Media Peddle Bogus Wuhan Virus Stats To Bash America..By Mollie Hemingway

[mystery-ak]

 Media Peddle Bogus Wuhan Virus Stats To Bash America

Many in the media enthusiastically relish the claim that the United States has more people infected with the coronavirus than China does, even though China's numbers are unreliable.

By Mollie Hemingway
March 27, 2020

When Donald Trump tweeted this week that the United States had performed more coronavirus tests than any other country, the media were upset.

Trump being Trump, he’d also said the United States had done more tests in eight days than South Korea had done in eight weeks. PolitiFact calculated the United States had done 17,582 fewer tests than South Korea during that time period. LiveScience said the United States had done 43,790 fewer tests than South Korea during that time period.

Their own disparity notwithstanding, other media outlets pointed out merely that South Korea is a much smaller country than the United States. That meant they had done more tests per capita than the United States had.

“Trump overlooks a huge piece of context,” a USA Today fact check said. CNN went with “Fact Check: US has done more coronavirus tests than South Korea, but not per person.” MSNBC ran a segment with a graph asserting that “The U.S. Trails Other Countries In Number Of Other Coronavirus Tests Conducted Per Million People.”

more
https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/27/media-peddle-bogus-wuhan-virus-stats-to-bash-america/

[PeteS in CA]

IOW, the MSM will use per capita numbers when it suits their purpose, and use raw numbers ...... when it suits their purpose.

Statistics don't lie, but liars use statistics.

[Smokin Joe]

IOW, the MSM will use per capita numbers when it suits their purpose, and use raw numbers ...... when it suits their purpose.

Statistics don't lie, but liars use statistics.

The switch from raw numbers to rates to percentages has ever been used by the  media to distort reality.

Some of that is built in.

Rig count goes from 100 to 50 and the headlines read "Drilling down by 50%"
Rig count goes from 50 to 100 and the headlines read "100% increase in Drilling activity"
Even though the raw number changes are the same (50 rigs), the statistical presentations are correct.