PLAGUE JOURNAL May 2020: Yellow Journalism, Lysenkoism, Political "Science," Retractions, Red-Blue Disparities
Scare journalism, Fauci, hydroxychloroquine, authority, obedience.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
Yellow Journalism
In 1941, American journalist Frank Luther Mott defined the five characteristics of yellow journalism:
Scare headlines in huge print, often of minor news.
Lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings.
Use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts.
Emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with comic strips.
Dramatic sympathy with the “underdog” against the system.
Coronavirus has brought us everything but the comic strips, which is too bad, as they might lighten the mood. Good news is no news. Flattening the curve went unreported because it was good news. Bad news is good news because it entertains us (from Latin tenere, “to hold”). Good news is bad news if you’re in the news business. What happened yesterday might have been good news (we’ll never know); what will happen tomorrow will kill us all.
Although we flattened the curve, we didn’t care about that anymore. We were all going to die anyway, especially if we were minorities, or essential. (I learned from family members that women are essential and men are not.) Doorknobs were lethal. We threw away food a neighbor spent hours preparing, afraid of infection and death. We loved the word “curbside.” We behaved like 15th-century Europeans trading with Africans, avoiding lethal violence by leaving baubles for each other asynchronously, never meeting.
This thing was coming through the vents of our cars. We scrubbed and sanitized and wore masks, at least when we were watched (although I have a secret—I have touched hand sanitizer just once in my life, years ago when it was required to board a cruise). Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor told us in the New Yorker that black people would die because “Black workers are concentrated in public-facing jobs, working in mass transit, home health care, retail, and service, where social distancing is virtually impossible.” It was all about and distances and surfaces: stay away, don’t touch anything, stay home, stay in, stay safe. I could feel the disapproval when I told a friend I’d sat across a table from someone in a backyard for a few hours on a sunny afternoon.
When I was a teenager, my uncle, a CBS television producer, appeared on camera for an interview, with a suit and a cigarette and horn-rimmed glasses—at least in my mind. I never saw the video, but I heard a cassette recording. It was April Fool’s day. He was a phony author or a phony expert. He had plenty of words but he said nothing. The interviewer was serious, as was he. The only thing I remember was his answer to a question (I don’t recall the question or the topic), which went something like this: “Well, Susan, the answer to that would have to be an unqualified yes and no.” Such is our news, which rains upon us. Perhaps touching a doorknob is harmless, but experts warn. No one catches it outdoors, but you should stay indoors. You may be alive now, but don’t get used to it. Stay tuned for guidance and permission.
From the New York Times “The Morning” email the day after Memorial Day, a typical headline read, “Good morning. Americans ventured out this weekend, both safely and unsafely. California’s economy is struggling. And the official death toll is probably about 30,000 too low.” Scary. Vague. What does “safely” or “unsafely” mean? The Times could run this line any weekend of any year and it would be correct, and meaningless. It doesn’t matter. The answer would have to be an unqualified yes and no.
The New Yorker, formerly a magazine of writing and reporting, has become a blog of brief and thoughtless ideological opinion pieces, mostly glossing other media. John Cassidy writes about finance—sort of. He doesn’t report much but occasionally he consults an expert. Because finance is his beat, he probably felt pressure to deliver a story about finance and the coronavirus, which brought us, in mid-May, an article titled, “Have the Record Number of Investors in the Stock Market Lost their Minds?” He told us that while some people are investing, hoping that stocks go up, history teaches us that stocks can go down. For this, he consulted an economist, Robert Shiller, who said “that he ‘gives some probability’ to the optimistic scenario. But he also issued a warning to investors: being in the market at this point is much riskier than it appears, because the ultimate outcome of the pandemic is shrouded in so much uncertainty.” Yes and no. Maybe. Markets may go up, or we may all die. Perhaps we will never know. Stay tuned.
Dr. Fauci, the Politics of “Science,” Hydroxochloroquine
In the middle of all this, or a bit off to the side, was a bland figure called Fauci. It wasn’t clear what his job was any more than it was clear what Chris Cuomo’s job was (beyond sweating in his basement), but the press seemed to like him, referring to him as “the country’s leading medical expert,” as if he had won a competition. If he was so good, shouldn’t he have cleared up a few things? We did not get sick from pizza boxes or delivery drivers, but we weren’t going to hear that from Fauci. We did not catch the virus from walking past someone outdoors or in a hallway or a grocery store, but Fauci was silent about the mechanics of transmission. He was also silent about the dramatically increased risks from obesity and other modern conditions. Many months in, people I ask randomly—friends and acquaintances and restaurant workers and Lyft drivers—have little idea about how the virus transmits. They think it might grab you if you get too close to someone on a sidewalk, or if you walk on a trail an hour after a hiker sneezed.
