The disappearance of reporting
What many Americans think is wrong with America’s legacy media today isn’t the biggest thing wrong with America’s legacy media today.
Yes, obvious bias in news coverage – whether left or right – is irritating. It forces readers into extra efforts to try to sort out the facts and discern what is really going on when journalists are trying to spin things.
But there’s a bigger problem, the sad decay in the quality of reporting in general with the once standard Fives Ws and How now largely abandoned, though Wikipedia still has a record of them.
These questions are who, what, when, where, how and why with the latter being an often unanswerable question. The other five, however, always have answers, but to get to the answers you have to ask the questions.
Regularly now, reporters are so ignorant of what they are covering they don’t even know enough to have an idea of what to ask. This makes it almost painful to read stories involving subjects you know well, and leads to a general conclusion that much of the media is simply incompetent.
A couple of cases in point here, starting with a headline from People magazine:
This story, which got picked up by legacy media all across the country, involved the tragic death of 37-year-old Christopher Roma in the mountains of New Hampshire. As someone who spent three decades as the outdoor editor of the Anchorage Daily News and covered dozens of fatal accidents and disappearances in the Alaska wilderness, these sorts of stories still interest me from the standpoint of what those of still alive might learn from the mistakes that led others to their deaths.
What the reporting has revealed about Roma’s death is basically nothing.
Given that public relations now largely owns the reporting business, the when and where was pretty well covered in a media statement from New Hampshire Fish and Game, although that statement, too, came up a bit short.
“Eventually the hiker made contact with NH 911 and coordinates were obtained that placed the hiker between Mount Bond and Mount Guyot,” the statement said. It was WMUR-TV in Manchester, N.H., that clarified that by later reporting that officials had been “able to trace (Roma’s) coordinates” by monitoring his phone.
The TV station did not, however, report whether Roma was on a trail or lost nor did New Hampshire officials. The official statement did add that “before the call was lost the hiker stated he was very cold.”
No one has bothered to ask what else he might have said, or if they have, this has not been reported although those details could be telling.
Was he off-trail and lost or trying to follow a trail? Given that all of this was happening during the dark of night, did he have a headlamp to help guide the way? Was it even possible to follow the trail in the dark and blowing snow? When he said he was cold, did that mean he’d stopped moving, which really alters how much heat the body produces?
During that call, did Roma say if he had any sort of plan to try to survive the night? What did he have with him in terms of extra insulating clothes, and did he have anything – even a space blanket – to try to provide himself emergency shelter?
None of these questions have been asked or again, if they were, they weren’t reported.
The still-wild East
Roma’s general location was reported to be near Mount Bond, a barren peaks in the White Mountains. The Bondcliff Trail connects it Mount Guyot, according to All Trails. The NF Fish and Game statement said Roma was “thought to be in the area of Mount Bond and that he might be moving towards Bondcliff.”
Bondcliff is a 4,265-foot summit described as “a subsidiary peak of Mount Bond along with West Bond.” Maps show the Bondcliff Trail going over both Bondcliff and Mount Bound before dropping down to the Guyout Campsite and shelter before going on to Mount Guyot.
Where exactly Roma’s body was found has never been reported nor has his cause of death although the media has widely assumed that he was killed by the cold. WMUR, to the local news outlet’s credit, did clearly state “the exact cause of Roma’s death has not been released.”
A member of the Christopher Roma search time on Mount Guyot/NH Fish and Game
Noticeably missing from the NH Fish and Game photo is the “waist-deep snow” reported in nearly all the news stories, but this is to be expected on a windswept ridge. Roma, and the people who went to try to rescue him, were apparenlty facing two problems – waist-deep snow in the forest below the ridgetops and wind on the ridgetops themselves – though the “news” explains none of this to those unfamiliar with wilderness travel.
Meanwhile, the “whats” here are many and none of them have been addressed in any story to date. This is sadly understandable due to the fact your typical reporter today was born and reared in urban America and all these questions as to what exactly happened to Roma are likely irrelevant to he or she because they “know,” instinctively without thinking, that is it unsafe to go into the woods, especially alone as Roma was.
All that is left then is to grab for the sensationalism needed to underline Roma’s death.
