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The Atlantic published a fictional article about an unvaccinated child dying from measles last week. Laura Hazard Owen of NiemanLab busted Bruenig, according to reporting from ZeroHedge.
“When I initially read Bruenig’s story, I was stunned: An Atlantic staff writer’s unvaccinated child had died of measles in the 2020s, and now she was writing about it,” Owen wrote. “At the end of Bruenig’s piece, though, there’s an editor’s note: ‘This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.’ That was the point when I sent a gift link to my mom group: ‘as far as I can tell this piece is fiction. What do we think about this choice? I am very conflicted!!!’ My conflict stemmed from my concern that, though the piece was heavily researched, it was not a true story. I wondered if the key people whose minds might be changed by it — people who don’t vaccinate their kids — would brush it off as fiction, or fake.”
Good on the vax-maxis for policing their own for once.
Written from the perspective of a mother whose two unvaccinated children fell ill with measles, the 11-month-old child dies. It’s technically a second hand telling, but it reads as a first hand account. From Owen:
“I wondered if the key people whose minds might be changed by it — people who don’t vaccinate their kids — would brush it off as fiction, or fake.”
My first response to Harvard lady, who is lamenting that “people who don’t vaccinate their kids” might not have their minds as a result of this scandal, is that no one that defected from vaccines is having their minds changed by The Atlantic (or Harvard for that matter) on anything substantive.
Remember when The Atlantic wanted a “Pandemic Amnesty” for their crimes against humanity during Covid? Hilarious.
My second, and more important response, is that this is fiction!
The dead unvaxxed child is fake.
The writer, Elizabeth Bruenig, reportedly has two daughters with her husband…and she reportedly claims her piece was well researched…and it’s told from a position of authority of having been through:
“Her cough wracks her whole body, rounding her delicate bird shoulders. She does not sleep well. And as you lift up her pajama top to check her rash one morning, you see that her breathing is labored, shadows pooling between her ribs when she sucks in air.”
A reader would think this was a mom telling you about their experience.
But it’s not.
It’s a composite narrative character constructed from medical literature about how measles progresses in severe cases, interviews with physicians who have treated fatal measles complications, and documented historical cases.
Wait, what?
She imagined — invented! — a dead child. Two fake kids got sick, and one of the fake kids died. Bruenig reportedly has two (ostensibly real) kids with her husband. Did she imagine her real kids dying to “authentically” write this (fictional) story about fake kids dying?
Super serious journalists assure us this is not fiction. It’s creative nonfiction with heavily-researched composite characters.
That’s fiction, the objections are Orwellian, and attempts to convince us this is not fiction are Cultural Marxism. Just Google it:
“New Journalism is an American literary movement in the 1960s and ’70s that pushed the boundaries of traditional journalism and nonfiction writing. The genre combined journalistic research with the techniques of fiction writing in the reporting of stories about real-life events. The writers often credited with beginning the movement include Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese.”
Abandoning “objective” reporting to tell better stories in an effort to drive social change — classic.
Inventing dead, unvaxxed children to drive social change is not journalism, new or old. It’s emotionally manipulative propaganda.
Final Thought: Can we acknowledge how spectacularly Bruenig failed at getting into the mind of a non-poisoning parent? She was so unbelievable as an “anti-vaxxer” that even the other vax-maxxing wine moms called her out.
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Every single time.