta is due to HCQ's immunosuppressant qualities calming the cytokine storm.)

A comment chain here will not reconcile the bubble realities. I disagree strongly with your comment, as you seem to with mine. It’s not going to go anywhere from here.

I think it's more than fair to blame the media, which has had centuries to build up their reputation and credibility. They were incapable of preserving public trust during a national crisis. They have all the advantages over individuals or fringe organizations. We aren't talking about a few thousand people that got indoctrinated into a cult, we are talking about millions of people, some highly educated, who turned away from the mainstream media altogether.

That’s not the way psychology works but okay.

I agree with you. There were several agencies putting out responsible messaging and trying to keep public trust. Ultimately it was a failure. Millions of people didn't trust the gov and turned to alternatives like this. I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Key figureheads undermined public trust.

The government's information was obviously was filled with inconsistencies that were obvious to anyone with the slightest prior mistrust of them.

Ivermectin has a long history of safe and beneficial usage in the developing world, billions of doses. Yet it was actively discouraged as "horse medicine" here. Anyone with experience or relatives in the developing world would immediately question the veracity of such a discouragement.

It was discouraged (correctly in hindsight) because there was no evidence it would do anything for Covid.

It was called horse medicine because the unfortunate people that fell for the kooks resorted to vet sources for it because doctors correctly refused.

I can’t believe the revisionist history on this.

Yeah, but I thought a lot of /inconsistencies/ were overblown with 1 side of the political spectrum jumping on any change in messaging to promote distrust. I wouldn't expect 20-30 people giving press conferences over 2-3 years to say the same things. I do remember precautions changing, like not using masks (supposedly to reserve them for hospital staff), and then it changed. I think a lot of the problem was we want to be treated like level-headed adults. We want to know the intent behind the messaging. Without being transparent, so many conspiracies filled the void.. :(

The public health agencies worked hard to rightfully shatter all trust in them from those who are aware and pay attention

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