Stock credited the federal government for this idea of the well-deserved rest. After it “weighed in, making 65 the age of eligibility for Social Security benefits in 1935, and Medicare benefits in 1965,” he wrote. “Sixty-five was firmly established in our minds as retirement age, even though, as of 1950, 72 percent of all 65-year-old men were still in the labor force – they had jobs or were actively looking for work.”
And many of the jobs of the 1950s were physically demanding. More than half the labor force was then employed in blue-collar jobs as craftsmen, mine and vehicle operatives, laborers or farmers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and many more were active in service industries.
Those people spent their days moving, not sitting around behind desks. By 2002, the U.S. Census was reporting 60 percent of Americans were working in white-collar jobs, most of which involve a lot of sitting.
That number only kept going up in the years that followed, and by 2107 researchers would be warning that people were putting themselves at risk by ignoring 84,000 generations of human evolution wherein “survival was shaped by adaptation to a widespread range of different food sources, (and) abundant daily exercise frequently under fasting conditions as well as an unpredictable food supply depending on the daily foraging success.”
“For more than 2.5 million years, our metabolic adaptation to seasonal food availability was considered to be an outstanding survival advantage. Nowadays, the same survival strategy in completely altered surroundings is responsible for” a long list of those chronic health problems that were eventually to be called “comorbidities.”
This problem was well-known before the pandemic. So, too, the link between exercise and T-cells, a prime player in the human immune system.
And then came the pandemic. It should have been a wake-up call. Anyone who was paying attention should have learned a lot about T-cells, especially so-called “naive T-cells,” the utility players of the human immune system ready to adapt to battling any new disease, plus the link between those cells and exercise.
All this was and is especially important among older people because the immune system begins to decay with age even among those who exercise. Exercise, however, can slow the rate of decay which has led to considerable discussion about chronological age and biological age with Covid-19 death toll in this country heavily weighted toward the elderly.
“Across all age groups, adults aged 65 years or older accounted for 62.9 percent of Covid-19-associated hospitalizations, 61.3 percent of intensive care unit admissions, and 87.9 percent of in-hospital deaths associated with Covid-19 hospitalizations” from January through August of last year, the Centers for Disease Control reported in October. “Most hospitalized adults aged 65 years or older (90.2 percent) had multiple underlying conditions,” ie. comorbidities.
The agency did not report how many of the 12.1 percent of the dead under age 65 had a biological age of 65 or greater due to decades of living sedentary lifestyles, but the evidence would indicate the number is likely to be high.
Public Health England in 2021 estimated that one in six of all deaths in that country were associated with “physical inactivity.” Covid-19 primarily accelerated the rate at which those people are removed from the population.
Covid-19 vaccines helped to save some of them, but far from all partly because the vaccines have been shown to offer more protection for fit and healthy people than for the comorbid, and partly because of a slowing in the uptake of booster shots.
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a healthy policy research group, in the fall of 2022 reported the first point at which the number of vaccinated dying of Covid-19 topped the number of unvaccinated dying of Covid-19, but it noted that about a quarter of the 58 percent of the vaccinated dead lacked their booster shots at the time.
But the vaccinated and fully boosted still accounted for more than a third of the deaths. The people who weren’t dying much were the un-comorbid, or what might be called the fit and healthy.
One would think any competent reporter would have figured out enough about the pandemic by now to at least mention some of this and point out the problem of avoidable comorbidities in this country.
If you thought this, unfortunately, you’d be wrong.
Nowhere in the ABC story is there a hint of the problem of the general bad health of millions of Americans or of the value of fitness or the epidemic of the unfit. Instead there is this conclusion:
“Experts said there are several reasons why people might still be dying from the virus, including not enough people accessing treatments or getting vaccinated as well as waning immunity.”
And this:
“As of Jan. 5, just 19.4 percent of adults aged 18 and older and 8 percent of children have received the updated COVID vaccine, CDC data show.” Why children are mentioned here, given that the number of children dying from Covid-19 is so small as to be almost invisible, is hard to understand other than trying to heighten the fear factor.
This number of deaths averages out to about 565 per year. Compare this to the big killers of American children: motor vehicles, which now kill about 2,300 kids per year, according to KFF, and firearms, which claim about 2,500 lives. About a third of the firearms deaths are suicides with the other two-thirds homicides, both heavily concentrated in the teen years.
