Propaganda Files: A Tale of Two Studies

It was the best of media coverage. It was the worst of media coverage.

Introduction

What's happened in this Age of Covid, from a propaganda standpoint, scares the hell out of me. I feel like the Crypt-Keeper has taken me by the hand. Every single day, he introduces some new evidence, some taint of propaganda, that may only hint at the horror I don't see. Because I certainly catch only a small number of the propaganda piranha in my perceptual net, God only knows what I'd notice if I had better mindsight. 

Tonight's crypt-ic episode takes a brief look at two new, very different studies. One indicates a problem with vaccines, while undoubtedly understating the problem. The other heralds a failure for Ivermectin, the drug being used as a cheap and allegedly effective means of defusing Covid. Can you guess which study has seen the light of mainstream media day and which has been relegated to en-crypt-ed shadows, out of public view?

Myocarditis Study

The first study is from The Journal of the American Medical Association and was published January 25, 2022. The title is "Myocarditis Cases Reported After mRNA-based COVID-19 Vaccination in the US From December 2020 to August 2021," and the authors are Matthew Oster, David Shay, John Su, et al.

The study indicates that myocarditis rates after the second mRNA vaccine shot are roughly a hundred-fold greater than what would be expected. The danger is much worse for young men and male adolescents than for other demographics. Had the data from young men been featured exclusively, the study's ominousness would have been amplified. Worse still, because the study relied on data from the United States' VAERS system, which is a passive self-reporting arrangement, the reality is probably much worse than what the data indicated. 

I'll review the VAERS questionnaires another time. For now, I want to very narrowly focus on CNN's coverage. 

One would think that a study uncovering a hundred-fold (at least) second shot myocarditis effect would be a featured lead for many news cycles. Instead, CNN didn't cover it. Go to CNN or the sub-heading "Health" at CNN and search "Myocarditis Effect of Vaccines" and various alternatives. Nothing about the January 25 paper. Zilch. And it was not featured on nightly newscasts, either. 

One would also think this would have been a perfect opportunity for CNN to trot out Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Dr. Leana Wen to discuss the study and all of the nuances. But not a peep. The questions I have are whether Dr. Gupta and Dr. Wen WANTED to discuss the study. I trusted these two implicitly early in the pandemic. Now, not so much.

How could this study not have been newsworthy? How can major news organizations simply ignore it?  The first study I've seen that uses firm if understated data to establish vaccine risks, and it goes largely unreported.

The Malaysian Ivermectin Study

The second paper was published February 18 by JAMA and is titled, "Efficacy of Ivermectin Treatment on Disease Progression Among Adults with Mild to Moderate COVID-19 and Comorbidities." The authors are Steven Chee Loon Lim, Chee Peng, and Kim Heng Tay, et al.

The study found no differences in disease progression between placebo groups and groups receiving five-day Ivermectin treatment. I don't have much to say about Ivermectin one way or another, but in the conclusion, I'll mention some things this study buried or failed to mention. For now, I want to focus on the fact that this paper provides a "pro-vaccine" narrative, which (given CNN's curious stance on what data to feature or not feature) is also a "pro-CNN" narrative.

If you go to the same CNN "Health" subcategory and search "Ivermectin Failed," or something similar, you will indeed find not only a CNN story by Brenda Goodman (published February 18), but also related video clips. Thus, the anti-Ivermectin study gets feature status as opposed to the myocarditis study, which is completely ignored.

Auxiliary Observations

I just want to mention a few interesting tangents here.

1) Joe Rogan was lambasted when he mentioned on a January podcast that he thought vaccine-caused myocarditis in young males exceeded Covid-caused myocarditis. Australian guest Josh Szeps corrected him, which left Rogan to seek live fact-checking, which supported Szeps. I was a little surprised that Rogan didn't "know" this stuff, since I did. 

Well, I don't presume to understand exactly how the January 25 JAMA myocarditis paper colors the numbers for myocarditis/vaccination correlation. Certainly, however, the paper suggests that those numbers need to be revisited. Rogan may turn out to have been correct, especially since the JAMA paper almost certainly underestimates case numbers due to reliance on VAERS. Szeps (and I) may very well have been wrong. 

The mainstream media and social media responses to Rogan being "corrected" were somewhat shocking. I'll tackle them down the road.

2) I don't know much about Ivermectin one way or another, but I do know that the protocols for use of Ivermectin in the Malaysian study are not the recommended protocols suggested by most Ivermectin advocates. In that sense, despite the double-blind gold standard, this particular study is a bit of a non-sequitur.

3) The Malaysian study was relatively small (by my subjective standards), with about 500 people split into Ivermectin and placebo groups. While the study did indeed find that "progression to severe disease" was not halted by Ivermectin, the fact is that three people died after taking the Ivermectin as opposed to 10 dying in the placebo group. Depending on what statistical criteria are used, that may or may not be considered a significant disparity in results. My key observation here is that this was buried in the paper. One line in the body of the paper mentions this, and then it appears in the supplementary section. It's a very interesting choice of location.

Conclusion

What the Malaysian authors did was, in newspaper parlance, "bury the lead." At least that's how most civilians would interpret it. Personally, I think the authors needed to mention and address the death figures, even if it undercut the theme of the paper and meant the paper didn't publish. It's the one statistic that carries enormous public weight, and in this case the authors knew their paper would likely have a high public profile, so they needed to address it.

