Yesterday in her Karen-rant, KDKA Radio's Wendy Bell doubled down on the latest right-wing (and QAnon sourced, BTW) COVID-19 lie.
She said:I think we have a truth problem in America. Everything is upside down and inside out. It's America in retrograde. And it's a dangerous thing, ladies and gentlemen.
ANd I work tirelessly every day to share with you facts and data and numbers that I stand behind. Because I double triple check them. ANd I source them to you so that you can check me as well.
Who does that?
We had a huge monologue yesterday. What was so great about it was because I'm so dazzling? But duh. No! It was because after March, April, May, June, July now into month six. Month six of unreasonable restrictions and regulations and hoop-jumping and the optics of obeying; wearing masks wearing shields, staying distant, staying here, don't go there, don't touch that, here's your sanitizer, do you have a covid test? oh my gosh! We find out from the CDC. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, government run on their own website that, shh!, we're just going to put this in here but we want you to know that even though there are 182,000 people we've told you have died from COVID-19, only 6% of them had COVID as the real primary cause of death. 94% died with at least two or more complications.
A then she clarifies few sentences later:
Did you guys hear it? Shouted across the world yesterday that the CDC says that 94% of people who we think died of COVID did not die from COVID but died and happened to have it at the same time.
Which is, of course, not what the CDC said.
Factcheck.org:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn’t drastically reduced the number of deaths attributable to COVID-19, but posts making that bogus claim have been circulating widely — with the help of President Donald Trump, who retweeted one such claim on Aug. 30.
Twitter has since removed the original tweet, which came from an account dedicated to the pro-Trump conspiracy theory QAnon. But the claim is still readily available on all the major social media platforms. In fact, the same QAnon account that posted the now-deleted tweet includes a screenshot version featuring the president’s retweet.
The post Trump highlighted said: “This week the CDC quietly updated the Covid number to admit that only 6% of all the 153,504 deaths recorded actually died from Covid. That’s 9,210 deaths. The other 94% had 2 to 3 other serious illnesses and the overwhelming majority were of very advanced age.”
But that’s not what the CDC information says.
And:
That means that 6% of those who died with COVID-19 through Aug. 15 didn’t have any other reported conditions.
And:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, clarified what the CDC data mean.
He noted that the 6% figure includes cases where COVID-19 was listed as the only cause of death. “That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of Covid didn’t die of Covid-19. They did,” Fauci said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“So the numbers you’ve been hearing — the 180,000-plus deaths — are real deaths from Covid-19. Let [there] not be any confusion about that,” Fauci said.
Wendy, did YOU fact-check your QAnon claim?
Apparently not.
And apparently, this is completely OK with KDKA Radio.
But not, apparently with KDKA TV:
KDKA TV would like to remind our viewers and readers that Wendy Bell does not work for KDKA TV, a ViacomCBS owned station.
Bell works for KDKA Radio, which is owned by Entercom Communications radio group.
Please direct all comments and inquiries to KDKA Radio, 412-353-1300.
