Has Juan Williams formed a misimpression?

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 202

Also, the statistic which never barks: We chatted with George Stephanopoulos at an elite July 4 soiree way back in maybe 2001.

He seems like a very nice guy! In fact, we complimented him for the sly way he'd contradicted Sam and Cokie on several occasions, perhaps without seeming to do so.

On the whole, Stephanopoulos did a decent job with our speed-talking commander in chief during Tuesday night's town hall. Still and all, ABC News was the host of that show, and we live in a country where the commander can say things like this, knowing he'll never be asked about a certain set of statistics:

TRUMP (9/15/20): We really—we’re starting to get very good marks [for handling of the virus]. If you look at what we’ve done compared to other countries, with the excess mortality, the excess mortality rate, we’ve done very, very well.

When you see our testing, we’re going to be at 84 million tests, 84 million, think of that. And next would be India with about 50 million less testing programs, far greater.

I brought this along today because I think it’s something that’s really, very special. We have a new test. It came out literally today. That’s just showing you numbers of how well we’re doing relative to other countries.

[...]

But we’re very proud of the job we’ve done, and we’ve saved a lot of lives, a tremendous number of lives.

[...]

TRUMP: The excess mortality rate is among the best in the whole world. I mean, I can show you. There’s a chart that just came out a little while ago, excess mortality rate is compared to Europe, compared to other places, it’s about 25 percent better.

In one case, it’s over 60 percent better. And we also have a very big country. You know, this—we’re talking about a lot bigger than most countries.

Trump was actually rather careful this night on the subject of Covid deaths. He talked about our "excess mortality rate," which he said is "among the best in the whole world."

In one case, it's over 60 percent better! That just shows how well we’re doing compared to other countries!

Of course, no one knows what the "excess mortality rate" is. No journalist will have any idea how to critique Trump's claims about such matters. 

No journalist will have any idea if Trump's claims are accurate in this murky area. But he seemed to be saying we're doing amazingly well, mortality-wise.

He also spoke about all the lives he has saved through his topnotch anti-virus work. To cite one example, the commander said we've done amazingly well with  swabs.

But how about the many lives our country is losing compared to all those other nations? At no point did Stephanopoulos cite such astounding statistics as these:

Deaths from Covid-19, September 10-16

United States: 6,258

Germany: 30

Canada: 35

United Kingdom: 78

South Korea: 23

Taiwan: 0 

Does it look to you like we're doing well compared to other countries?  Does it look to you  like Donald J. Trump is saving a whole lot of lives? 

When it comes to ongoing daily and weekly deaths, why in the world do we have such horrible numbers? Whatever the answer may be, we can assure you of this:

Very few people have ever seen any such horrible numbers. Those horrible data remain undiscovered by our sleepwalking upper-end press.

In his unimpressive attempts to question Trump about Covid deaths, Stephanopoulos stuck to Total Deaths to Date, an increasingly irrelevant statistic which ignores our nation's ongoing daily/weekly disaster.

Also, this sad exchange occurred:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you know we have 4 percent of the world’s population, more than 20 percent of the cases, more than 20 percent of the deaths.

TRUMP: Well, we have 20 percent of the cases because of the fact that we do much more testing. If we wouldn’t do testing you wouldn’t have cases. You would have very few cases.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But these are actual cases.

TRUMP: Well, Dr. Fauci said we’ve done a fantastic job. He just said it yesterday actually. He said we’ve done a fantastic job, that we didn’t mislead anybody.

Truth to tell, that wasn't the world's greatest question in the first place. But Stephanopoulos asked the commander about cases and about deaths. 

When Trump responded with a disclaimer concerning cases, Stephanopoulos followed him down. Just like that, Covid deaths disappeared!

Last week, our nation sustained well over six thousand coronavirus deaths; Germany had thirty. But even now, eight months in, our "journalists" and "news orgs" still haven't discovered that gruesome data set.

Where in the world do these people come from? (Answer: Harvard, Columbia, Yale! ABC News, New York Times!)

For a second end-of-week point, consider something Juan Williams said Tuesday night on The Five. 

The gang was discussing the recent shooting attack against two Los Angeles police officers. Has Juan perhaps formed a misperception? We dreamed about that major survey we'd like to see someone conduct:

WILLIAMS (9/15/20): There is overwhelming consensus in our country of  the need for police reform.  And this kind of violence [against police] doesn't undercut that need.

People who are mentally ill, people who may be reaching for a knife or drop a—that doesn't mean they have to die, that they should get killed

What Americans are saying is, there is a clear pattern. There's a clear pattern here of people who are killed by police. And overwhelmingly, they are minorities, and generally blacks.

To see the full discussion, just click here, move to minute 35.  Warning! The discussion gets a bit unpleasant, thanks perhaps to Greg Gutfeld's sacred anger.

Gutfeld was weirdly hostile. That said, has Williams perhaps formed a misperception? He seems to think that, "overwhelmingly," the people shot and killed by police officers are minorities—and that, "generally," such shooting victims are black.

Overwhelmingly? Those statements aren't even close to accurate, but that's what a person might think from ongoing press coverage. (According to the Washington Post's Fatal Force site, 26% of such victims have been black since the start of 2015.)