I'm not going to give the authors too much grief, however. The problem, for me, lies in mainstream media coverage of this study. Go ahead and google this Ivermectin paper. General media coverage does not mention the deaths disparity. The investigators burying what many would consider the lead results in media burying what many would consider the lead. Whether innocent or purposeful, it's a bad look.

Talking about CNN specifically, the network's disparate reaction to these two papers reeks of political decisions based on their commitment to certain narratives and their attempts to influence American attitudes and behaviors. In short, CNN appears to be engaged in its own brand of Fox-esque anti-journalism.

"...it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity...."   Charles Dickens

Bob Dietz

February 28, 2022

 

 

More on Mandavilli's CDC Expose'

Observations and Speculations

This entry focuses once again on Apoorva Mandavilli's February 21 New York Times' piece. Her reporting provides many hints and signals regarding questions I've previously posed in the "Propaganda Files." This entry attempts to tease out some of the implications of Mandavilli's piece. I'll be speculating without a parachute here, but I do some of my best work without a parachute, a la Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne climbing out of prison in The Dark Knight Rises.

The Elephant in the Room is Demography

So why would the CDC be reticent to make public, as Mandavilli states in her first paragraph, hospitalizations "broken down by age, race, and vaccination status?" Now that I've baldly stated the question, the likely answers should be obvious. See, pointing out the obvious has its utility.

Why would the CDC withhold as much demographic hospitalization data as long as possible? Again, I have no parachute here, but my best guess is because the demographic disparities are, especially when it comes to race, income, and outcomes, horrific. An administration and an institution, in this case the CDC, are (I predict) going to be revealed as running a bit of a racist, class-based endeavor, with bad results heavily skewed to minorities and the poor. Every American should, of course, have suspected this, but suspicion is one thing and balls-in-your-face actual demographic data is another. Given that the current administration portrays itself as a champion of minorities and the "less wealthy," not much political good would come of the demography of hospitalizations and deaths being made public.

This seems such an obvious rationale, I feel like an idiot pointing it out. The questions I'd like to ask are if any major media sources have (1) put forward what I've just said as the likely rationale and (2) raised the simple question of CDC rationale at all. Has CNN or MSNBC asked why the CDC sat on the data? Has The New York Times done a follow-up?

Because if not, we are looking at propaganda of omission in service of previous propaganda of omission.

Why Now?

If the CDC has been sitting on slowly accumulating demographic data for more than a year, what prompted Mandavilli's piece on February 21?

To me, the anchor point of her article is Paragraph 15, with an anonymous CDC official explaining the likely reasons for withholding data. My suspicion is that this anonymous source may be the origin point for the piece. An organization employing scientists can keep a lid on data censorship only so long. Undoubtedly, a number of CDC scientists were fed up with the data charade and wanted the purposeful lack of public information "made public." Contacting a well-known science writer like Mandavilli would be one way to get the word out. Or, conversely, perhaps Mandavilli was watching the covered pot boil for a long time and managed to finally pry off the lid.

The Structure of the Piece

The first thing that stands out is that just two official CDC voices make it into the piece. They are Kristen Nordlund, a "spokesperson," and Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the CDC's deputy director for public health science and surveillance, who blames the lack of transparency on outdated data systems. 

I would pay good money to have read the actual verbatim back-and-forth between Nordlund and Jernigan and the author. Did they get a heads-up from Mandavilli that she was doing this piece and what she knew, or did she cold-call them with some questions to which she already knew the answers? That would have been fun to read. 

In any event, what is missing from this piece are any CDC scientists providing their opinions and experiences, with the notable exception of the anonymous source. What's also missing are any questions from Mandavilli about what the demographic data shows that renders it radioactive. Did she ask Nordlund, Jernigan, or anyone else? We are left to ponder.

The Propaganda of Questions Not Asked

How can it be that the United States media, covering the pandemic for two full years, has not demanded the full demographic picture? Is such data considered beyond the abilities of the world's wealthiest and allegedly most technologically advanced country? Did every single American major media source fall asleep at the switch? Why was someone not publicly hammering at the CDC every single day to provide this data to the public? Does this preference to not provide or even discuss the data help explain the lack of a task force?

I have all kinds of follow-up questions and speculations. If The New York Times hadn't run this piece, would the scientists and "CDC official" have gone to alternative media? What would that have looked like? The CDC's blithe skipping of 18-to-49-year-olds data is shocking. The CDC needed to do that to make a case for boosters? 

For two years, American media has given the CDC a pass on not providing moment-to-moment demographic pandemic data. As I've said in previous entries, it reeks of a kind of "style guide" regarding what gets asked and not asked.

Conclusion

I mentioned in "Strategies and Tactics (Part Two)" -- published a day before Mandavilli's piece -- that under Biden I had expected a weekly demographic tally of all things Covid, and I could not understand why the information wasn't publicly available. The only answer, I surmised, was that the lack of information was in support of narratives. 

Sadly, I appear to have been correct.

Bob Dietz

February 25, 2022 

The Mandavilli CDC Article: Line by Line

Apoorva Mandavilli, who wrote The New York Times' CDC piece published February 21, was the 2019 winner of the Victor Kohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Reporting. She has won many other awards and was moderator for the American Museum of Natural History's June 2020 symposium on Covid-19 origins and spread. She has been immersed in all things Covid since the beginning of the pandemic.

I'm going to go through Mandavilli's piece line by line and comment on those elements I find most troubling. Rather than being mega-shrill, I will once again don my Dragnet Joe Friday persona and save most of my pontificating for another day.

First Paragraph:

Mandavilli writes, "For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for COVID-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race, and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public."

