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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Is this propaganda? My wife just recovered from covid and it knocked her on her ass. Yes upper respiratory was true, but nausea, fever, fatigue, fainting, body pain, loss of taste all happened
Just because an individual case doesn't fit the trend does not automatically make the news propaganda.
This article is a bit of propaganda though. That doesn't mean it isn't true or anything. But running an article in the news about how much milder the disease is, is still going to have an effect on how people respond to it.
I think you might be using too broad a definition of propaganda. The result of influencing opinion does not make something propaganda. Propaganda needs some intent to persuade or push an agenda.
The article might be propaganda, largely that depends on the motivations for writing and publishing it. But the fact that the content of the article might change people's opinions does not make it propaganda.
Nah.
A bar this article very easily clears. What to publish is a choice. A choice was made to publish this article, with obvious influence on opinion and action.
Nah. Intent a nonsense metric. We can bicker forever about intent. Because we cannot know anyone's mind.
Using intent as a metric gives a lot of propaganda a free pass. Because we can't prove intent.
So you just don't know what propaganda is, got it.
Oh sod off then, dickhead.
Nah.
That wasn't directed at you. But I guess I said "dickhead" and you figured it fit you.
It's not a free pass. Something doesn't have to be propaganda to be bad.
I didn't say it did? I didn't even say that propaganda is universally bad?
Sure, but propaganda has to have intent. The article itself cannot be propaganda without it. It may advance a claim of COVID being trivial, but those who advance it must bend the article in some way. What they say then is the propaganda.
The choice of what to publish at all, is intent. News outlets are not just firehoses of all facts. They choose what to publish.
There is no need for the article to be "bent" in any way.
So to you propaganda is a synonym for news, and that is simply incorrect.
No. Not a synonym. But the line between news and propaganda is not clear-cut. Especially in the case of a self-contained article. A news outlet may serve as a source of propaganda, based on the editorial decisions they make. The individual articles are still news, even as they serve as propaganda for their audience.
You've kind of arrived at the point while ignoring it.
Propaganda requires intent. You are correct that we can't know their intent directly, therefore we can only use evidence to try to determine the authors intent.
Admittedly I did not pick the article a part, but I saw no tell-tale signs of propaganda. It was primarily interviews with doctors. I saw no signs of manipulative wording, attempts at persuasion, or unsupported opinions of the writer.
While I can't definitively say this article is not propaganda, it probably isn't.
So it's not propaganda until you can provide good evidence that it is.
And editorial choice clears the bar for intent.
You are ignoring what I'm saying. You are trying to look at a single article for evidence of propaganda. But that isn't the whole picture.
A news desk picks what articles that they publish. If they publish a whole bunch of articles saying "the average case of covid has become more mild" that is furthering a specific viewpoint. If they instead publish articles about "people are still suffering from long-covid", that is furthering a different viewpoint.
And crucially, both "the average case of covid has become more mild" and "people are still suffering from long-covid" can be true. Both types of articles can be written with absolutely zero bias, and still serve as propaganda.
Ok, but now you are assuming intent of the news desk still without evidence. I get where you're coming from, but without actual evidence showing a clear organizational bias for a certain narrative, making that assumption isn't anymore valid than assuming the actual reporters intent.
And again, furthering a viewpoint does not make propaganda. Virtually all news is going to further one viewpoint or another, even if the organization and writer are 100% unbiased. Facts usually don't maintain a neutral ground on a topic.
You mean like how they and others keep publishing articles saying, or intimating, that COVID is less severe now even though there's really no evidence for that?
It's the fact they keep doing it that makes it propaganda.
Ironic considering you've presented no evidence to support that.
So your own comments here are propaganda? If everything published by choice is propaganda, then everything is propaganda, because everything is published by choice. Nobody just dumps a bunch of rocks on the keyboard and publishes whatever it types out.
No, they think propaganda influences opinion, but I don't think anything they've said has changed anyone's mind about anything.
There will always be outliers in any population distribution, your wife being one it seems. This is talking about the general outcome now.
There is a ton of, "COVID is mild now" propaganda which is not supported by the science. More evidence points to increased immunity than a reduction in the lethality of the virus itself.
Omicron is less severe than Delta, but that's really misleading because Delta was the most dangerous variant.
I’m not sure you know what propaganda means
There is more than just one strain in circulation
There's a lot of different strains going around, but it's a bunch of different subvariants of Omicron.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions
I think what they are trying to say is that harsh reactions are becoming less common. Which is good for everyone. Although it can still affect people a lot, like it affected your wife.
Although it could be propaganda, at this moment I hope it’s the former.
I just wouldn't want people to get the impression that it's nothing, or that it's like a common cold. My wife is really happy to be alive. I was really scared of losing her.
What sort of propaganda do you think this would be?
An effort to downplay the risks we are under in order to avoid a panic or shutdown like before during a bad economy?
One idea, I don't know, I'm sure there are other possibilities, I'm wasn't thinking of anything specific.
I feel like the comments are dragging you unnecessarily. Maybe one variant presents mildly, but the first line says hospitalizations are increasing. Is hospitalization ‘mild’?
The article contradicts its core premise in the first line.
The core premise is that the "common" symptoms follow a different pattern than they used to. The common symptoms are not the ones that have ever sent anyone to hospital. Hospitalization can still be up and not refute that point.
At the risk of sounding argumentative: The byline of the article says that COVID has gotten milder. The first line of the article says hospitalizations are on the uptick. I feel it’s a bit downhill from there.
I don’t disagree with the premise. As soon as it became clear that COVID was a pandemic and not something that could be quarantined out of circulation, epidemiologists and armchair experts alike have supposed that COVID would become milder. (It’s not evolutionarily advantageous for a virus to be too deadly to its host organisms. That’s sort of a self-limiter.).
I think a milder, more cold-like (or perhaps indistinguishable from cold) COVID may be the ultimate outcome.
That said: To get more into it - I don’t like the article because it appears to contradict itself and it doesn’t account for the same sorts of things that the guy I responded to was being criticized for - variants, vaccination status, immune systems, and anecdotes.
The one bit of real science in it is a paper published in April 2022. And while I’m sure the scientists who wrote that paper did fine work, their research was weeks or months old by the time the paper was published.
That means the only information referenced in the story that isn’t an anecdote is over a year and a half old - published only a few months after Omicron was even recognized as a COVID variant.
And I guess that’s my main issue. It’s a non-story. It asserts something it doesn’t validate. But the commenter asserted something they can’t validate either (to us), and folks dragged him for it.
For what it’s worth, 3 people I know, and myself recently experienced symptoms similar to what OP described. My doctor and a PA at an urgent care both said something to the effect of those symptoms being on the rise. Not saying I should be more trusted but I have a contradictory experience to the article.
If we’re going to be critical of people who have no reason to be misleading, then perhaps we should also be critical of folks who are trying to serve us advertising.