… is from page 185 of the late Hans Rosling’s brilliant 2018 book, Factfulness:
Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot. Sure, my foot is part of me, but it’s a pretty ugly part. I have better parts. My arms are unremarkable but quite fine. My face is OK. It isn’t that the picture of my foot is deliberately lying about me. But it isn’t showing you the whole of me.
DBx: The news media disproportionately focus on, and portray, those events that vividly grab emotional attention. The news media enlarge that which is seen and amplify that which is heard. In doing so, the new media ignore that which is unseen and that which is silent, or even merely quiet.
This reality has always been so, and it will continue to be so. Yet I know of no more destructive consequence of this regrettable reality than the news media’s grotesque distortion throughout 2020 of the dangers of Covid-19. A huge number – it seems to me, a large majority – of my fellow Americans have absolutely no clue about the true dangers of Covid. So many Americans today behave as if Covid is an angel-of-death that strikes indiscriminately and with appalling frequency, regardless of age or health.
The news media are the major super-spreader of the one disease that does now pose a clear and present and gargantuan danger to humanity: Covid Derangement Syndrome.