My response, upon reading the first sentence, was great, there is fairly complete demographic information that is available. After reading the second sentence, I felt a knot in my stomach and thought, "Uh oh." Because if the info bolstered the preferred storylines, the information would almost assuredly be publicly available. How bad is the missing data going to be? I steeled myself.

Second Paragraph (And I Cringe):

"When the CDC published the first significant data two weeks ago on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65, it left out numbers for a huge portion of that population:  18-to-49-year-olds, the group the data showed was least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected."

I was flabbergasted by this. I really did not know what to do with it. Of course, the first question that popped into my head was, "Why?" Even if the CDC announced to the public that it was skipping data for 18-to-49, would public comments in the media about booster effectiveness continually mention that 18-to-49-year-olds were not included? Highly unlikely. The reporting on booster effectiveness would be labeled as "adults younger than 65," and the fact that the majority of data was withheld would not be mentioned in the usual news blurbs.

So I did my own math (as I occasionally do). The 18-to-49 U.S. population is 138 million people. The 50-to-64 share is 63 million. Thus, when touting "booster effectiveness," the CDC decided to eliminate 69% of the data. Being a cynical bloke, I of course think that not including 69% of the data was in service of a narrative. 

I was horrified, but since I'm in Joe Friday mode, I will comment no further on my horror. Suffice it to say that I raised an eyebrow and choked a bit on my coffee. 

You can't just quote booster effectiveness numbers for "adults under 65" and leave out the "18-to-49-year-old" data. A college freshman doing that in a lab course would get a big fat "F." No government agency should ever pull something like that, unless we're talking 1930's Soviet Union. The United States CDC left out the bulk of available data to make a better case for the effectiveness of boosters. Hard to believe.

Paragraph Six:

"Without the booster data for 18-to-49-year-olds, the outside experts whom federal health agencies look to for advice had to rely on numbers from Israel to make their recommendations on the shots."

Well, at least these "outside experts" knew most data was missing, even if the American public wasn't informed.

Paragraph Eight:

"Another reason (for not releasing data) is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Nordlund said."

That's Kristen Nordlund, a spokesperson for the CDC. If the CDC is concerned that information might be misinterpreted, I don't think purposefully misrepresenting data is really the way to fix that.

Paragraph 12:

"'The CDC is a political organization as much as a public health organization," said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation's Pandemic Prevention Institute. 'The steps that it takes to get something like this released are often well outside of the control of many of the scientists that work at the CDC.'"

I'm glad Mandavilli got Scarpino to say one of the quiet parts out loud.

Paragraph 13:

"The performance of vaccines and boosters, particularly in younger adults, is among the most glaring omissions in data the CDC has made public."

As I have been emphasizing in the "Propaganda Files," what is missing often tells you more than what's presented. Once you recognize what's missing, you can theorize about WHY it's missing.

Paragraph 14:

"Last year, the agency repeatedly came under fire for not tracking so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans, and focusing only on individuals who became ill enough to be hospitalized or die. The agency presented that information as risk comparisons with unvaccinated adults, rather than provide timely snapshots of hospitalized patients stratified by age, sex, race, and vaccination status."

I have commented many times on the curious media strategy of providing statistical context for survival of the vaccinated but not for survival of the unvaccinated. The above paragraph frames similar problems. These problems also tie into the change in definition over time for the phrase "vaccine efficacy," which at the start of the pandemic referred to the ability of vaccine to prevent infection but has morphed into the ability of vaccine to prevent hospitalization and death.

From Paragraph 15:

"But the CDC has been routinely collecting information since the COVID-19 vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make these figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective."

First, note that this is another example of the quiet part being said out loud, this time by a "federal official" who unsurprisingly prefers to remain anonymous. 

How the public interprets or doesn't interpret data is absolutely no excuse to withhold data. Withholding data allegedly in service of some "public good" is incredibly arrogant. What, we rubes won't properly interpret the data? So we have no right to it? 

Quietly withholding key statistics from the public in service of institutional goals is flat-out propaganda.

Paragraph 25:

Mandavilli writes, "'Tell the truth, present the data,' said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and adviser to the Food and Drug Administration. 'I have to believe that there is a way to explain these things so people can understand it.'"

One would hope so. And God bless Dr. Offit.

Conclusion

What the CDC has done by withholding and mislabeling data has consequences. The most obvious consequence is that it absolutely undermines the wavering confidence Americans have in the CDC. I'll tackle the unstated aspects of Mandavilli's piece next time.

Bob Dietz

February 24, 2022

Time-Out to Point Out -- I've Been Correct

Maybe professional gamblers have a nose for news (or as Sherlock Holmes might say, a curious lack of news). Maybe it takes cynicism mixed with an appreciation for what isn't said. Perhaps I draw obvious conclusions from partial information with more ease and accuracy than most Americans. Or maybe my Spidey sense tingles when I'm continually being sold a bill of goods. Then again, maybe I'm simply prescient. If that were the case, however, you'd think I'd win more than 58% of my college football bets.

My point is that followers of this blog's "Propaganda Files" have been treated to American media analyses that have been spot on. Especially during the last week, I've laid out the ways in which Americans have been manipulated and misled, as often by what U.S. institutions and media have NOT said as by what they've said. 

Yesterday, the New York Times broke a story that should shake every American to his core. I'm glad the Times exposed the CDC, but I do have some major issues with the story, which I will broach in another entry. For now, I just want to spotlight how accurate these "Propaganda Files" have been in describing what's missing from American media coverage of the pandemic. The Times story provides a frame for the "why" of much that I've detailed. 