“Racial and ethnic differences in gun deaths among kids are stark. In 2021, 46 percent of all gun deaths among children and teens involved black victims, even though only 14 percent of the U.S. under-18 population that year was black,” Pew reported.
The nearly 2,000 blacks under age 19 age predominately males that PEW reported killed that year was nearly four times the annual death rate of Covid-19 for children of all races.
“Black children and teens were roughly five times as likely as their white counterparts to die from gunfire in 2021,” Pew said. “There are also major racial and ethnic differences in the types of gun deaths involving children and teens. In 2021, a large majority of gun deaths involving black children and teens (84 percent) were homicides, while 9 percent were suicides. Among White children and teens, by contrast, the majority of gun deaths (66 percent) were suicides, while a much smaller share (24 percent) were homicides.”
All of this gets little coverage because stories about young black men getting killed don’t generate many clicks, and there is no vaccine for which to advocate to end youth homicides.
Sadly, there is also no vaccine for poor, shallow, crappy, click-chasing journalism which instead of describing that the biggest reason significant numbers of Americans are continuing to die of Covid-19 is linked to the same reason huge numbers of Americans continue to die of heart disease: People don’t want to invest any effort in improving their own health.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I’m old enough, and thus subject to some degree of immunosenescence no matter how fit I try to stay, that I was happy to get vaccinated and boosted, but I’m not sure that I would have done so if I’d been as fit and as lean as I was in my mid-30s.
The downsides to Covid-19 vaccination, as far as are known at this point, are tiny, but so were the risks of serious problems for very fit thirtysomethings, and I’ve long been of the opinion that ingesting unnecessary medicines is not a good idea.
But that’s off point. The point here is the one researchers were reporting back in 2017 before the pandemic began: “Poor vaccine responses, which are characteristic of an aging immune system, can be improved by single or repeated bouts of exercise.”
To write about why Americans – vaccinated or unvaccinated – are continuing to die at significant rates from Covid-19 without mentioning that fact and this country’s epidemic of inactivity is simply irresponsible, but with so much of today’s legacy media business mainly in the clicks-and-fear business, we get what we get:
Really, really crap reporting with or without the politics getting involved. It’s enough to make an old reporter want to scream, but that won’t fix anything.
Categories: Commentary, Media, Outdoors
If you really read that article before, than why have you pooh-poohed the Red State effect, where Covid outcomes in Red states are generally worse than Blue states? Even in Sweden (which has a much better educational system than we do), the less educated and poorer regions did worse, similar to our Red States, which you would know if you had really read that article.
You wrote, “The vax might actually have helped spread the disease by encouraging people to believe they weren’t “sick enough” to stay home, an all too common belief in this country. With Covid as with flu, we could reduce the spread of infections if people stayed home when feeling sick, but so many don’t.
As for Sweden, I’m not hung up on anything. Sweden is pointed out because it is a country that took a different approach to the pandemic that is now being reflected in better social and educational outcomes than in this country. But you’re old and probably could care less about how any of this messed up younger people and especially children, which is perefectly OK.
It’s biologically natural to be driven by self-interest.”
If people went out when they were still feeling ill with Covid, it was because they were ignoring the CDC and all other legitimate medical advice. Hard to blame that on a vaccine, but somehow you manage to. I haven’t seen anyone claim the vaccine makes you stupid, have you? Please cite if so.
And why do you promote Sweden’s response, and not, say, New Zealand’s, which was quite different and MUCH more effective? You’re old too, so you must be driven by your own self-interest. What is yours? My two Swede friends feel awful about how all the older people there died so quickly when Covid first hit, as compared to other countries.
Yes, older vaccinated people are dying now, but that’s ’cause they’re old, not because they’re vaccinated.
And WHY do you COMPLETELY ignore long covid? Have you even heard about it? Don’t you have friends who have it, like I and most people do? Maybe you don’t know that lack of vaccination causes it to be more a likely complication.
I guess, you must not care about anyone who has it.
I do. It’s mean and nasty.
And the proper phrase is “could not care less”, when you wrote”could care less”.
Can you really be so ignorant as to have no knowledge of the SES effects on health in general or no understanding of all of the confounders plaguing these studies of mortality in red states versus blue states. Alaska’s about as red as they get and yet it had a comparatively low death toll.
But I do have to thank you for providing me a good laugh, ie: “Yes, older vaccinated people are dying now, but that’s ’cause they’re old, not because they’re vaccinated.”
