The Patriot Post® · Leftmedia Uses COVID to Justify Authoritarianism

We coined the term “Leftmedia” to quickly identify the agenda behind news media organizations, an activist agenda promoting socialist ideals. The Leftmedia’s socialist agenda has been made all the more apparent during the global COVID-19 pandemic, during which the press has sought to induce panic over a disease that has a survival rate of over 99.9% for anyone under 50 years old and a 99.5% survival rate for anyone under 70. In fact, even those over 70 who contract the virus have a survival rate of 94.6%. These stats come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To put it bluntly, contracting the coronavirus is not anywhere in the ballpark of a death sentence for the vast majority of Americans, so why the outsized panic?

It’s simple. By stoking illogical fear over the novel disease, Leftmedia outlets, working on behalf of the Democrat Party, have been able to convince millions of Americans to willingly allow for their God-given rights and liberties to be trampled upon by authoritarian-minded government officials. “All for the greater good,” which for the Leftmedia means getting rid of President Donald Trump.

Hence, the constant bad news on COVID propagated daily by the Leftmedia, despite the fact that, on balance, there is more good news regarding the virus in recent months than bad. Good or even alternative news runs counter to the narrative — a narrative that Big Tech’s leftist thought police have worked to promote and protect via their censorship campaign.

Three Ivy League professors, two from Dartmouth and one from Brown, noticed the constant negative media coverage of COVID and decided to do a little research into the numbers, which resulted in a paper titled, “Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?” The researchers note, “Ninety one percent of stories by U.S. major media outlets are negative in tone versus fifty four percent for non-U.S. major sources and sixty five percent for scientific journals. The negativity of the U.S. major media is notable even in areas with positive scientific developments including school re-openings and vaccine trials. Media negativity is unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases or the political leanings of the audience.” In short, the mainstream media has convinced the majority of Americans to believe the worst about COVID and to ignore any good news as unreliable or wishful thinking.

Is the MSM simply giving Americans what they want? Perhaps in part, but don’t underestimate Big Tech censorship that silences or “fact-checks” any COVID story from non-mainstream media that fails to toe the “COVID panic” narrative. It may be less about what consumers are demanding and more about what media sources consumers are allowed or encouraged to access.

In any case, it’s clear that a political agenda is fueling the Leftmedia’s narrative surrounding COVID.

One obvious example of this comes from the San Francisco Chronicle. On November 2, the day before the election, it ran an article titled, “Record 61,000 children in the U.S. infected with coronavirus last week.” Joe Biden made President Trump’s response to COVID the centerpiece of his campaign, ridiculously asserting that Trump was responsible for more than 200,000 American deaths. The bulk of the Chronicle story focuses on the increasing number of children catching the novel virus in California, only to note in the second-to-last paragraph the following fact: “Two children have died in California [from COVID].” Think about that for a moment. Only two children have died from COVID, and yet the state has closed schools and largely shut down its economy. How many children have died due to California’s overreaction to the novel virus? How many suffered in other measureless ways?

As if to prevent the entire fearmongering purpose of the story from being undercut by facts, the author concludes, “But while the chances for death and serious complications are minimal for children, researchers are concerned about the explosive growth in childhood cases seen over the past weeks.” What was clearly a good piece of news — that children are not dying or seriously threatened by the coronavirus — was spun into a negative story. Keep the panic going, while at least implicitly blaming the Bad Orange Man.

And now, with Trump’s Operation Warp Speed leading to the development of two COVID vaccines, the Leftmedia is still stirring panic over a virus on the verge of being defeated for no other purpose than to keep providing cover for totalitarian-minded government officials who continue cracking down on Americans’ civil liberties.