Major Bryan Musolino has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and is a military expert on Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). Currently, he is an Emerging Technology Assistant Professor at the Anthony G. Oettinger School of Science and Technology Intelligence.
Given the media’s fear-inducing reporting on COVID-19, Dr. Musolino provides an interesting background and perspective on the harm this reporting by national media is causing.
On 8 June, he published an extensive article titled, “Perspective: Media Coverage of COVID-19 and Outcomes of Fear Generation.”
Major Musolino points out how on 3 March, congressional testimony of Dr. Anthony Fauci, heralded as America’s leading expert on infectious diseases, gave an unsubstantiated, overblown perspective on COVID-19 that quickly was picked up by national media. In Dr. Fauci’s testimony in early March, he stated, “The flu has a mortality rate of 0.1 percent. This [COVID-19] has a mortality rate of 10 times that.”
Major Musolino comments, “Regrettably there is an issue with this statement; to determine a mortality rate we need to know the number of deaths per number infected (ideally), or estimated using the disease burden combined with a historical statistical analysis. The issue with Dr. Fauci’s statement starts with the nature of the virus and is then further impacted by inconsistent reporting to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
Major Musolino then points out that soon after Dr. Fauci’s highly inflated projections, “Taking a snapshot from the week of March 16, 2020, from the previous year in 2019, Fox News saw an increase (in ratings) of 89%, MSNBC was up 56%, and CNN up a whopping 193%.”
Focusing in on CNN’s medical expert, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Major Musolino writes, “Even though at the beginning of April 2020 the CDC and WHO recommended wearing a face mask only if you were sick or caring for someone who was sick. CNN’s Dr. Gupta counter-recommended that face masks should be worn by everyone as it would prevent individuals who are asymptomatic from spreading the disease.”
The national media continues to support the threats by many governors to slow down or reverse the recent strategies for reopening schools, businesses, and public spaces by continuing to generate fear-inducing headlines and stories. Major Musolino hones in on what’s going on here:
“We have seen that the initial reporting of the CV19 outbreak by the media was successfully able to induce an initial level of fear in a seed of the populace, and then capitalize on and simultaneously cultivate the fear by increasing the volume and sensationalism of the storylines. With this ever-growing level of reporting on the apprehensive populace, political leaders had to demonstrate to their constituents that they were dealing with the pending disaster. Unfortunately, many of their statements only exacerbated the fear cycle, and the derived counter-measures were not based on science, but rather could be considered in the realm of ‘security theater.”’
Revealing the media for what it’s become, Major Musolino concludes,
“The media has a distinct responsibility to provide factual reporting, but in the case of CV19 they have elected to continue with dramatized storylines at the expense of the affected – the citizens of the United States. Finally, for perspective, on average 647,000 Americans die each year from heart disease, an estimated 795,000 Americans suffer a stroke each year of which approximately 140,000 are fatal, and approximately 34.2 million Americans are diabetic with more than 270,000 succumbing to the disease each year. Yet despite these numbers, as well as the associated financial burden of $580 billion dollars per year attributed directly to the diseases, there has been virtually no media coverage.”
A Voice of Sanity
One of the few American political leaders showing true leadership and not giving into the fear and anxiety generated every day by national media is Missouri governor Mike Parson.
Last Thursday, commenting on the fact that so many of his fellow governors are reversing their reopening strategies due to concern over higher contagion rates, Governor Parson tweeted, “We are not overwhelmed. We are NOT currently experiencing a second wave. We have NO intentions of closing Missouri back down at this point in time.”
Governor Parson’s comments were in reaction to the fact that while there had been a spike in new coronavirus cases reported in his state, hospitalizations have been declining.
TRENDPOST: As we report in this week’s article, “MEDIA RANKED DEAD LAST,” Sweden’s top virologist, Dr. Anders Tegnell, revealed the reason more coronavirus contagion is being reported is because more extensive testing is being done and that the much more important data, death rate and rate of hospitalization, have both gone down.