The CDC Lied

The Times piece is "CDC Isn't Publishing Large Portions of the COVID-19 Data It Collects." The author is Apoorva Mandavilli, and it was published February 21. Basically, Mandavilli reports how the CDC has kept the majority of its Covid and vaccination data to itself for more than a year. Moreover, when the CDC did publicize data, it lied. It cherry-picked some data, omitted data not supporting the policy-of-the-moment, and kept its findings to itself that were not conducive to whatever narrative it wanted to spin.

I'm going to quote some of the more chilling lines verbatim tomorrow, but first I want to spell out how this expose corroborates the "Propaganda Files" themes, especially those themes of the last three entries, all published well before the Times story broke.

Spelling Out the Propaganda

My previous three entries highlighted the curious ways the CDC, the Biden administration, and U.S. mainstream media had sustained narratives without serious cross-examination. I specifically mentioned that:

1) Actual experts were rarely being made available for any kind of potentially adversarial interviews. This meant no public task force briefings, no cross-examination moments, no difficult questions. This has been the case for a year.

2) Non-expert talking heads at CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, and so on have been serving as proxies for actual experts. It turns out that there was a reason for stand-ins rather than experts when delivering CDC information to the public. Being non-experts, they never faced adversarial interviews or challenging questions. And they suffer no consequences for being wrong or lying by omission, largely because they are "non-experts." As conduits, they assume no responsibility.

3) Whenever public figures pushed back on the prevailing institutional narratives (see my "Aaron Rodgers" pieces), the responses to them weren't written by actual experts quoting meta-studies. The responses were "opinion" hit pieces written by non-experts. So when these non-experts were revealed to be manipulating information or flat-out wrong -- again, no real consequences because they are "non-experts."

This Times piece makes clear the problem with putting actual experts on the public firing line. Presumably, the experts would know what statistical shenanigans the CDC was engaged in, and the careers of any actual experts would be on the line if they faced adversarial questions. They could lie, knowing that eventually the CDC would be exposed, and their reputations ruined. Or they could upset the narrative apple cart and tell the truth about the CDC pulling stunts with data. In the latter case, the experts' careers would also take hits.

The frame for much of what I've been discussing is that experts knew what was afoot, so they have not been in the spotlight. That's a big part of the reason there is no task force. 

Tomorrow, as I said, I'll review some of the more chilling lines from Mandavilli's article. Things are quite a bit worse than I thought. The CDC is both hopelessly politicized and hopelessly compromised.

Bob Dietz

February 22, 2022

Strategies and Tactics (Part Two): What Isn't Said

Inspector Gregory:  Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?

Sherlock Holmes:  To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.

Inspector Gregory:  The dog did nothing in the night-time.

Sherlock Holmes: That was the curious incident.

The Adventure of Silver Blaze (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

One of the main themes of these "Propaganda Files" is that, concerning the identification of propaganda, what is NOT said is at least as important as what is said. Failing to mention key facts has been a ubiquitous and consistent media ploy this last year. In this Part Two, I want to point out a handful of American media behaviors that are quite startling by omission.

1) Not only are illnesses and deaths caused by vaccines not examined or discussed in any meaningful way, they're not even mentioned. The silence is extraordinary. One would think that during a historic pandemic with experimental vaccines, literally every American news outlet would demand and publish the latest vaccine illness/death breakdowns on a weekly basis.

Instead, there is no reporting whatsoever. Vaccine-caused illnesses and deaths simply don't get mentioned, whether it's CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times, and so on. One would expect state-by-state comparisons, demographic tallies, and details about the extent and nature of the adverse effects. We get nothing. It is stunning, this ubiquity of nothing.

Even if one grants that vaccines have saved tens of thousands of lives (to this point), as I do, there is no excuse for this massive silent black hole regarding adverse vaccine effects and deaths. What rationales can responsible journalists possibly provide for NOT discussing these elements of the pandemic?

2) Usually, I am annoyed at cable news wasting my time with anecdotal personal profiles and stories. Now, in the middle of a historic pandemic, they have pulled the plug on vaccine hardship stories. There are literally none.

 

Early in the pandemic, I was scheduled for an mRNA vaccine. Two Tennessee women were hospitalized at Vanderbilt. They were suffering sudden post-vaccine paralysis due to auto-immune responses. I learned of this via newspapers and, since my family has a really nasty auto-immune history, I decided to delay my vaccination. Since then, I have not read a newspaper story about severe post-vaccine auto-immune responses. Am I to believe those two women were the only ones thus affected?

3) When all of the negative vaccine stories are quashed, they must go somewhere. They go to forums, podcasts, and sometimes down conspiratorial rabbit holes. The fact that mainstream media refuses to engage and feature vaccine victims forces these victims underground. This is institutional white washing and institutional bullying of the worst kind. These people are pandemic victims. They deserve to be seen and heard.

4) The continually nose-diving efficacy of vaccines against each new variant is rarely a headline. In fact, it's not often mentioned. The short-lived efficacy of boosters against new variants is also downplayed. 

5) The fact that all vaccines currently in use were designed to cope with the original variant is a key fact that gets edited out of almost every vaccination story. How can you not mention this every single time? It's a core element of the narrative.

