White House Reportedly Upset With MSM Over ‘Irresponsible’ Coverage Of Delta Variant

 For the last couple of weeks, you’ve heard it everywhere: The Delta variant of COVID-19 is bad, really bad — and spreading like wildfire.

But the White House doesn’t like those breathless reports, not one little bit.

“The White House is frustrated with what it views as alarmist, and in some instances flat-out misleading, news coverage about the Delta variant,” CNN reported on Monday in a piece by reporter Oliver Darcy.

“That’s according to two senior Biden administration officials I spoke with Friday, both of whom requested anonymity to candidly offer their opinion on coverage of the CDC data released that suggests vaccinated Americans who become infected with the Delta coronavirus variant can infect others as easily as those who are unvaccinated,” Darcy wrote.

The crux of the piece is to declare that the unvaccinated — not the new virus strain — is the real problem, and even cites an unnamed source in the White House saying so.

“The media’s coverage doesn’t match the moment,” one of the Biden officials told Darcy. “It has been hyperbolic and frankly irresponsible in a way that hardens vaccine hesitancy. The biggest problem we have is unvaccinated people getting and spreading the virus.”

Darcy wrote that “poorly framed headlines and cable news chyrons wrongly suggested that vaccinated Americans are just as likely to spread the disease as unvaccinated Americans. But that isn’t quite the case.”

The piece cites several stories — all surprisingly in the mainstream media — with which White House officials took umbrage. For instance, The Washington Post ran a headline that said, “CDC study shows three-fourths of people infected in Massachusetts covid-19 outbreak were vaccinated.” Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at the liberal Media Matters, complained on Twitter, saying: “Please don’t do this. Provincetown has one of the highest vaccination rates in the country. As vaccination rates increase the percentage of cases that are in vaccinated people NECESSARILY increases.”

Darcy pointed out that “NBC News also found itself facing criticism when it published a story with the headline, ‘Breakthrough Covid cases: At least 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans have tested positive.’ That headline failed to note that, per NBC’s own data, that figure represented ‘less than .08 percent of the 164.2 million-plus people fully vaccinated since January.’ NBC updated its headline later to read, ‘Breakthrough Covid cases: Data shows how many vaccinated Americans have tested positive.'”

Darcy’s piece even blasted the CDC for saying this last week, as reported by The New York Times: “The Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated, an internal C.D.C. report said.”

The White House quickly responded, with Ben Wakana, a member of the White House’s rapid response team, yelling on Twitter: “VACCINATED PEOPLE DO NOT TRANSMIT THE VIRUS AT THE SAME RATE AS UNVACCINATED PEOPLE AND IF YOU FAIL TO INCLUDE THAT CONTEXT YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.”

White House Reportedly Upset With MSM Over ‘Irresponsible’ Coverage Of Delta Variant White House Reportedly Upset With MSM Over ‘Irresponsible’ Coverage Of Delta Variant Reviewed by CUZZ BLUE on August 02, 2021 Rating: 5

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