Perhaps the press praised Fauci because they thought they could influence him, and they were right. He engaged in the same maybe this, maybe that doublespeak and bad information that the press performed constantly. When Trump said he considered taking hydroxychloroquine, Fauci muddied the waters, saying to CBS’s Face the Nation in early April, “In terms of science, I don’t think we can definitively say it works,” and “The data are really just at best suggestive. There have been cases that show there may be an effect and there are others to show there’s no effect.”
Never trust anyone who invokes “science” without offering information, as what comes next will be ideology and a grab for power. In an anti-hydroxychloroquine article from April 6th, the Guardian quoted another expert, Dr. James Phillips, a professor of emergency medicine, who spreads confusion: “It’s a dangerous message for someone without a medical license to get up there and tell people to try it. You need to listen to physicians, people who understand science, before you go willy-nilly into the medicine cabinet.”
In fact, physicians and scientists knew better. Hydroxychloroquine has been around for sixty-five years, and thousands of doctors have prescribed it safely for decades, with virtually no side effects. It hadn’t yet proven effective against the coronavirus, but the people invoking science don’t seem to understand how science is done, which involves testing and trials. Many doctors were rigorously tracking their results, which were encouraging. Trump had said in March that the drug “looked promising,” which was both true and innocuous. Fauci himself, discussing not hydroxychloroquine but medicine more broadly, had said that the medical establishment was “pushing on a vaccine and doing clinical trials for therapeutic interventions.” So why was he interfering with clinical trials when performed by trained and experienced physicians using hydroxychloroquine?
Perhaps because he wanted to please the press. After Trump expressed optimism about hydroxychloroquine, suddenly Don Lemon and Vox and the Times and all the usual non-experts railed against it. The Times did their normal hatchet job, repeatedly using the word “falsely” in articles about Trump’s comments and committing their signature dismissals: “this lacks evidence,” “with no evidence,” “ignoring expert opinion.” Fauci and his handlers in the press continued to spread confusion, and some states began banning the drug’s use for coronavirus trials, which frustrated and enraged many physicians. Putting an end to clinical trials is not good science. Politicizing medicine does not keep people safe.
In late May, Fauci approvingly cited a study in the medical journal The Lancet purporting to show evidence that hydroxychloroquine endangered people. Some independent physicians noticed problems with the study, and the Lancet was forced to retract it. The study was bogus, yet our “leading public health expert” fell for it.
It’s not hard for thinking people to spot misinformation, especially those who know the subject matter. Fake information invokes experts and science and facts but fails to provide evidence or accord with the observable world. Every time I tell someone about the coronavirus dosage model—that breathing in more of the bad stuff is worse than breathing in less of it—the response is, “That makes sense.” It does make sense. People know it from their experience with junk food, spoiled food, drugs, alcohol, sunburns, exercise, sleep, virtually everything we expose our bodies or minds to. People are reasonable—as long as they don’t read the news. I have not met anyone who is anti-science, only people who have been fed bad information.
Yet Fauci and the others who politicize information and spread fear attempt to smear those who aren’t buying the misinformation, calling them “anti-science” and “anti-vaxxers.” Shortly after he fell for the bogus Lancet study, Fauci complained that people don’t listen to him. His comments from a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services podcast called The Learning Curve were printed in multiple articles, including CNN, Business Insider, Newsweek, and The Hill. “They just don’t believe science and they don’t believe authority,” he laments. “So when they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to it, who’s talking about science, that there are some people who just don’t believe that—and that’s unfortunate because, you know, science is truth.”
Science and Lysenkoism
Fauci’s jumbling together of science and authority should alarm us. History is full of henchmen pretending to science. In the mid-twentieth century, the Soviet Union’s chief agronomist was a man named Trokhym Denysovych Lysenko, who believed that tropical plants could thrive on the Russian Steppe if only the plants were sufficiently committed to the socialist cause. When he forced farmers to plant seeds too close together because he believed that plants of the same “class” would not compete with each other, millions starved. People who disagreed with him were imprisoned or executed.
Fauci and the press don’t seem to understand that science is not doctrine or authority. It is a process of discovery. When Newton felt his falling apple, he grasped the law of gravitational attraction. He knew that his apple was 60 times closer to the center of the earth than it was to the moon, so he saw that gravitational attraction was directly proportional to the product of the masses of the objects and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Newton didn’t invoke experts or tell others to do as he instructed, and he didn’t talk in doublespeak or platitudes.
Einstein didn’t invoke a single expert or scientist in his 1905 paper on relativity, and he didn’t say, “Perhaps E = mc2, or it might equal mc5, or perhaps it equals nothing at all. More research is needed. Perhaps we’ll never know. Stay safe.” He laid it out, from his observations and understanding of the world. Other scientists were chasing chimeras, but he saw things more clearly.
Instead of invoking science and authority, Fauci and his followers could have done a public service by giving us clear and straightforward information about how the virus spreads. But the press was committed to spreading fear, of the virus and of Trump, and Fauci liked his newfound celebrity and the feeling of telling others what to do.
