This Week in Misinformation: Walensky Fail, Something Something Psychosis, Fake Trump Electors, Oath Keepers Indictment, The Ballad of Ray Epps, Q Road Trip to Arizona
13 January 2022
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Reliability scores for media outlets cited in the summary are in parentheses for each, courtesy of the terrific folks at Ad Fontes Media.
Now, on to our top three stories.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s interview for Good Morning America was edited to make it really easy for people to misunderstand the impact vaccines are having.
Walensky appeared on the popular ABC morning program to clear up the agency’s messaging on COVID, but when editing removed important context the tape seemed to show her saying that three-quarters of COVID deaths are of people with four or more comorbidities, which isn’t true (Good Morning America, -). What she said, and what is true, is that about 75 percent of breakthrough deaths (i.e., people who were infected but had been fully vaccinated) were of people with many comorbidities (The Dispatch, 42.19).
After the interview aired, CDC lodged a complaint with ABC for muddling the (already confusingly expressed) message about how effective vaccines are at preventing serious illness and death in otherwise healthy people.
The reception was harsh on both sides. For the left, touting “encouraging headlines” about how only disabled people are dying seemed to betray an unethical approach to pandemic management (Washington Post, 43.82). On the right, vaccine opponents seized on the misleading footage to assert that people are dying “with,” not “from,” COVID (CNN, 43.70).
That rare event where a fact check breaks through to the public consciousness--but only because it had to do with Joe Rogan and a recently ascendant pseudoscience fad.
Not long ago the Joe Rogan Experience podcast hosted Dr. Robert Malone, who despite having no training in psychology held forth at some length about a thing he called “mass formation psychosis” (The Independent, 41.74). Malone claimed that the phenomenon explained why many people take COVID precautions instead of doing nothing, like real freedom-loving Americans. Actual experts in mass psychology, however, disagree that “mass formation psychosis” is even a thing, or that it could mean what Dr. Malone had asserted, published as fact checks by the Associated Press (49.34) and Reuters (48.81), the two most reliable wire services that we have.
The fact check was taken by Malone fans as evidence that all of the media are perpetrating this psychosis (@GordPennycook via Twitter, see replies) at the direction of shadowy forces. By this way of thinking, the media can’t say anything to disabuse believers of the notion, and attempting to is what would be expected from the puppetmasters to throw people off scent. (See: the self-sealing nature of conspiracy theories.)
Reacting to the wide propagation of the debunked theory in the days since the podcast aired, a group of doctors and scientists penned a letter to Spotify asking for the company to do something about the medical misinformation that has run rampant in the world of podcasts (USA Today, 45.72). To this, contrast the widespread thinking about COVID policies as entirely unwanted coercion, for example Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld and cartoonist Scott Adams (CNS blog, -) have been trying to make “February 1st”--when everyone will somehow invoke their second amendment rights and free the country from all restrictions--a thing (Media Matters, -).
In a meta kind of January 6th misinformation news, we learned that Trump supporters sent falsified slates of presidential “electors” to the National Archives in December 2020.
After it was reported that Republican groups that weren’t state legislatures actually sent a number of official-looking (but fake) “Electoral College” documents to Washington, D.C., a watchdog group obtained and published seven of them (American Oversight, -) from Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other states where Biden’s wins were lawfully certified. Reported to have been coordinated by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (Newsweek, 39.37), this scheme was apparently cooked up in hopes of giving Vice President Pence a pretext for not counting Electoral College votes on January 6th.
Also in the category of breaking the law to help Donald Trump overturn the will of the American people, the Department of Justice indicted leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers group with “seditious conspiracy”--the first January 6th defendants to be so charged (CBS News, 46.93). The memo describes the “quick reaction forces” they arranged to stand by to deliver men and firearms while teams breached the Capitol in military gear and formation (U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, -).
And finally, in the category of made-up stuff about January 6th that a lot of people believe: Arizona man Ray Epps, who encouraged the Trump mob to go into the Capitol, has nothing to do with law enforcement or the FBI, according to Ray Epps (House January 6th Select Committee via Twitter, -).
All right, now the grab bag you’ve been waiting for all week: J6 committee asks for and doesn’t get cooperation from Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, pushes back on McCarthy’s “legitimacy” attack and issues subpoenas for planners of January 6th rallies and social media companies Alphabet, Meta, Reddit, and Twitter; Mitch McConnell says the “I” word; Madison Cawthorn’s constituents want to tag him out; Trump bugs out of NPR interview and now hates Senator Mike Rounds; Cyber Ninjas lawyer with a bold move to force judge off case; Q world is heading to Arizona to party with Trump; a state senate leader in Iowa rattles off “cabal” accusations from the rostrum; Rand Paul and Tony Fauci duke it out, again; misinformation about COVID tests; 80 fact-checking outlets around the world ask YouTube to shape up; Joe Manchin gets filibuster dates entirely wrong; a deep dive on Disclose.tv; and Alex Jones sure sells a lot of supplements.
That, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin