John Hayward Delivers a Brutal Thread On the Media and Wuhan Coronavirus
Article by Bonchie in "RedState":
John Hayward is no stranger to epic Twitter threads.
Idiocy like this has been abundant.
Video of my question to @realDonaldTrump today on his administration's disbanding of the White House team responsible for coordinating responses to pandemics.
He called my question nasty & said he knew nothing about it.
I call it a relevant, fair, and truth-seeking question.
@Yamiche asked the president about a reorganization of the National Security Council that dismantled a key pandemics team in 2018.
President Trump: "I just think it's a nasty question... You say we did that, I don't know anything about it.
a minute's worth of footage of trump and health-care execs fondling the same mic and touching each other. reassuring presser, overall!
This is BIZARRE. Just a roll call of Big Important American Businesses.
Hayward dives into that. Here’s his comments.
Why do we get so much delusional fearmongering in times of crisis? Because it works. It gets clicks and riles people up against designated hate objects. The dopamine hit is enormous. Money often changes hands. And when the doomsday predictions don't happen, there is ZERO penalty.
How many doomsayers and hysterics have ever been completely discredited by their predictions failing to come true? Not well-meant warnings that were a bit off, but misses on the scale of the "population bomb" scare. Has a fashionable hysteric gone out of business since the 70s?
If hysteria matches political preconceptions, it doesn't matter if it fails to come true, or even if it's 180 degrees wrong. The doomsday prophets get unlimited credit for good intentions. They predicted what SHOULD have happened according to dogma that will never change.
Modern society has a weird passive-aggressive combination of lethargy and frenzy that provides the perfect environment for doomsayers. You have to predict outrageously magnified disasters to get people to care, and once they start caring, they become obsessively focused.
The dark side of the "preference cascade" phenomenon creates stampedes. As soon as they see other people reacting to a crisis and it's actually affecting daily life, the public suddenly shifts from apathy to frenzied activity and demands for SOMEONE to do SOMETHING immediately.
Of course there are political predators lying in wait to take advantage of the frenzy, like the Democrats who tried to stuff abortion junk into the coronavirus emergency bill. Their whole agenda revolves around catching panic waves and surfing to greater power on them.
Among the many ways the media makes it worse is by keeping the same people on speed dial for analysis and commentary. It doesn't matter how wrong they are, and always have been, as long as they're narrative-friendly and good for hot and spicy sound bites.
Social media unquestionably made the media worse by giving it a bottomless well of hysteria to dip into whenever it needs a quick fix. It's absolutely insane how much of "news" coverage is now shaped by 280-character messages, often composed on cell phones.
John Hayward
@Doc_0
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Replying to @Doc_0
Rest assured that when the coronavirus panic is over (and the actual coronavirus problem is resolved) that the people who made the most hysterical doomsday predictions will suffer zero damage to their credibility. They probably won't even be asked how they got it so wrong.
The lesson modern media takes from the Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that crying wolf is wrong. It's that the Boy should have cried louder, monetized his crying, demanded more funding for the Department of Wolf Control, and gotten himself on a few Rolodexes as a wolf expert. /end
His point about media personalities trying to play doomsday prophet is one the nose. We’ve seen crazy projections of millions dying, even as reality shows the spread slowing in places like China and South Korea, with the latter currently having under 100 deaths. In the end, after these people are proven wrong, there will be no reckoning. They won’t be held to account. No, they’ll be right back to the next partisan attack, no matter how insane it may be. They’ll continue to cry wolf, polishing their credentials, because they are never called on for their litany of false proclamations.
That’s the sad reality of our current legacy media. They are a bloated, self-important bunch who care more about pushing narratives that doing what’s right. The worst part? It’s not going to change anytime soon.
https://www.redstate.com/bonchie/2020/03/13/john-hayward-delivers-a-brutal-thread-on-the-media-and-wuhan-coronavirus/
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