HBO host Bill Maher absolutely shredded the media over their COVID response while heaping praise on Gov. Ron DeSantis for his, and simultaneously eviscerating Gov. Andrew Cuomo over his handling of nursing homes during the pandemic.
The “Real Time” host focused his derision on Democratic governors, the ignorance of liberals, and what he called the media’s “panic porn” coverage of the pandemic. Maher saved his praise this time for the Republican governors of Texas and Florida in regards to how they have handled the coronavirus outbreak.
“Over the past year, the COVID pandemic has prompted the medical establishment, the media, and the government to take a ‘scared straight’ approach to getting the public to comply with their recommendations,” Maher noted during his closing monologue on Friday night. “Well, I’m from a different school, ‘Give it to me straight, doc.’ Cause in the long run, that always works better than ‘You can’t handle the truth.'”
He tore into the media over its “if it bleeds, it leads” mantra.”
(Video Credit: Real Time with Bill Maher)
“The more they can get you to stay inside and watch their panic porn — the higher their ratings,” he caustically stated.
Maher went on to cite a study from 2020 that stated that out of the approximately 20,000 coronavirus-related news items from the nation’s most popular media outlets, over 90 percent were negative.
“When all of our sources for medical information have an agenda to spin us, yeah, you wind up with a badly misinformed population, including on the left,” Maher commented. “Liberals often mock the Republican misinformation bubble … but what about liberals? You know, the high-information, behind-the-science people?”
He also referenced a Franklin Templeton/Gallup survey that asked the question: “What percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized?” The answer should have been between 1 and 5 percent. Only 18 percent of Americans got it right. Twenty-six percent of Republicans answered the question correctly. Shockingly, 28 percent of Democrats think that 20 to 40 percent of those who contract the disease had to be hospitalized.
“So almost 70% of Democrats are wildly off on this key question, and also have a greatly exaggerated view of the danger of COVID, and the mortality rate among children,” Maher noted. “All of which explains why today the states with the highest share of schools that are still closed are all blue states.”
He went on to ask, “So if the right-wing media bubble has to own things like climate change denial, shouldn’t liberal media have to answer for ‘How did your audience wind up believing such a bunch of crap about COVID?'”
“Sunshine is the best disinfectant and Vitamin D is the key to a robust immune system,” Maher posited. “Texas lifted its COVID restrictions recently and their infection rates went down in part because of people getting outside to let the sun and wind do their thing. But to many liberals, ‘That can’t be right because Texas and beach-loving Florida have Republican governors,’ but life is complicated.”
Maher went on to laud Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for being “a voracious consumer of the scientific literature.”
“And maybe that’s why he protected his most vulnerable population, the elderly, way better than did the governor of New York,” Maher snarked, decimating Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo for his nursing home scandal. “Those are just facts, I know it’s irresponsible of me to say them.”
“Look, here’s what I’m saying: I don’t want politics mixed in with my medical decisions,” Maher stated. “And now that everything is politics, that’s all we do. If their side says, ‘COVID is nothing,’ our side has to say, ‘It’s everything.’ Trump said it would ‘go away like a miracle,’ and we said it was World War Z.”
“And now, of course, we find out that all that paranoia about surfaces was bulls*** anyway,” he bluntly added. “If you lie to people, even for a very good cause, you lose their trust.”
“Imagine how many lives could have been saved if there had been a national campaign à la Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move’ program with the urgency of the pandemic behind it,” Maher proclaimed.
“If the media and the doctors made the point to keep saying, ‘But there’s something you can do,’ but we’ll never know because they never did because the last thing you want to do is say something insensitive. We would literally rather die. Instead, we were told to lockdown,” He added.
“Unfortunately, the killer was already inside the house. And her name is Little Debbie,” he said. The reference to “Little Debbie” is in connection to studies that show people who are overweight are far more likely to contract the disease.
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