A rchive Date
[ 07-06-2020 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-media-deliberately-distorted-what-trump-said-about-george-floyd
Media deliberately distorted what Trump said about George Floyd
Lorrie Goldstein
June 6, 2020
Contrary to a globally reported blunder by the media on Friday, President Donald Trump did not say a positive report on U.S. job numbers was “good news for George Floyd.”
Here’s what Trump said:
“Equal justice under the law must mean that every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement regardless of race, color, gender, or creed. They have to receive fair treatment from law enforcement. They have to receive it. We all saw what happened last week. We can’t let that happen.
“Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying, ‘This is a great thing that’s happening for our country.’ It’s a great day for him. It’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality. It’s really what our Constitution requires and it’s what our country is all about.”
Clearly, Trump’s reference to Floyd was in the context of Americans agreeing everyone must be treated equally by police, not optimistic U.S. job numbers.
Despite their obvious blunder about what Trump said, which quickly went global and erupted on social media, few media organizations have corrected it.
Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, reacting to the inaccurate media reports, said what Trump said was “despicable.”
Some are now arguing it was outrageous for Trump to invoke Floyd’s name - he died in police custody, with the four fired police officers involved now facing a slew of major criminal charges - in any context.
But that deliberately ignores the point, which is that the media got the story wrong.
In another controversy involving Trump, a widely-circulated medical study published in the Lancet claiming patients with COVID-19 were more likely to die or suffer serious side effects from taking hydroxychloroquine has been retracted.
Based on this research, Trump was widely attacked for recommending the use of hydroxychloroquine and saying he was taking it himself to ward off COVID-19.
Trump should not be freelancing medical advice and it was dangerous for him to do so.
But as James Heathers, a research scientist at Boston’s Northeastern University, writing in the Guardian, observed, the retraction of the research paper is also alarming and potentially dangerous.
As Heathers wrote:
“The Lancet is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world. Recently, they published an article on Covid patients receiving hydroxychloroquine with a dire conclusion: the drug increases heartbeat irregularities and decreases hospital survival rates. This result was treated as authoritative, and major drug trials were immediately halted - because why treat anyone with an unsafe drug?
“Now, that Lancet study has been retracted, withdrawn from the literature entirely, at the request of three of its authors who ‘can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources.’
“Given the seriousness of the topic and the consequences of the paper, this is one of the most consequential retractions in modern history.
“How did a paper of such consequence get discarded like a used tissue by some of its authors only days after publication? If the authors don’t trust it now, how did it get published in the first place?”
Heathers says the root problem is with the peer review process which, “at its worst … is merely window dressing that gives the unwarranted appearance of authority, a cursory process which confers no real value, enforces orthodoxy, and overlooks both obvious analytical problems and outright fraud entirely.”
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