ABC News was caught lying again. This is the same media outlet that fabricated stories about bombings in Syria. It’s the same outlet that pushed lies about the Covington Catholic school kids and Jussie Smollett. You might think they would learn and improve. You would be wrong.
Keep in mind as you read this that this was a primetime ABC news segment.
According to their reporting, August 13, 2020, had the “highest single-day of COVID-19 deaths.” Let’s add a little context to be fair. They were talking specifically about the United States, so we don’t need to compare global numbers as some kind of gotcha. With that in mind, they reported that U.S. COVID deaths hit a new single-day high on August 13.
Ok, that’s a pretty easy number to fact check.
The irony is that in the very same segment, ABC did fact check that number. They had a graphic that showed August 13 didn’t have the highest number of daily deaths. It wasn’t even close to that number. Instead, the graphic displayed that August 13 was the highest for daily deaths since May.
So, maybe it was a simple mistake, right? Before we get to why they deliberately lied, let’s correct the numbers.
According to Johns Hopkins data, August 13 had 1,284 new coronavirus deaths. Here’s what’s interesting, August 11 and 12 both had more deaths than that. In fact, as of the time of this writing, August 11 had the most daily deaths since May, at 1,504. ABC wasn’t even right that August 13 had a high number for the week.
Let’s put this in a larger context. The highest daily deaths for the U.S. occurred in April with a total of 2,749. There was a dip in June and early July, but even then, daily death rates were over 800. That means that August 13 was much closer to the early-summer low than the April high. Any attempt to say that coronavirus deaths were spiraling or worsening in August is just plain reckless.
So, why would they make such a glaring mistake? Everyone has been looking closely at these numbers. There’s no way they’d get away with this level of dishonesty.
You already know why. ABC, like the rest of the mainstream media, wants you to be afraid of this virus. If they say bold things that you don’t bother to fact check, they can try to convince you that things are worse than ever, and they do this for two reasons.
The first is that they want you to blame President Trump for the coronavirus. That only works if the virus is a terrible thing that we can’t overcome. If the virus that is receding and not really a big deal anymore, then there’s not much fire in that blame.
The second reason is that they want to continue to undermine the country, and coronavirus is the excuse. They forced us into a planned economy that killed a third of our GDP in a single month. The virus was the justification. If we see that the virus is less than half as bad as it was in April (which we survived just fine), then there is no need for continued lockdowns and authoritarian measures. Without those measures, our economy and way of life can bounce back quickly, and we don’t need the left back into power to “fix” everything for us.
This narrative is about politics. It’s about control. It’s about getting you to lie down quietly while they destroy everything you love. That is why you see these lies, and the lies will not stop until we make them stop.