6) The changing of definitions during the two years of this pandemic never gets discussed. The definitions of "mitigate" and "vaccine efficacy," for example, have shifted dramatically away from their original early-2020 usage. But no one mentions these shifts and the reasons for them. "Vaccine efficacy" in 2020 referred exclusively to the vaccine preventing infection, period. Now, mainstream media has somehow decided that "vaccine efficacy" refers to preventing hospitalization. This is one reason why network front men do most of the talking rather than actual experts. The front men get away with slovenly, amorphous, and convenient definitions under the auspices of "not being experts."

7) Viral loads and R-values, discussed often in the media while the original variant was dominant, are no longer mentioned. That's because they highlight that the vaccinated now spread disease as efficiently as the unvaccinated, and (due to golden behavioral tickets for the vaccinated) possibly spread it more. 

8) Instead of constant comparisons of American Covid policies and results with other nations, American media has taken a very parochial approach. I expected comparisons with other countries to be reported continually during the pandemic. I expected weekly report card segments grading policies and results from around the world. We saw much more of this kind of reporting in 2020. Under Biden, we get very little reporting on how the rest of the world views the United States' Covid policies and results.

Conclusion

All of the facts listed above are more or less hidden from American public view. The obvious questions I've mentioned never get asked. What's stunning is the institutional homogeneity -- it's as if mainstream media is following a ruthless, agreed-upon style guide.

Although more Americans have died from Covid in 2021-22 than in 2020, American media has stopped counting Covid deaths on a minute-to-minute basis. The obvious question is, "Why?"

Despite the deaths and an array of very different, evolved variants, we no longer have a Covid task force fielding questions in front of the American public every week. And here's what really bothers me about that. There is no mention of a lack of a task force, no mention that there had been one, no discussions of whether there should still be one. It's as if the history and the subject of a Covid task force with weekly briefings doesn't exist. No one asks, "Shouldn't we have weekly public briefings?" It's unbelievable to me that, given the major media that call the U.S. home, none are asking for the task force's return. And none are asking why it no longer exists. The Covid task force has become a topic non grata.

What's missing and what's not mentioned are often the most striking evidence of propaganda. In this February 2022 United States, that evidence is everywhere.

Bob Dietz

February 20, 2022

 

Propaganda Files: Strategies and Tactics (Part One)

Analyzing specific articles featured in mainstream media during the last two months, I've discovered some consistent themes, general strategies, and specific tactics. I'm going to recap some of what I've learned from both my general media survey and my line-by-line analyses:

1) One general theme has obviously been "vaccinated-good, unvaccinated-bad." This theme promotes vaccines and boosters as a way to save lives and keep the economy rolling. Public figures who question the efficacy or long-term value of vaccines, thereby undercutting the preferred narrative, are attacked in various ways.

2) Surprisingly, given the "vaccinated-good, unvaccinated-bad" narrative, actual scientific experts are not regularly on display. They aren't featured as authors of explanatory or predictive articles, and they certainly don't appear on television or podcasts in situations where they must field adversarial questions in cross-examination formats.

3) The usual talking head front men for CNN, MSNBC, and other media sources act as spokespeople for the American scientific community's actual experts. The public is supposed to accept these spokespeople's explanations and storylines, but because they are not actual experts, the front men are not required or even expected to field adversarial questions or grant adversarial interviews. The spokespeople seem to be insulating actual experts from public interaction.

4) One would think that the American public directly hearing from scientific experts would be a good thing during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. But that's not what's happening. The American public is kept more in the dark under Biden than Trump, which is startling when you think about it.

5) The dearth of actual experts published by CNN, Newsweek, and other media is stunning. One would have expected an explosion of actual expert pieces with Biden in office.

6) When a public figure, such as Aaron Rodgers or Joe Rogan, pushes back against the ubiquitous, homogeneous narratives, the responses to them are not made by infectious disease experts quoting meta-studies. The responses are usually "hit pieces" by people who are not Covid experts, and these hit pieces are framed under the aegis of "opinion."

7) By having "opinion pieces" attack public figures who don't adhere to orthodox government narratives, the publishing entity (whether CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, etc.) washes its hands of most of the responsibility for these pieces being accurate in any scientific way. "Opinion" writers, especially opinion writers with no actual expertise in the subjects, are free to cherry pick studies, write to influence rather than inform, and are free to just be wrong. They are free to be blatantly wrong, and because they are "not experts," they suffer no real consequences. The publishing entities, meanwhile, can wash their hands of what appears in these "opinion pieces." There is a layer of legal insulation protecting the publishing entities.

More people have died from Covid under Biden than under Trump. Yet there are no weekly task force briefings. Why are there no televised weekly task force briefings? Think about that long and hard.

Meanwhile, another variant has appeared, comprising 4% of U.S. cases at the moment. This new variant is both more transmissible than Omicron and more deadly. Hard to believe that something is more transmissible than Omicron, but there you have it. And no task force briefing in sight.

I'll continue with more propaganda strategies and tactics next time.

Bob Dietz

February 18, 2022

Misinformation, Disinformation, and the Problem with CNN

Introduction

When the pandemic began, many mainstream media sources used the words "misinformation" and "disinformation" interchangeably. This was wildly inappropriate and has been toned down immensely in the last few months. I suspect the fact that accusing someone of spreading "disinformation" opens the author to legal liability has much to do with this retreat from using the "disinformation" label. 

"Misinformation" refers to the spreading of false or out of context information without regard to whether the author knows the information is wrong or misleading.

"Disinformation" which is a much younger word than "misinformation," refers to the spreading of false or misleading information with the explicit intent to mislead. The author knows what he is saying is wrong, and that is why he says it.

