Friday, September 25, 2020

Nashville Did Not Hide Favorable C19 Stats

A Nashville tv station retracted a story that reported the city of Nashville hid favorable Covid-19 statistics from the public.  The Daily Tennessean reported:


Editor's note: After this fact-checking article published on Friday, Nashville Fox 17 retracted its news story during a 9 p.m. newscast. "We don't have evidence of a cover-up and apologize for the error," an anchor read during the newscast.

This week, Nashville’s Fox17 published a news story alleging Mayor John Cooper and city officials attempted to keep secret the number of coronavirus infections linked to bars because it is "so low." The story launched into the social media stratosphere.

There is just one problem. Is it true? No. It is not.

The crux of the Fox17 story is the false claim that emails obtained by the news station show the Cooper Administration and Metro Public Health Department hid the relatively low number of coronavirus infections tied to bars. The emails appear to be cherrypicked from discovery filed in a lawsuit filed against the mayor by bar owners.

Fox17 bases its claim on two partial email exchanges. The first exchange, on June 30, is between an epidemiologist and a member of the mayor’s staff. The staffer asked for information on the number of infections linked to bars, then the epidemiologist asks if the information was going to be released publicly. The mayor’s staffer says no.

While that particular conversation may not have been public, city officials disclosed the low number of infections tied to bars – 30 infections at 10 locations at the time – two days later. Although this number was comparatively small to the total case count, it was part of an alarming trend that showed the virus gravitating toward the city center.

Officials announced the statistic at a weekly press conference led by Cooper. The press conference was streamed online by the city, and The Tennessean published the statistic in a front-page article that led web traffic for the day.

This is the opposite of keeping a secret. This is telling every person who wants to listen.... Rest of article.

The article posted last week is removed from this website.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

The article was obviously very biased. I don't think the publication or retraction will affect anyone's beliefs. All this does is take away something the COVID deniers were trumpeting, but there is no way they will now admit they were wrong. They pick their sources that only reaffirm their blind beliefs anyway.

Jacksun said...

And there were so many commenters here ready to jump on this story. I am astounded by the people around here who think the virus can be wished away or ignored. Well, it's a pernicious virus. It will not stopy replicating into new hosts just because some want it to go away or engage in wishful thinking. We have to deal with it. Everyone needs to wear their masks until we get a vaccine widely distributed.

Anonymous said...

. . . and others use the retraction to continue to beat up on those who first believed the story that has since been retracted. While those points may be valid, please give it rest once in a while.

Anonymous said...

This silly shit is truly out of hand.

Anonymous said...

Don't even think the mayor's heavy hand of government didn't threaten legal action. The Monica Lewinsky affair started out as rumor then exploded into a real story.....as was said above, there's NO WAY they are going to say they were wrong or covered up anything....DOJ will be on their ass....and may still end up being.

Anonymous said...

More gaslighting.

Green Acres said...

So the original story was more fake news from a Fox affiliate. I'm shocked.

Anonymous said...

When it comes to Government...You'll Never know, what you'll never know....There is little transparency...

Like I heard an Attorney say once...When a civil defendant admitted shedding Records. You can't make them turn over what they've say doesn't exist Amy more.

Go All Electric said...

Instantly popular is the term gas-lighting. Even more immediately popular are those who think they know how to apply it.

Anonymous said...

Just because the station retracted the story doesn't mean that Nashville officials didn't hide or exaggerate data.....politics gets legal sometimes, and I'll bet the station was forced to retract, or get sued.

The press never retracts a story unless under threat of litigation.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, the retraction hasn't stopped the conspiracy nuts from spreading it.

If you have to defend your political view or choice with the words " opinion" or " believe", it's because you have no facts or evidence to back up what you want to be true.

If you back up your " beliefs" or "opinion" with a quote of some political pundit or party hack or someone who has no career expertise in the subject or someone who will profit, again, you have nothing but a biased comment and no facts or evidence.

"Alternate facts" is a bogus notion. Facts are specific and the only question is whether the fact is accurate and then if it's definitive or irrelevant to the subject at hand. One example or many examples of people surviving a plane crash doesn't mean all plane crashes are survivable.

Yet that is exactly what political hacks use to inflame your fears and emotions. They find the scariest examples no matter how rare or seldom.

Christians being killed in a foreign country where Christians are an oppressed minority doesn't mean there's a "war" on Christianity in the U.S. Nor do a few attacks on mosques or temples here mean that our government is attacking Islam or Judaism in the U.S. The attacks on Black churches weren't attacks on Christianity but on a racial minority.

But, if political nonsense and conspiracy crazies like Qanon keep being believed and worst, repeated by elected officials or candidates even and spread like bogus gossip, all that you fear will happen in our next civil war.


Those of you who are blindly loyal partisans are like a juror who ignores any evidence by the defense and listens only to the prosecutor or vice versa. As a patriotic citizen, your duty is like that of a juror... to listen to " evidence and facts" and to weigh the validity...not to parrot summaries or decide either the prosecutor or defense attorney is someone more like you that you'd like to be your friend or who you find entertaining.

And, law and order as well as any other set of recognizable consistent rules of order or civility will no longer exist in the chaos of civil war or hostile takeover of government. And, while there may be order in a dictatorship, you may not like the loss of personal freedom or seeing your children or family members who rebel or break a rule just disappear.

Duty and due diligence are more important now than ever.

That you will not listen to those with decades of study of a specific subject as their chosen career or those with a long history of service to this Nation who have no political afflation but who have served both parties honorably by providing their knowledge is astounding.

But, you will listen to celebrities and coaches and business leaders and those with an obvious political bias ...not on their areas of talent or career, but on everything.

News flash...even Einstein or Leonardo Da Vinci knew everything about everything instinctively and neither claimed to know everything or never err in anything. They knew what they studied and researched and they learned from others things they were born knowing.

Anonymous said...

7:07am, what a lazy comment. Read the Tennessean’s fact check article. It outlines evidence in plain terms that shows with absolute certainty that the stats were neither hidden nor exaggerated.

Anonymous said...

9/26 @6:30 p.m., that's why we have the spoliation doctrine. Basically, it means that when evidence is destroyed, a legal presumption arises that the evidence would have favored the other side in a civil case.

In other words, you prove the other side's argument by destroying their evidence. In some states, spoliation requires proof of intent. In Mississippi, negligent destruction of evidence raises the presumption. The attorney you cited was not only unethical and crooked, but incompetent as well.


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If you get tired come relax at the Fox News Tent. To gain admittance to the VIP section, bring either your Republican Party ID card or a Rebel Flag. Bringing both will entitle you to free drinks.Get your tickets now. Since this is an event for trolls, no ID is required, just bring the hate. Bring the family, Trollfest '07 is for EVERYONE!!!

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