Few institutions are as responsible as the MSM, and The New York Times in particular, for spreading misinformation about the pandemic.
Yet at the Supreme Court today the Biden Administration is, with the support of most in the MSM, demanding the right to censor “misinformation.”
A great example of this paradox is the Times’ “no duh!” story that school closures were a horrible mistake, harming children while doing nothing to slow the spread of COVID.
A growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students. Data shows the more time students spent in remote instruction, the further they fell behind. https://t.co/96kMFd4Pun pic.twitter.com/tmqwSlV1kC
— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 18, 2024
“A growing body of research,” while technically correct, doesn’t really describe reality as it played out in real-time. Plenty of epidemiologists knew that school closures were a bad idea even before they were implemented, and by the summer of 2020, every single one of them did.
The fact that the proof keeps piling up doesn’t tell the real story: we already knew this. It’s like saying that the proof that the earth is round keeps piling up. Yeah, so what? That was established by the ancient Greeks thousands of years ago.
Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic.
Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.
A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.
You mean that Republicans, who were VILIFIED for stating an obvious truth, have proven to be correct? Your admission of this now does precisely nothing for the children who were harmed horribly, and the Times will do nothing to hold the perpetrators of this crime against humanity responsible.
In fact, the Times will continue to pump out propaganda that helps them in elections, and celebrate the Faucis of the world while continuing to label Republicans conspiracy theorists. A trifecta of evils.
The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind.
At the state level, more time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an authoritative exam administered to a national sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students.
Again, we told you so back when it mattered, and Sweden proved that you could send kids back to school safely. In fact, almost every country in the world did so in the fall of 2020, and the US was an outlier because the public health establishment, the teacher unions, and the MSM successfully slandered anybody who actually cared about children.
The level of propaganda pumped out by the MSM was extraordinary, and Randi Weingarten of the AFT will spend eternity in the 7th level of Hell for her sins against children.
It is striking to me how unselfconscious the media is and how unapologetic. It was a rare story indeed that didn’t uncritically promote what their preferred “experts” said while simultaneously slandering those who have been proven to be correct. The steady stream of unchecked falsehoods promoted by the media still hasn’t ended, but as they slowly beginning admitting the truth they are acting as if those of us who were right were so only accidentally.
If they ever bothered to listen they could have written this story in late 2020, easily.
These are signs, experts say, that even short-term closures, and the pandemic more broadly, had lasting effects on the culture of education.
“There was almost, in the Covid era, a sense of, ‘We give up, we’re just trying to keep body and soul together,’ and I think that was corrosive to the higher expectations of schools,” said Margaret Spellings, an education secretary under President George W. Bush who is now chief executive of the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Closing schools did not appear to significantly slow Covid’s spread.
Perhaps the biggest question that hung over school reopenings: Was it safe?
That was largely unknown in the spring of 2020, when schools first shut down. But several experts said that had changed by the fall of 2020, when there were initial signs that children were less likely to become seriously ill, and growing evidence from Europe and parts of the United States that opening schools, with safety measures, did not lead to significantly more transmission.
“Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the Covid response at the University of California, San Francisco health system.
One of the most striking things I noticed during the pandemic was the willingness to label schools as inessential. Liquor stores remained open as essential businesses, but schools were shut down willy-nilly. Teachers kept repeating that “kids are resilient” while assuring us that they didn’t need to be in schools.
These same teachers are now insisting that they know better how to take care of children’s mental health than parents. Given their recent performance, I beg to differ. Yet the Times, which is finally coming to recognize that teachers and policy makers did horrible harm to children during the pandemic are now repeating the mental health claims of the very same people, insisting that a third-grade teacher can diagnose and treat gender dysphoria in children.
They can’t even teach reading, apparently, but can solve a child’s mental health problems.
The MSM, our educational system, the government, and Big Tech all promoted the most harmful misinformation during the pandemic (and beyond), and yet it looks possible that the Supreme Court may further empower the government to keep at it, if Court watchers are correct in their interpretation of arguments at the Supreme Court today.
Time and again the dissenters from the “consensus” have proven to be right while the people claiming to battle disinformation have proven to be societal arsonists.
That The New York Times has made a much belated analysis showing that perhaps the “experts” were a bit off is, I suppose, better than nothing. But are they chastised and willing to consider alternate ideas?
I have my doubts.
Read the full article here