No doubt that’s a very dramatic photograph that has gone viral of two people wearing scrubs and blocking traffic in Denver during a protest of Gov. Polis’s stay-at-home order.
It certainly gives the impression that doctors or nurses are opposed to restarting our economy and getting our lives back on track since the first emergency order was issued by Polis six weeks ago.
But were those guys really medical workers?
Editors obviously didn’t bother to fact check before running the photograph, and some are running the photo again to tell us they still don’t know for sure if the man and woman pictured really work in the medical profession.
The couple wouldn’t give the photographer their names or say where they worked, so there’s no way to determine if the photo’s message is true or staged.
But who cares about facts, right? Because it symbolizes what the media want — that anyone who wants to go back to work is obviously crazy and trying to kill babies and old people.
If the subjects in the photographs are really medical professionals who have been treating COVID-19 patients for weeks as they claimed to the photographer and a Westword reporter, why the Hell were they counter-protesting and spreading coronavirus cooties all over the place instead of self-quarantining?
Doctors are living in tents in their yards so they don’t infect their kids, but these guys go to a protest with hundreds of people?
And seriously, what hospitals are providing matching green masks and scrubs?
They don’t look at all like the over-worked and under-supplied medical workers we’ve seen all over the media.
But as the Denver Post explains, even though they don’t know who these people are or whether they are medical workers, what matters is this:
The photos aptly portray Americans’ divisiveness about the novel coronavirus and how the country should be dealing with it, said McClaran, which is why she believes they resonated with so many.
No, what it aptly portrays is the media’s failure to find out the truth before publishing it, because it’s what they want to believe.