Red/Blue Disparities and the Split between Safety and Safety-ism
The bullying and confusion put out by the mainstream media had its intended effect on the citizenry. According to various polls, Democrats—the primary consumers of this media—are significantly more likely to support and obey stay-at-home orders. From the beginning, Republicans were less likely than Democrats to search the web for “coronavirus” and less likely to buy hand sanitizer. Mobility studies, using anonymous cell phone data, found that people in counties that voted for Trump were less likely to stay home than people in counties that voted for Clinton.
Trump voters must be dying in record numbers, right? Especially as Republicans are over-represented among the elderly. Yet, as much as it irks those in the press, people in red counties suffer significantly less than people in blue counties. In late May, the New York Times reported that “counties won by President Trump in 2016 have reported just 27 percent of the virus infections and 21 percent of the deaths — even though 45 percent of Americans live in these communities.”
The press can’t accept the news, so they’ve been telling us that things are about to get a lot worse, a tactic they have employed all along. Although “essential workers” were not dying at higher rates than others, the headlines told us constantly that they would die soon. Although states opening for business were not seeing spiking rates of infection, we were assured that they would. A search for “coronavirus in Africa” does not give us stories about infections and illness but gives us instead endless predictions about the mayhem to come. Although people who get out of the house are dying at lower rates than those who lock themselves indoors, Trump voters would be dying soon. A Vox headline crowed on May 1st that, “The pandemic is hitting counties that voted for Hillary Clinton harder — for now.” Just wait. Your turn is coming.
Or maybe not. Perhaps Republican voters were more likely to remain healthy because they ignored the scare balloons and went outside for a run with the dog.
The Vox story committed a common but incorrect assumption about population density, saying, “It is well known that the disease has disproportionately hit large cities and metropolitan areas.” Announcing that something is “well known” is a pretty good indicator that it’s wrong. Reporters say something is well known when they want us to believe it. The data are beside the point.
In fact, the correlation between population density and coronavirus outcomes is not nearly as strong as newscasters believe, or want us to believe. The Times admitted that “even in more densely populated suburban areas, there was less evidence of social distancing in counties that voted for Mr. Trump”—and yet there were lower coronavirus rates. Extreme caution, locking in, hiding beyond masks and gloves, believing the direst warnings—none of these things correlated with better coronavirus outcomes.
If extreme lockdowns keep us safe, as the predictions from Neil Ferguson and the unnamed “experts” and the sham studies want us to believe, why are people who stay home more likely to get sick or die? The answer may be pretty simple: people catch it in their homes. Sometimes, the home is a nursing home, where the population is indoors, compromised, with winter visitors coming in from cooler outdoor weather. Many nursing-home residents are hard of hearing, causing others to lean in and speak loudly or shout. New York’s governor Cuomo required nursing homes to accept sick patients when he could have quarantined them in now-vacant New York hotel rooms (a smart practice used in some Asian countries). He could have put them on the ships provided by the federal government, but the ships would remain empty, perhaps to spite Trump. Cuomo and a handful of other governors put sick people into a vulnerable population when they should have isolated them. (New York’s hotels remain closed, by law, into June as I write this).
Even in ordinary residential homes, the risk was high. Low ceilings, dry heated air, long hours and days inside avoiding inclement gray weather. If one person brought it in, the whole household often became infected. And how would anyone know how to avoid infection when the press and the press-approved equivocating health experts confused the message so badly? If we believe shaking hands posed the greatest threat (when it posed none at all), no wonder so many people misunderstood the actual threat. The Skagit County choir members dutifully spread out, avoided sharing sheet music, avoided hugs and handshakes—and then sang loudly in stagnant indoor air for two and a half hours. They had done exactly what CNN told us all to do: spread out and don't touch anything! Fifty-two of sixty choir members became ill, and two died.
Once someone had the virus, caught mysteriously despite endless hand-scrubbing and street-crossing to avoid strangers, it spread to family members and roommates. People who ignored the news had a better chance of understanding the means of transmission and were more likely to get into the air and sun, even if only for a walk, a bike ride, a drive to the store, a visit to a friend’s patio—anywhere but in front of the TV listening to Don Lemon or Wolf Blitzer spreading fear and resentment.
The most dangerous places on earth are cool, damp, gray climates in high latitudes, places with so little sunshine that people stay inside in the winter. Perhaps there’s an additional reason that those who obediently locked themselves in were more likely to get infected: fear and confusion cannot be good for the immune system. Yet locking in is the policy that won, thanks to the New York Times and their followers in the press and political ranks. Because they hate Trump, we practice safety theater instead of safety.
There is no positive correlation between isolating at home and staying safe from the coronavirus. The correlation runs the other way: people who spent March and April indoors, in Boston and Brussels and Madrid, suffered. People living on the streets of Lagos or Los Angeles did not. Nor did the average citizens of Texas or Florida or Idaho or Colorado, who were more likely to walk, run, or ride a bike outside.
I have thoughts on the last 2 ppg’s. I’ll tell you over a beer soon. Cheers!