Pravda was the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party. A perfect Orwellian oxymoron, the name translates as “truth,” where “truth” was whatever propaganda the Party pushed on a given day. Similarly, The Tampa Bay Times (TBT, nee St. Petersburg Times) is just one of many fact-shading, history rewriting, Democrat Party controlled news outlets. The lamestream news media like to say that “our opinion section may be left but our hard news is unbiased.” Hah! TBT’s saturated leftism infects the entire publication. Let’s dissect a recent example of biased, fake news, ripped from their front page.
TBT Headline, Sunday, Aug. 2, 2020: Young not spared ravages of the virus
Subhead: A 32-year-old lost his battle after three months spent in agony.
The intended spin is “hey young people, you’re all going to die and it’s all Trump’s fault. Vote Biden.” With that theme in mind, let’s see how TBT intentionally bent a real story into fake news propaganda. Right below a memorial collage of the young man at the center of tale is a summary of Florida Covid deaths by age. Here’s a simplified version of their table:
Florida Covid Deaths
| AGES | by month… | Total |
| 5 to 14 | 2 | |
| 15 to 24 | 12 | |
| 25 to 34 | 43 | |
| 35 to 44 | 120 | |
| 45 to 54 | 263 | |
| 55 to 64 | 627 | |
| Total | 1,067 |
Numbers, numbers, numbers, but straight up, how dangerous is Covid to young people?
3,100 Floridians die every year from car accidents, and most of those are young. Will this stop you from driving, going to work, having fun?
The risk of complications for healthy children is higher for flu compared to COVID-19.
Is anything missing? Where are people over 64 years old and their numbers? You must read deep into the article to find that the concurrent statewide total was about 6,000. Huh? The table above shows only one thousand. That means that the Tampa Bay Times writers deliberately omitted almost 5,000 Covid deaths, 80% of the real total.
Why did they do that? The answer is simple statistics. Covid is most deadly to seniors, but we already knew that. By omitting seniors, they falsely inflate the perceived risk to these younger groups. The lefty journalists wanted to scare the young “skulls full of mush,” to quote a favorite radio talk-show host.
Let’s say you’re 30 years old. According to the table above you’d be forgiven to believe that your odds of dying is 43/1,067, or about 1 in 25. Meh! That’s super scary. But there are 10 years in that decade-wide age span so now divide by 10. But they deliberately omitted the other 5,000 deaths, so divide now by 6. The approximate probability of a 30-year-old being one of Florida’s Covid deaths is 1 in 1500. But Florida has about 21.5 million residents and only 7,000 of those have died of Covid. So your age agnostic chance of being one of those Covid deaths is 7,000/21.5M, or about… 1 in 3,000. If you’re young, as we saw above, it is a very small fraction of that sub 0.1%. Do you see how this is trending? The much smaller over-65 age group, about 20% of Florida’s population, accounts for over 80% of deaths. Aside: isn’t it interesting how often that old engineering rule of thumb, the “80-20 Rule,” pops up in real life? Back to the story – Covid is, in fact, a statistically insignificant threat to the young. Not zero, but so small that it might as well be nil.
What? Way more young people die of car accidents and we certainly don’t shut schools or deliberately crush our economy for the annual flu. Heck, only half of us even bother to get a flu shot, and that’s mostly old folks, not the young. But with Covid, the alarmists say that our children shouldn’t go to school, and if they do, they’ll alllllllll die? That’s what the Teacher’s Unions want you to believe and their leftist agenda is well known. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman let the truth slip recently during a CNN interview. It went like this: Thomas, when will the Corona pandemic end? Answer: November (when Biden wins).
Turning back to the TBT story, what about that young Covid victim who is JUST LIKE YOU? Well, he “struggled with lung issues and asthma his entire life…” He “had a history of health problems, including diabetes, that made him especially vulnerable.” Hmmm… maybe he isn’t just like you.
Let’s review that headline again: “Young not spared ravages of the virus.” Slick Willie Clinton would argue “it depends on the meaning of the word ‘young.’” As used here, “young” is not singular, it refers to a (large) group of people who are young. The TBT staff struggled to find a poster boy for their panic-fanning narrative and the best they could find was one very tragically sick individual. They mention maybe a handful of other examples in the body of the article, but they finally and necessarily concede that the most important risk factors are age and preexisting health conditions, facts we’ve known from the very beginning. Does that comport with the headline? No. This headline and the associated misleading table were crafted to scare healthy, virtually immune, young, low information readers into supporting a freedom destroying Biden-Sanders socialist restructuring.
Political motivations aside, did the TBT story do harm? Yes, because our attention and resources should be laser focused on protecting the truly vulnerable; the old and the already sick. A casual TBT reader might instead believe that the young are equally vulnerable which could lead to a mortal misallocation of always finite human and material resources. Fake news can have real human costs.
Stepping back a moment, this isn’t the first time that The Railer has seen the Democrats willfully, deliberately, harm our nation. It happens every time a Republican President stands for reelection. The customary Democrat war wagon is an attack on our economy, and it is again in 2020. They just hide this year’s operation behind Covid and “saving lives,” but the destruction of the best economy in the history of our nation is the goal.
Heather MacDonald summed it up best:
Over the last four months, Americans have lived through what is arguably the most consequential period of government malfeasance in U.S. history. Public officials’ overreaction to the novel coronavirus put American cities into a coma; those same officials’ passivity in the face of widespread rioting threatens to deliver the coup de grâce. Together, these back-to-back governmental failures will transform the American polity and cripple urban life for decades.
Can you hear the cheer rising from the rich Democrat coastal socialists who fund the black-clad Antifa mobs? The Railer awards The Tampa Bay Times 4 Clintons for this deliberately misleading and biased story.