If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs

Citizens staying home and fact-checking the media may be an interesting third-order effect of coronavirus quarantines.

Took a break to read back and see how the media covered Trump's 1/31 announcement barring entry into the U.S. from China and HOO BOY...

Many in the scientific community beclowned themselves because their hatred for Trump blinded them—and does to this day. pic.twitter.com/QjF8zfkCB0

— Lyndsey Fifield (@lyndseyfifield) March 19, 2020

Click to follow the thread.

It is a partial list but sufficient to make the point. The media and the experts are obfuscatory or simply wrong in their reporting as are cherry-picked experts. The empirical evidence to support whether travel restrictions had a material beneficial impact on slowing the spread of Covid-19 is not yet available. Nor is the evidence that the costs of such travel restrictions are commiserate with the benefits.

All of it is plausible and all of it might be untrue. We don't know yet.

Clearly, though, the certainty with which the mainstream media and their cherry-picked experts denounced the travel restrictions was unwarranted. Clearly, the tide has shifted and there is widespread institutional and public support for such travel restrictions.

We are living without empirical evidence to firmly establish the case one way or the other. But what can be said with great certainty is that the mainstream media seem to have a strong bias against the administration which apparently determines their confidence in condemnation of whatever actions are taken and they are not concerned in the least about caution, empirical evidence, or evaluating costs and benefits.

That ordinary citizens have the time to go back and look at the quality of reporting from six weeks ago given what is known or assumed to be known now will be very interesting and revealing. And not beneficial to the mainstream media brand.