Juno News - May 17, 2021


The mainstream media's commitment to lockdowns

Mentioned
Liberate Michigan Doug Ford COVID-19
Israel and Hamas are not moral equivalents Hamas Apologetics

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

177.18

Word count

615

Sentence count

36


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about why some people are still addicted to wearing masks, and why some can't seem to shake the lockdown mentality. I also compare the media coverage in the U.S. to what we're getting here in Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I found it very interesting and instructive to compare the different pandemic responses
00:00:11.320 between Canada and the United States, various Canadian provinces, and various American states.
00:00:16.880 How a place like Liberal Michigan, for instance, very similar to Ontario in a number of ways,
00:00:21.760 doing things completely differently than Ontario, led by supposedly Conservative Premier Doug Ford.
00:00:28.220 One thing, though, that I also find very interesting is comparing the media responses and the general media narratives in the United States to what's happening here in Canada.
00:00:39.320 Three features I want to bring to your attention that I've seen in American media very recently, just in the past week or so.
00:00:45.940 First of all, there's a New York Times feature. It's an op-ed, but it's a really long one, a feature-length one.
00:00:51.240 A lady talking about her experiences as a more liberal-minded person living in Texas and initially having some problems with the sort of anti-lockdown attitude in Texas,
00:01:00.980 and they were one of the first to reopen and lift the mask mandates and so forth.
00:01:05.060 But her coming to basically appreciate living in Texas and saying, hold on a second, is it maybe tribalism that is actually fueling a lot of our responses to all of this
00:01:14.600 and fueling a lot of our perspectives and our attitudes, why we support or don't support lockdowns.
00:01:19.820 Really interesting piece. There was another in The Atlantic, which, well, they're not generally considered this sort of far-right publication
00:01:26.640 about the liberals who can't quit lockdown. That was the headline.
00:01:31.020 And they go on to say, progressive communities, this is a sub-headline,
00:01:34.460 have been home to some of the fiercest battles over COVID-19 policies, and some liberal policymakers have left scientific evidence behind.
00:01:43.940 Well, so very respected mainstream magazine talking about why is it the progressives who are abandoning science.
00:01:51.460 Here's an interesting one. Vice magazine, typically considered a pretty left-wing publication.
00:01:56.240 Get a load of this one.
00:01:57.980 People aren't addicted to wearing masks. They're traumatized.
00:02:01.920 That's the headline subhead. They say there's a glaring omission from the discussion about why some can't quit pandemic behaviors,
00:02:08.380 the mental and emotional toll of the last year.
00:02:11.120 So what's interesting about this vice piece is they kind of take it as the starting point that,
00:02:16.020 well, no, you shouldn't still be in love with lockdowns and you shouldn't be double masking and all this stuff.
00:02:19.740 I mean, come on, look at the facts, look at the evidence. I mean, we got to evolve here, folks.
00:02:23.360 But they take a very compassionate and sympathetic approach to people who are still committed to lockdowns,
00:02:28.400 but basically say it's their own trauma, their own psychological problems.
00:02:32.620 Basically, we have a sort of mental health challenge as to why some people are so deeply committed to still holding on to the lockdown mentality.
00:02:42.560 Really interesting stuff.
00:02:43.680 And I know Canada and the U.S. are not 100% apples to apples comparisons,
00:02:48.680 but let's be honest, there is a massive gulf here in these features that you find in American media
00:02:53.860 compared to what we might be discussing here in Canadian media.
00:02:57.740 Completely different. Major disconnect.
00:03:00.120 None of these stories, none of these stories would ever run right now in a mainstream Canadian publication.
00:03:05.740 It would be considered way too far out of field.
00:03:07.920 And yet this is not just, you know, the regular conversation in America.
00:03:11.500 This is something that liberal, that left-wing journalists are putting forward.
00:03:15.220 Very interesting there.
00:03:16.360 So yes, compare the responses in terms of the numbers and the lockdown approaches and so forth,
00:03:21.000 America to Canada, but also take a look at the difference in the whole media conversation,
00:03:26.660 the whole media attitude.