Experts from
Brown University pored over tens of thousands of articles about the Chinese virus that were published over the past year and the vast majority of them pushed overwhelmingly “negative” narratives about the novel disease.
“The most striking fact is that 87 percent of the U.S. stories are classified as negative, whereas 51 percent of the non-U.S. stories are classified as negative,” wrote study authors Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Darmouth; Ranjan Sehgal, also of Dartmouth; and Brown’s Molly Cook.
Though the study does not delve all that deeply into the social ramifications of this constant negative coverage, it is safe to say that the reason tens of millions of Americans are still freaking out about face masks is because they believe the media’s lies that the Wuhan flu is going to get them unless everyone goes anti-social and shelters in place forever.