CNN's Brian Stelter says its time for the media to seriously reflect on how it is covering the new surge in COVID-19 cases, criticizing “sensationalist headlines” surrounding vaccinated people getting infected with COVID-19 that don’t provide the proper context, The Wrap reports.
“It is, as so many public health officials have said, a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated,'” Stelter said on Sunday during his broadcast’s opening monologue of Reliable Sources. “So the news coverage needs to reflect that.”
But Stelter said that the media, instead, focuses too much on covering cases of people who got COVID-19 despite being vaccinated, even though CDC data shows that vaccinated people only account for 0.004% of hospitalizations in the country and 0.001% of deaths.
There is no single national story about Covid-19 right now. There are two very different stories for two different audiences – the vaccinated and the unvaxxed pic.twitter.com/hucoCvJsjG
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 1, 2021
As an example, he compared headlines from the Washington Post and the New York Post. On the NY Post’s front page, a graph of squares was shown representing the 161 million Americans that have been vaccinated. Of them, only about 1,150 have died, a total marked with a red square so small it had to be magnified. The Washington Post, meanwhile, ran a headline about a town in Massachusetts where 75% of new cases were among vaccinated people, but did not note until the end that only a precious few of those cases led to hospitalizations.
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