I'll give an example of each. I was going to use a Joe Rogan podcast quote about myocarditis rates as an example of misinformation, but it turns out that he may have been correct, so I need a different example. Dwelling for a moment on that Rogan statement, however, the fact that he was willing to fact-check live certainly suggests that, if he was wrong, it was a case of misinformation, not disinformation.

Donald Trump provides some interesting examples of each. I think that Trump actually believed there was "something" to hydroxychloroquine, so his touting of HCL was more misinformation than disinformation. And touting bleach on live television was not something one would do unless he thought there was some research supporting it, so I'm guessing that the "bleach speech" was more misinformation than disinformation. However, when it came to Trump's repeated low ball Covid death projections, Trump had to have known he was way, way off. Those would have been examples of disinformation in the service of the economy and Trump's re-election.

While I love Dr. Fauci, his pushing of gloves as opposed to masks during the first month of the pandemic was disinformation in the service of preventing the general public from buying up all of the masks, which Fauci wanted to hoard for health care workers. Fauci and international infectious disease experts all knew that masks were more important than gloves, but Fauci and the CDC went with the disinformation campaign.

What's misinformation versus disinformation, then, boils down largely to intent. Are you sharing what you think to be true or are you sharing what you think to be false?

Issues with CNN

The problem with authors labeling what others say as "misinformation" or "disinformation" is that the authors are usually not experts and not qualified to judge misinformation or disinformation. This includes me, of course.

For example, when Dean Obeidallah of CNN says that Aaron Rodgers is misinforming people about Covid, the question becomes, "Who is Dean Obeidallah to make that statement?" Obeidallah is an attorney. When Peniel Joseph, also for CNN, says that Joe Rogan is misinforming the public about Covid, who is Peniel Joseph? He's a political science academic specializing in Black Power Studies. Why should readers trust Obeidallah's scholarship over Rodgers' or Joseph's knowledge over Rogan's? 

That leads me to the question, of course, "Who am I to expound about anything?" Well, I have severe limitations, but as far as Obeidallah and Joseph are concerned, I guarantee that I would score better on a Covid-19 history test than either of them. 

For now, my point is that these authors are slapping a "misinformation" label on people, and the authors are not expert in any way. When social media pokes fun at Rodgers and Rogan for "doing their own research," shouldn't it also be poking fun at Obeidallah and Joseph for both "doing their own research" and assuming that "their own research" is better than Rodgers' or Rogan's?

True Experts and Problems with CNN

I have great respect for CNN standouts Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Dr. Leana Wen, who are true experts. The problem with their presentations on CNN is that they are almost never placed in unscripted environments to face actual adversarial questions. 

Propaganda is as much about what is purposefully omitted as what is purposefully said. Neither Gupta nor Wen expose themselves to much of anything outside of narrow scripted "interviews," and neither does much in terms of facing cross-examination by people outside of the CNN silo. When Gupta, who I believe to be an honest, talented scientist, ventured onto a Rogan podcast, cracks in the CNN narratives were exposed.

If honest scientists are never asked those questions that would undermine scripted storylines, are they still honest scientists? Should they be speaking out about what isn't said? Should they be exposing some of the purposeful CNN nonsense, like the August 24, 2021 CNN Ivermectin hit piece? If they don't point out the flaws in CNN's presentations, are they still honest scientists?

Conclusion

If CNN allows non-experts to label other non-experts as "misinforming," what is the justification? Are those employed or featured by CNN presumed to somehow absorb expertise from the ether by dint of their CNN affiliation? And if CNN experts avoid any kind of adversarial public cross-examinations, what does that say about the network's confidence in the positions taken?

If CNN felt their positions and their experts could hold up in the court of public judgement, they would allow Gupta and Wen to field adversarial questions all day, every day. It is frightening that CNN has so little confidence in the narratives they project.

I don't know about anyone else, but at those few things I am truly expert, I could pontificate and field questions all day long. At those things at which I'm expert, I also have no qualms saying "I don't know" when confronted with questions for which I have no answers. For those things at which I'm expert, I would be insulted if I were fed only those questions to which I had a scripted answer.

It pains me to say all of this, because for more than 30 years I considered CNN the best objective source for objective news. But they have gone off the Cronkite rails. 

Scripted questions and coddled experts don't produce journalism's finest moments, and this is why the "Fake News" moniker stuck. If the outcome of an "interview" is known before the interview takes place, it's not really much of an interview. It's scripted and it's fake. That's what makes it propaganda.

Bob Dietz

February 17, 2022

Propaganda Files: Don't Pretend

My plan was to delay examining any article with Joe Rogan as a subject until I had completed another dozen or so "Propaganda Files" pieces. That would have set up a preliminary framework to tackle Rogan.

However, Peniel E. Joseph's piece, "Don't pretend you don't know what Joe Rogan is all about," was published February 10 by CNN. Some elements of this piece were so interesting, and some phrasing so outrageous (including the title) that I feel it's preferable to comment ASAP.

My Theme:  Low Tolerance for Ambiguity

I know very little about Joe Rogan. I have watched one complete podcast and segments of half a dozen others. I'm no fan boy. My initial take is that Rogan is a fine interviewer with a little touch of Johnny Carson in him and more than a little touch of Howard Stern. He seems nimble during interviews, as one might expect of a comedian. Mr. Joseph evidently has issues with Rogan, some of which I grasp, some of which I don't. Before getting to specific lines from Joseph's article, however, I want to discuss why this particular piece interested me. Lines strewn throughout, including the title, are evidence of something I see as a common theme in American media at the moment.