If they’re vaccinated and dead from Covid-19 they’re just as dead as if they were unvaccinated and dead from Covid-19. And given that we don’t have a decent control group of unvaccinated old people anymore, we really don’t know how much the vax is helping those now dying given tht the SARS-CoV-2 virus of today is far different from the SARS-CoV-2 virus of yesterday.
Who knows, if we get lucky, 100 years from now it could evolve into just another of the coronaviruses linked to the so-called “common cold,” which has also been known to kill people, especially old peope, because – surprise, surprise – old people are more likely to die in general than young people. You might not believe this, but it is what “nature” intended. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7125703/
As for long Covid, doctors are still trying to define what it is, and my personal experience with a serious lung injury – a significant pulmonary embolism – would indicate that full recovery from any serious lung damage takes a long, long time. And I would expect, given what we know about Covid-19 and comorbidities, that a lot of the people with long Covid today had compromised lungs before they were infected which would make the recovery period even longer.
I empthatize with their plight. I emphathize with anyone who is sick or rehabbing. Either can be terribly depressing. I lived with a chronically bad back for years. It got so bad for a friend in a similar situation that he eventually committed suicide. Life deals most people a shitty hand at some point. You make what you can of it and keep moving forward.
P.S. If you believe those bad red-state, blue-state studies, why aren’t you celebrating? You have to be over the moon at red staters dying or people who chose not to get vaccinated.
According to Johns Hopkins, as of 3/10/2023, the case-fatality rate in the US was 1.1%, in Sweden 0.9%. Not much different.
I urge you to read this literature review and study about Sweden. I ask because you may learn something about the importance and efficacy of vaccination, and not just for old people.
I recognize that neither of us are epidemiologists, but you seem hung up on Sweden, and there’s a lot more going on there than you seem to know. If you’re going to criticize the state of journalism, physician, heal thyself.
If it’s too long for you, just read the conclusion and recommendations and see if that draws you in.
Cheers.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12351-023-00794-6
Thanks Gail. I read the paper when it came out. Are you getting checks from Big Pharma to push vaccination? The facts are that the vax is good for some people and probably a waste of time for others. Age is the big player.
“The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years. IFR increases approximately four times every 10 years.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9613797/
The data can actually lead one to question whether the risks of complications for healthy young males are greater than any benefit of the vax as some in Europe have pondered. And, of course, most of those under age 40 who’ve died of Covid-19 – almost all of them – were already suffering from serious comorbidities. So if you remove them from the frame, those already low IFRs for the non-old folks go even lower.
Then, too, the studies are measuring in chronological age than biological age so fitness, which has been shown to play a huge role in maintaining our evolutionary immune sytems, also plays a big role. We have a lot of sedentary folks in this country who are far old than their chronological age, and a few old folks who are younger than their chronologlical age.
I’m not anti-vax. I think there are a lot of people well-advised to get vaxxed. I’ve told them that and lobbied some older friends who were anit-vax that it was foolish for them not to get the shots. I couldn’t begin to calculate their risk of becoming a fatality but given their comorbidities they were clearly in the cohort capable of boosting that IFR way up there.
That said, I can only add my belief that in a democracy peole should be allowed to look at the numbers, weigh the risks, and make their own decisions on this as they make their own decisions on everything else. My thinking might have been different if there was any reason to the believe the vax was going to stop people from spreading the disease, but no one who really knew anything about coronaviruses was believing that from the beginning.
The vax might actually have helped spread the disease by encouraging people to believe they weren’t “sick enough” to stay home, an all too common belief in this country. With Covid as with flu, we could reduce the spread of infections if people stayed home when feeling sick, but so many don’t.
As for Sweden, I’m not hung up on anything. Sweden is pointed out because it is a country that took a different approach to the pandemic that is now being reflected in better social and educational outcomes than in this country. But you’re old and probalby could care less about how any of this messed up younger people and especially children, which is perefectly OK.
It’s biologically natural to be driven by self-interest.
About half way through the section Still Wild East there is a paragraph the begins “Lacking actual aareporting”. I believe this is a typo unless you’re channeling your inner pirate. Good stuff otherwise matey.
Thanks. Cloud editing always appreicated.