We've dreamed of a survey in which people are asked how many people of various groups they think get shot and killed by police. We'll guess that a certain number of people would say that no "white" people ever get shot and killed. 

We're curious about the extent to which misperceptions are being formed. This is a very important topic, and the coverage has been highly selective and perhaps misleading.

Williams is nobody's dope. For that reason, we were struck by what he said. We expect to return to the larger, deeply depressing topic next week. 

As with other topics, so too here. False and mistaken statements have long been part of the coverage. Such statements rather typically lead to false and mistaken belief.


16 comments:

  1. "Of course, no one knows what the "excess mortality rate" is. No journalist will have any idea how to critique Trump's claims about such matters. "

    And yet those journalists are fact-checking the president, often in real time.

    If someone wants to know what excess mortality is, all they have to do is google it.

    Somerby is being a real ass today.

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  2. "Of course, no one knows what the "excess mortality rate" is."

    Whoa? Dear Bob, you don't understand what "excess mortality rate" is? Murky?

    It's not the rocket science, my dear; I don't think one need more than middle school education to immediately understand what it is.

    It's how much the mortality rate is higher than expected under the normal circumstances.

    This is where your phony "Deaths from Covid-19, September 10-16" calculated by the medical mafia as "anyone who died must have died from Covid-19" collide with reality.

    And it also gives you a correct way to ride your liberal hobby horse, comparing the US with other countries, that may have a completely different procedure for calculating their "deaths from Covid-19".

    Tsk. I'm disappointed in you, dear Bob, I must say. More and more you sound like a garden variety dembot.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "He seems to think that, "overwhelmingly," the people shot and killed by police officers are minorities—and that, "generally," such shooting victims are black."

    The correct word is "disproportionately", disproportionately those killed by police are blacks and other minorities, mentally ill, homeless.

    We ALL know what Juan Williams meant, including Somerby.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "We'll guess that a certain number of people would say that no "white" people ever get shot and killed."

    Nothing is stopping Somerby from taking a clipboard down to his local market and asking the shoppers his question. Even in Baltimore, few people will say that "no white people" ever get shot.

    Somerby complains that we underestimate The Others, but here he underestimates the general public in a big way, especially liberals, who do believe that too many people of all races are being killed by police and DO NOT believe that no white people are ever shot by cops.

    As long as Somerby doesn't test his hypothesis, he can go along pretending that whatever he wants to say about people is true. But that is the cowardly approach. Scientists aren't afraid to test their own cherished notions.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Here is where false beliefs and mistaken info come from, and it isn't journalists doing a good-faith job. It is from people deliberately trying to subvert others via the internet.

    David Neiwert (who studies alt-right extremism) has a new book out about how people become radicalized via the internet:

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/9/15/1977645/-Red-pills-and-radicalization-New-book-explores-how-conspiracism-is-overwhelming-us

    This is what Somerby should be talking about, if he cares about the polarization and outright crazy ideas believed on the right. And no, there is not an equivalent set of false beliefs on the left because the left is committed to forms of reality-checking that the right opposes. If Somerby were a liberal, for example, he would check out his notion that the public believes no white people are ever shot by police. Because simply asserting such a belief isn't enough, unless you are conservative and prone to conspiracy theories about how the left is duping its followers by printing and airing FAKE NEWS.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.

    Neiwert says that "it's actually easier than you'd think to distinguish between a real conspiracy and a conspiracy theory, beyond recognizing that the former has a reasonable degree of being real, while the latter is almost certainly a falsehood intended to scapegoat other people.

    "Real conspiracies, by their very nature (including their dependence on secrecy), have three major limitations:

    o Scope: their purpose is usually to achieve only one or two ends, often narrow in nature.
    o Time: their actions necessarily occur within a relatively short time frame.
    o Number of participants: all successful conspiracies are the product of only a handful of people.

    As the boundaries of all three of these limits increase, however, the likelihood of the conspiracy failing or being exposed rises exponentially...exposure is fatal to every conspiracy, once the secret is out, it's no longer a viable plan for action.

    "Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, almost universally feature qualities that contrast sharply with these limits..."

    Neiwert then explains why conspiracy theories are bad for democracies, citing political researchers.

    Somerby needs to ask himself whether he is helping or hurting the attempt to maintain our democracy and prevent the damage inflicted by politicized belief in conspiracism.

    I believe Somerby is part of the problem, not part of the solution. His relentless attack on the press over trivialities, coupled with his tendency to support conservative memes and attacks on liberal beliefs, which do tend to be more grounded in facts and reality, are unhelpful to those trying to keep our democracy from sliding into autocracy.

    These ongoing quibbles over covid statistics are of interest only to government record-keepers and modelers, epidemiologists perhaps, but not the general public. They serve only to attack the press, which is trying to present a description of the status quo to readers. If the big picture is substantially correct -- and it is -- then there is no need to wade into these weeds, as Somerby pretends to do. His larger goal is to support Trump and give credence to his defense of his own wrong statistics, by confusing readers and making the subject seem fraught with disinformation, when it is Trump who is telling lies, as always.

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