I was looking for articles showing that those who predicted deadly failure due to Governor Brian Kemp's decision to open Georgia were wrong. I found such an article at Business Insider, a widely read online news outlet. Diving into the article, though, revealed that it wasn’t reporting the news at all. Instead, it provided a perfect example of how the media shape and distort the news in service to a Democrat narrative.

When Governor Kemp announced three weeks ago that he would start opening up Georgia, the media had a field day. After all, this was the governor who “stole” the election from Stacey Abrams, a woman distinguished only by being the worst loser in American gubernatorial history. (Hillary Clinton still holds the record for being the worst loser ever.)

These were probably the two most memorable headlines for they reflected the Left's believe that Republican policies are stupid and the hope that Republican voters might die off:

• The Atlantic: Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice
• The New York Times: Georgia leads the race to become America’s No. 1 Death Destination

I needed a cite to the fact that these nasty predictions had proven wrong. I thought I’d found the article I needed at Business Insider. The partial headline that showed up on my search said, “Live updates: Georgia hasn’t seen a massive spike in coronavirus cases since reopening.…” When I went to the article, though, I read the headline in full. After the word “reopening,” it added, “but it’s too soon to declare reopening works.”

If Michelle Mark, the reporter wanted to be factual, her article would have consisted of one sentence: “Georgia's Department of Public Health has published data showing what appears to be a significant decline in new cases and deaths.”

Instead, the entire, very long article is a series of hypotheticals about how maybe, possibly, even probably, people will still get sick in Georgia. Thus, the above-quoted language is sheltered within two paragraphs that continue to yearn for Georgians to die (emphasis mine):

Roughly three weeks after Georgia began reopening businesses and lifted its shelter-in-place order, the status of the state's coronavirus outbreak remains unclear amid a roiling debate over how to interpret recent COVID-19 data, and allegations that state officials have been misrepresenting the number of new cases.

Though Georgia's Department of Public Health has published datashowing what appears to be a significant decline in new cases and deaths, experts have emphasized that the data is both preliminary and incomplete, and suggested that the outbreak appears to be in a plateau — not a decline.

The article continues in that vein, continuously burying the facts that support Governor Kemp’s policies in a mountain of hypotheticals that don't (including theories about out-of-state visitors).

I was curious which “experts” shared the benefit of their expertise “that the data is both preliminary and incomplete.” Following the link led me to another Business Insider article, this one entitled “A ‘cuckoo’ graph with no sense of time or place shows how Georgia bungled coronavirus data as it reopens.” This headline is a lie because there’s no proof of bungling, let alone that a graph has any tie-in with this hypothetical bungling.

Instead, it turns out that the Georgia Department of Public Health, on its website, published a graph of the “top 5 counties with the greatest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases.” In the words of Governor Kemp’s communication director, the health department set up the graph's x-axis “to show descending values to more easily demonstrate peak values and counties on those dates.” That is, there was no bungling. There was a deliberate decision to shape the graph to make a specific point.

A reporter didn’t like that logic. He thought that the x-axis should be arranged by date. He reported, as well, that when he asked the health department to make that change, it did.

This graph, which didn’t confuse anyone working for the government, but did confuse reporters and Democrat politicians, is the basis for the claim that data is “preliminary and incomplete,” a narrative the Mark article repeats at length. And who’s the expert? An epidemiologist? A physician? A researcher? No. As best as I can tell, the “expert” is the reporter who first pointed out that the graph would be better with a different x-axis.

What Business Insider is doing isn’t reporting. It’s not concerned with facts. It is, instead, deeply concerned with crafting a narrative that makes people frightened of the Republican governors’ more freedom-oriented policies. The irony, of course, is that it is the Democrat governors, with their decisions to lock up healthy, young people, and expose older, sicker people to the Wuhan virus, who have blood on their hands. Mainstream media consumers, though, will have a hard time learning those particular facts.