krismiler,
You have got it right.
The reports in AW&ST (in the bodies of technical articles, not headline news) were in the context of occurrences that were logged for maintenance to look at, but were only realised to be MCAS related in retrospect.
They have come to light during the MAX investigation.
krismiler was referring to your assertion LS that pilots in the US experienced the same conditions as Lion Air and Ethiopian,
Whilst I don'r have the quotes to hand, several articles in Aviation Week and Space Technology, which have been exhaustively covering the issue, have mentioned same. They never received any publicity at the time, because the crews involved just ran the uncommended stab trim checklist, as did the lost Indonesian aeroplane's crew the night before, Bali to Djakarta.
thats what he meant by this:
Did he mean to say that there had been previous incidents where the MCAS had malfunctioned in a similar way to the two disasters but the pilots had managed to prevent an accident ?
You cant even keep up with your own gibberish. For your benefit though I have included a good web article that might help you understand MCAS better and why it is so different to any of the irrelevant examples that you have cited. Of particular note is the number of warnings a crew would face in the event of an AoA failure and the activation of MCAS.
737 MAX - MCAS