Because Time wanted to minimize the damage of Black Lives Matter protests, Time used statistics instead of a count: 570 violent riots in 220 cities and towns in three months became "93% of Black Lives Matter Protests Have Been Peaceful, New Report Finds". Reporting it in this manner gave the impression that the movement is mostly peaceful.
On the other hand a statistical headline--for example, "Americans have a less than 0.1% chance of dying from the coronavirus in 2020"-- doesn't horrify the reader. Instead, the emphasis is on "the absolute number of deaths"-- 189,000 in the United States at the time of the post.
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| U.S. infections and deaths as of this writing |
In our vast nation, where the annual number of deaths from heart disease and cancer are 655,000 and 606,520, respectively, 200,000 virus deaths are a sign of monumental failure, and Time knows who to blame:
Although America’s problems were widespread, they start at the top. A complete catalog of President Donald Trump’s failures to address the pandemic will be fodder for history books. There were weeks wasted early on stubbornly clinging to a fantastical belief that the virus would simply “disappear”; testing and contact tracing programs were inadequate; states were encouraged to reopen ahead of his own Administration’s guidelines; and statistics were repeatedly cherry-picked to make the U.S. situation look far better than it was, while undermining scientists who said otherwise. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told the journalist Bob Woodward on March 19 in a newly revealed conversation. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”"Statistics repeatedly cherry-picked"--that's a good one by a publication that cherry-picks numbers every week to flog systemic racism or denigrate Donald Trump.
"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." – Josef Stalin, reportedly.
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