Finally, after years of denials, there is a consensus among medical agencies that the shot does cause myocarditis and pericarditis, especially among the younger generation. No matter how small a number, if it’s you or a loved one, it becomes a big deal.
I can answer your most basic question: He died of bad decisions. Whether by ego or naive assessments.
Sadly and unfortunately, that is usually the case. But, of course, few want to say so. The majority would seem to prefer to take comfort in “he died doing what he loved.”
Having come close to the end a couple times, I can only say that I never once thought “Oh wow, I’m going to die doing what I love.” In those worst cases, I thought “J—- C—– did you f— up here.”
Media has always been the fourth estate of government in America.
Damn, Craig, you are so right. And that really sucks. American society has been so dumbed-down; few people seem to actually think, much less use critical thinking anymore, while our government becomes more fascist every day. Thanks for all your great reporting
Thank you for your in depth reporting. I enjoy every article and an amazed at your research. Thank you for setting a high bar so needed for journalism.
Journalists used to be the citizens watchdog over government, but today too many have become willing propagandists for government. Telling us what to think and burying important facts we need to be truly informed.
Douglas: The problem is that they don’t think of themselves as “propagandits,” but as “partners.” Every time I get an email from a state or federal agency talking about “our journalism partners,” I cringe. Most don’t. The legacy media has largely become a rewrite business, not a reporting business. They are so depending on the government spokesmen/women, interest group advocates, and to a much lesser extent businesses to do their leg work for them that little independent information gathering gets down anymore and critical thinking is largely dead.
Throw in the steady flow of journalists these days into the ranks of the spokespeoples and PR spinmeister and the problems become even worse because you get groupthink among all these “friends.” Journalists used to be more than watchdogs over government; they were once also huge skeptics of those people they called “flacks.” Now, the basically work for the flacks.
It’s a sad state of affairs. That death in New Hampshire was a classic. Almost every story that appeared was nothing more than a retwrite of the N.H. media statement, and nobody – barring one local TV station in the state – even bothered to ask questions about the unclear part of the statement, ie. whether the hiker told him where he was during that call or whether his phone was pinged to pinpoint his location.
It would be really interesting to know if he was on the trail. The photos of the peak make it look very easy to lose the trial in the dark. And if he was off the trail, it would be very interesting to know if N.H. Fish and Game told him where he was or offered any advice on what to do. Personally, I’d be trying to figure out how to drop down into the woods to get out of the wind, but I don’t know how cliffy that area. The map makes it look like that could be dangerous in laces.
The pandemic, meanwhile, has been a sadly vivid demonstration of how most of the legacy media has become little more than a mouthpiece for what has become a vast national bureaucracy. The implications of school closings and economic shutdowns during the pandemic are likley to send consequences rippling through our society for a decade to come. And the media played a big role in shouting down those who suggested that maybe there was a better way forward than following the socially divisive and largley unproductive path the U.S. bureaucracy took.
Sweden, which largely avoided this social divisiveness, as of today has a Covid-19 death rate about 75 percent of hours and the three least vaccinated countries in the world China, Nigeria and India have deaths rates of, respectively 4 per mllion, 15 per million and 379 per million. Ours i 3,566 per million.
The China, Nigeria and India rates are no doubt undercounts. People were dying in droves in China after it ended its onerous lockdowns and some have calculated the India count could be off by a factor of 10. But even if i that is true, it would still only move the dial to make India look about the same as the U.S. despite it being far less proactive on all Covid-19 fronts, including the vax.
The vax surely saved some lives among older Americans. Whether it did anything for younger Americans is hard to say because so few of them were dying to begin with. And it never stopped the spread of the disease as Anthony Fauci claimed it would. There is no reason to believe he was so naive as to believe that claim, either, given the long history of the failure of vaccines aimed at stopping the spread of corona and flu viruses.
But, of course, he was a God to many in the legacy media, and people – even in modern, non-religious societies – listen to Gods who tell them what they want to hear, who tell them that when you get vaccinated, “you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere.”
That, of course, isn’t how this worked out. Research in Israel pretty quickly showed that “the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people,” and we still don’t know how much of the downturn in deaths and hospitalizations was due to the vax and how much was due to the mutations in the virus, which clearly has become less deadly over time.
But it is comforting for many, if not most, to believe our technology saved us because we are in love with our own tech. It is the machine God.