For other posts, visit my Commentary blog
Occasionally I write a blog I feel has some interesting perspective or important element of information worth sharing, so that’s what I do. In addition to posting the piece on my website, I have a list of media outlets I reach out to. My goal in sharing is to allow equal access to both liberal and conservative media outlets, plus one intellectual outlet. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if I properly meet my goal, but the media outlets I reach out to include
- Albuquerque Journal
- Chicago Sun Times
- Chicago Tribune
- Chris Matthews
- Drudge Report
- LA Times
- Michael Savage
- NY Daily News
- NY Post
- NY Times
- Rush Limbaugh
- Wall Street Journal
- Washington Post
- Washington Times
- White House
Mostly these media outlets (+ one intellectual outlet) ignore me, but not always. For example, if you listened to President Trump’s HBO interview this past week, you would have heard him espousing the very same scientific assessment of COVID I have been blogging about. I like to think that President Trump is starting to realize that the medical opinions of Drs. Fauci and Brix are failing not only him, but the country and he needs good scientific data to influence his decision and policy making.
At the same time, if you listened to Rush Limbaugh’s Tuesday’s show, you would recognize that his entire show was virtually verbatim from my blog. It would have been nice to get a little shout out from the President or a reference from Rush, but in the end it’s not about that. What matters is that reasonable and rational points of view grounded in factual science are beginning to permeate political and media discourse, perhaps for the first time in modern history.
I am not reviewing the NY Times daily or scouring through the Wall Street Journal for elements of my analysis, those papers are way too immersed in their biases to consider fresh points of view, even fresh points of view grounded in sound science. I persistently include them in my media outreach not because I expect to gain traction any time soon, but so that when they do eventually come around to objective journalism, and an appreciation for what unbiased data analysis looks like, they will have had some exposure to it.
For now I retain a modicum of satisfaction that we have a President who rarely says the right things in the right way, but is open to consider objective evidence and does not mind speaking truth to power. And for that he has my respect, even though I don’t always agree with him.
For what it’s worth, during the President’s tête-à-tête with the HBO reporter, the President was right, the only COVID metric that matters is the rate of survival for those infected. The infection rate metric is meaningless; if I don’t get infected with COVID, then obviously I’m not going to die from COVID – that is unless I die in a hospital, then they’ll say I died of COVID so they can collect the cool $39k my COVID death pays them. This means the rate of COVID deaths relative to the entire population that the HBO reporter espoused, is not insightful. The President was also right to say the epidemic is winding down, it would have helped his case however, if he better explained how the CDC reaches that conclusion.
I laugh at the absurdity of the HBO reporter who mocked President Trump for having a positive outlook on life. Apparently he’s never interviewed athletes who visualize their success prior to performing, or read the “Seven Habits of Highly Successful People;” where habit two states to “Begin with the end in mind.” I suppose we have to excuse him, he’s a liberal millennium journalist so of course views the world as dark, dank, and hopelessly lost.
