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WaPo social media team is exposed for pandemic porn at its extreme worst

June 3, 2021 | | Print Article

The Washington Post’s social media team was blasted online for promoting a pair of negative stories regarding the COVID-19 pandemic even as illnesses and deaths from the virus wane dramatically around the country.

Twitter personality @politicalmath on Wednesday took screenshots of two WaPo tweets — one linked to a story warning unvaccinated Americans not to become “unrealistically optimistic” as cases rapidly decline, and another to a story noting that due to “underlying conditions” COVID vaccines “may not work in some people.”

“I would like to ask, respectfully, what the hell is wrong with the Washington Post social media team,” @politicalmath noted before calling out the newspaper for fearmongering.

“The @washingtonpost is very deliberately promoting the absolute worst news they can scrounge up. They’re *paying money* so that people will be pessimistic in spite of all the good news out there,” @politicalmath added.

The two promoted stories from the Post come as the United States recorded its lowest daily infection rates since March 2020, when the pandemic began, Axios reported Thursday.

In fact, daily infection rates have fallen so dramatically, as more of the country becomes vaccinated and naturally immune after having had the virus, that the outlet will end its daily tracking operation.

“Nearly every week for the past 56 weeks, Axios has tracked the change — more often than not, the increase — in new COVID-19 infections. Those case counts are now so low, the virus is so well contained, that this will be our final weekly map,” the site reported.

Axios reported that over the past week, the U.S. averaged about 16,500 new cases per day, or 30 percent fewer than the previous week. Overall, new infections fell in 43 states while holding steady in the remaining seven.

“The official case counts haven’t been this low since Americans went into lockdown in March last year — when the pandemic was still new, no one knew how long this would go on, and inadequate testing meant that cases were undercounted,” Axios reported, adding that about 10 percent of the population — 34 million — have tested positive for the virus. About 611,000 have died from it.

“The Bottom Line: The vaccines work,” Axios declared. “They’ve brought cases to their lowest point yet, and because that improvement is the result of vaccines, there’s no reason to believe the virus will start gaining significant ground again any time soon.”

Many experts agree that former President Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” effort to rapidly develop COVID-19 vaccines likely saved at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American lives.

As for WaPo, its two stories focusing on the negative aspects of the pandemic drew a lot of criticism from other social media users.

“Ah yes, sell ads in articles, then pump the impressions with paid ads for the article… No ad fraud here,” one wrote.

“If we have learned anything in the past year it’s that if the media has to choose between the public good and chasing clicks, they are going to chase clicks *every*single*time*,” wrote another user.

“Pandemic porn at its worst,” said another.

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Jon Dougherty
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