Bitter pill for leftist media in eagerness for Ivermectin idiocy

Nobody in the media can resist a great ivermectin idiocy story, so the normal journalistic rules of multiple sources and double checking are simply discarded, writes Tim Blair.

Beware the story that perfectly tickles every one of your ideological fancies. Chances are, no matter how much you wish to believe otherwise, that story is wrong.

Way back in 2004, for example, anti-Australian leftists were delighted to find all their prejudices confirmed by a Chicago Tribune piece citing Australian psychiatrist Graham Thorn’s hostile attitude towards Aborigines.

“These people always complain,” Thorn allegedly said.

“They want it both ways: their way and our way. They want to live in our society and be respected, yet they won’t work. They steal, they rob and they get drunk. And they don’t respect the laws.”

You can see why people of certain political beliefs lapped that up. It’s pure leftist fentanyl.

Too bad nobody could find an Australian psychiatrist named Graham Thorn. Following a quick investigation, the paper fired veteran Tribune contributor and source inventor Uli Schmetzer.

Similarly, some conservatives were taken in a few years ago by an image apparently showing peace-loving then-Greens leader Richard Di Natale happily posing with an AK-47.

What a hypocrite, right? Wrong. The photograph was fake, as was revealed by a rudimentary reverse-image search.

News agenices have been caught out publishing untruths by not checking the veracity of bogus stories. Some agenices would rather 'believe it to be true' as it benefits their political motivations.

We’re all vulnerable to stories that confirm our biases. Which brings us to a recent too-good-to-be-true tale that for left-leaning media ticked every single box.

On September 6, Oklahoma news outlet KFOR-TV reported that so many people in the state were overdosing on the anti-parasite drug ivermectin that rural emergency rooms were overcrowded and ambulance services were stretched to capacity.

Moreover, according to KFOR-TV’s solitary source, Dr Jason McElyea, “the ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated”.

Check all the leftist triggers in those two paragraphs. You’ve got your dumb Trump-voting rural rubes, you’ve got your gun violence and you’ve got your ivermectin believers who are evidently so idiotic they’re wolfing down horse-sized doses of the stuff.

And they’re apparently continuing to do so despite all those hospitalisations, which in small regional areas you’d tend to hear about.

What you don’t have, however, is the identity or location of any specific hospital. Or a source other than Dr McElyea, who told KFOR-TV that ER-clogging ivermectin gobblers were suffering from nausea, vomiting, muscle aches and cramping.

“The scariest one that I’ve heard of and seen,” Dr McElyea added, “is people coming in with vision loss.”

Rolling Stone soon picked up the story. So did everyone else: the Guardian, Newsweek, the BBC, MSNBC and the New York Daily News, among many others.

None of them made a single call to any Oklahoma hospitals. As a subsequent Washington Post analysis put it in a headline: “Bogus Oklahoma ivermectin story was just too good to check.”

So one Oklahoma hospital with which Dr McElyea is affiliated put out its own announcement. The Northeastern Health System Sequoyah “has not treated any patients due to complications related to taking ivermectin,” it said. “This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose.”

Another McElyea-associated hospital, Integris Grove, also denied it was infested with ivermectin cases.

And Scott Schaeffer of the Oklahoma Center for Poison and Drug Information later told reporters that since “the beginning of May, we’ve received reports of 11 people being exposed to ivermectin.”

Raw Story’s Sky Palma observed: “That statement alone – 11 reports of ivermectin exposure in the entire state – contradicts KFOR’s claims that ivermectin overdoses were overcrowding hospitals.”

Yes. Yes, it does. So why were these checks not done before the story ran worldwide?

“The root cause of these failures is news organisations no longer consider reporting facts to be their function. Instead, they exist to propagate the Narrative,” explains American Thinker’s Rajan Laad.

“When they learn of a story such as the ivermectin overdose, they are so overcome by a desire for it to be true that they abandon all due diligence.

“In their minds, the ivermectin story is about anti-science dunderheads and a dog-whistle for Trump supporters foolish enough to treat Covid by consuming a drug meant for deworming horses.

“The implicit message is they received their deserved comeuppance by ending up in the emergency room.

“Trump supporters almost killing themselves is both satisfying and hilarious for leftist journalists.”

With stories like this, however, they’re killing their own credibility. Even Erik Wemple of the passionately anti-Trump Washington Post was ­infuriated by all of this.

“First, they failed to see through a phantom story, likely because it tickled their own preconceptions of life in a red state,” Wemple, the Post’s media critic, wrote.

“And second, when the story was exposed, they tweaked a headline, appended an ‘update,’ added a comment or inserted ‘context’ — all of them cowardly quarter-measures at war with any self-respecting book of journalistic standards.”

It’s going to keep happening, of course. Here’s another case: the BBC reported in July that Cardiff woman and disinformation opponent Layla Stokes had her hand slashed by a ­concealed razor blade when she ­removed an anti-mask poster from a road crossing.

Not much about that report adds up either. Again, beware the story that ­rewards your biases.