Almost everyone in journalism of any kind seems unable to maintain neutrality or ambivalence regarding public figures. There seems to be a media obsessive-compulsive disorder to categorize public figures into neat righteous/not-righteous categories. Writers also seem incapable of perceiving people as fence straddlers, as politically neutral, as independent thinkers. It's almost as if stating that you're an independent is treated as a form of obfuscation, of purposeful camouflage. Somewhere deep down inside, you must actually be this or that. Protesting that you're not leads to social media microscopes being turned to a higher lens power. The search for clues to righteous/not-righteous continues until some shred of evidence offers an excuse for a label.

People must be defined as Trumpster or non-Trumpster, progressive or not progressive, Christian or not Christian. Basically, as believer or non-believer in whatever is fashionable in a particular neck of the woods. The religious nature of Trump support has helped create these righteous/not-righteous perceptual categories. The faster we can stereotype or caricature someone, the less our stress. If we allow someone into our personal culture, and we don't have them cleanly categorized, then we suffer the stress of being psychologically intimate with someone who might be "not us." 

My working theory is that the more stress people are under, the less they tolerate ambiguity. The more stress, the more driven they are to stereotype, categorize, caricature, and label. A during-Trump, post-Trump pandemic has created fertile ground. 

Point by Point

I'm not going to debunk, per se, what Joseph has written, but I'm going to review some of the more outrageous comments:

1) The title of the piece is both outrageous and beyond preachy. Somebody telling me that I need to acknowledge that I implicitly know "what Joe Rogan is all about" is ridiculous. I don't know Joe Rogan. If I saw a hundred podcasts, maybe I'd have some small hint of what he's about. But the last thing that I need, and I think the last thing that anyone needs, is an academic telling people to draw some forced-choice conclusion about someone based on partial information. In a time of knee-jerk categorization, the last thing Americans need is coaching to do more knee-jerk labeling. Joseph seems to think he has Rogan pinned down, identified, and psychoanalyzed. Good for him. I gamble professionally. I tend to know what I don't know, and I rely on what I don't know to make decisions. This way of thinking and working is evidently alien to Joseph. I'll have more to say on this in the conclusion.

2) In the fourth paragraph of this piece, Joseph strings together a series of comments regarding Rogan that Joseph deems problematic in some deep way. I want to criticize Joseph's choices here. 

Joseph writes, "Rogan has made waves by suggesting that because you can never be woke enough...it'll eventually get to (where) white men are not allowed to talk." Joseph seems to believe this is a really bad thing for a comedian to say. Joseph should probably stay out of comedy clubs. He should also avoid watching American commercials, which now highly overrepresent white men as the doofuses of the world.

Joseph also says, "Rogan has horribly and deliberately misgendered a trans MMA fighter." C'mon,  man/woman (that was sarcasm, Sheldon). I'm with Rogan on this one. If an XY guy pretended to be a woman so he could enter cage fights to beat the hell out of women, wouldn't Joseph want him arrested? Instead, because an XY fighter labels himself "trans," Joseph is on "her" side. Gag me with a spoon.

Further along in the same paragraph, Joseph criticizes Rogan for hosting guests who question vaccine validity and for "giving a platform to a climate change skeptic." Rogan is an interviewer. His job is to get a range of guests. Unless the guests tilt exclusively right (they do not), I don't see the problem. This is the flip side of the argument regarding late night hosts. The vast majority of guests on late night American television skew left compared to the general American population.

3) Because Trump and Republican Governor Ron DeSantis have both publicly recommended Rogan not apologize for using "nigger," Joseph writes, "The far-right conservative support for Rogan belies the myth that his show represents a reasonable middle or common ground uniting average Americans untethered to the left-right spectrum of American politics." This comment by Joseph makes no sense. Rogan has no control of who endorses his show or implores him to do anything. How do comments by Trump or DeSantis dictate what Rogan's show is about, what Rogan's audience is about, or what Rogan himself is about? They do not. Rogan's podcast undoubtedly has specific demographics that Joseph could have stated and explored, had he been interested in making a somewhat less definitive and more accurate proclamation.

4) Joseph writes, "Folks who enjoy Rogan's political unpredictability, down to earth quality, and frank discussion about politics ignore the fact that he's one of the wealthiest people in America." I'm not sure who Joseph thinks he is, presuming that anyone ignores Rogan's wealth. 

I must have heard about Rogan's $100 million Spotify contract figure 200 times in the last month. How could Joseph presume people ignore Rogan's one-percenter status when it's the lead every 20 minutes on cable news? Speaking as someone who grew up in a county, half of which was owned by a family named Rich (I kid you not), I can tell you that socioeconomic status never leaves my field of thought. Not all one-percenters, however, are fire-breathing vampires (although that tends to be my default attitude).

5) Finally, Joseph provides this gem, "Any public personality attracting effusive support from Trump and DeSantis, two exemplars of racial and cultural intolerance, can not purport to be, as Rogan does, an independent thinker." I'm flabbergasted at both the basic illogic of this statement and the author's arrogance in making it. Unless Joseph is telepathic, he has no magical access to Joe Rogan's mind. Trump and DeSantis cheering someone on does not render that person an ideologue or even right wing. Joseph is pushing nonsense here with this fervent, baseless proclamation.

Propaganda

I started this entry not knowing much about Joe Rogan. I will end it the same way. I suggest anyone reading either Joseph's piece or this entry do the same.

Joseph's piece features a particular kind of propaganda. He proclaims things as true, and readers are simply supposed to take his authoritarian word on them. He says that he knows, and we should follow.  

As I stated in this entry and several others, I know very little about Joe Rogan. His Wikipedia profile yields a Libertarian who endorsed Bernie Sanders and whose political preferences don't cluster under a convenient label. The Joe Rogan profile confidently proclaimed by Joseph does not at all match the Wikipedia profile. 

The omissions of the Sanders endorsement and Rogan's votes for Libertarian candidates are tip-offs to Joseph's propagandistic writing choices. He could have mentioned these things, but they would have undercut his narrative, so he skipped them. Propaganda is often about what writers and editors choose to NOT tell you.

Conclusion

I traffic in making significant decisions based on partial information. Most professional gamblers do the same. My strength as a human being is knowing what I don't know, and also knowing the degree to which I don't know it.

In this era of Americans existing in informational silos, insulated from each other, Joseph does no one any favors by proclaiming that we should be drawing conclusions and imposing labels based on fractional and flimsy information (and his opinions). 

Stress pushes all of us in the direction of simple decisions, clear categories, and ignoring ambiguity in favor of certainty.  Calling ourselves "certain" of something may reduce our stress, but it doesn't solve real life problems. Joseph's kind of certainty is a mirage that leads us all deeper into a judgement desert. 

Joe Rogan is not Archie Bunker, and most of his listeners are not Archie Bunker fans. Joseph is undoubtedly correct that the United States is institutionally racist and has racism baked into the fabric of society. But coaching people, as Joseph does, into snap-labeling others as righteous/not-righteous solves nothing. If you can't appreciate and deal with the ambiguity of your fellows, you're not part of any American solution. You're part of the American problem.

Bob Dietz

February 16, 2022

Propaganda Files: Follow the Math

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."  

Mark Twain, Chapter from My Autobiography

The above quote did not originate with Twain, and I have no idea who first said it. My point in explaining that I have no blessed or damned origin for it is to impress upon you that admitting "I don't know" is not radioactive. "I don't know" does not exclude you from human company or heaven's pearly gates.

Ah, but these statistics. One of the themes of "Propaganda Files" is that purposeful omission is a form of propaganda. Carefully arranging and sequencing information to create specific interpretations while masking other information to prevent alternative interpretations is also propaganda.

This entry is devoted to "Follow the math and free yourself from COVID-19" by Damon Linker. Linker's piece was published February 11 by The Week. The sub-heading reads, "The vaccines have passed the test. They work. The time to return to normal is now."

Linker is a fine writer. This is an opinion piece. As I usually do, I'll lay a good deal of the propaganda responsibility on editors at The Week. The questions not asked, the information not presented, should be obvious to any editor.

Examining "The Math"

Linker makes the case that life in the United States should return to normal, and he makes this case by employing certain specific statistics. 

Linker says, "Yet they (vaccines) do in most cases protect a vaccinated and boosted individual from getting seriously ill and dying. We can see this from CDC data showing that the incidence of death last October and November from COVID-19 for someone vaxxed and boosted was about 0.1 per 100,000 infections -- or about 1 out of a million."

Linker then goes on to put that figure in context. He quotes some actuarial table odds. Americans have a 1 in 107 chance of dying in an auto accident in their lifetime. Also a 1 in 2,535 of dying via choking on food. And a 1 in 86,781 chance of being killed by a dog or a 1 in 138,849 chance of being killed by lightning.

The timescales for these events, of course, are radically different. The Covid data was for two months, and the other stats are for a lifetime. In an edited update, Linker mentions the timescale differences, but doesn't rewrite his argument.

Linker continues, "Which means, all else being equal, you're roughly seven times more likely to die from being struck by lightning over the course of your lifetime than you were to die from catching COVID-19 (in its current variants) if you were fully vaxxed and boosted in those weeks this past fall."

Debunking Linker

I worry when writers who should know better splash statistics around in a filtered way designed to garner a specific audience reaction. In this piece, Linker has written some eye-catching, fun lines, but the truth is, he should not be presenting the information in the way he did. Why not? Because two months does not correspond to a lifetime. The average American lives to more than 75 years of age. Seventy-five years features 450 of those two-month spans. Thus, the responsible, accurate statement to make is not that you're seven times more likely to die by lightning than Covid. The accurate statement would be that if you're vaxxed and boosted, you are at least 60 times more likely to die of Covid than a lightning strike. Still a long shot, granted, but not a great line for the purposes of this piece. Not a snappy stat to share to make a "get back to normal" statement.

Linker manipulated the statistics to write a rollicking, upbeat narrative. What he should have done was use accurate statistics to tell the truth, or he should have simply admitted that these stat comparisons have little relevance. Then, however, there is no rollicking narrative.

Putting these previous stats aside, however, Linker failed to be honest with readers in a more blatant way. Let's explore how he manipulated them.

Propaganda

Linker states, "But who is dying of the virus? Overwhelmingly, adults who choose to be unvaccinated." He then goes on to discuss the risk assessments of the unvaccinated.

The author is doing something fundamentally manipulative here. He provided actual odds early in the piece, comparing vaccinated and boosted risks to odds for other fatal events. He placed the odds against dying from Covid (if vaccinated) in an overall statistical context, comparing those odds to dying in car accidents and lightning strikes. In this segment, however, he chooses to mention that the people dying of Covid are unvaccinated, but he purposefully avoids putting them in an overall statistical context. 

For example, if it's true that (as Linker argues) just one in a million fully vaxxed and boosted died of Covid in October/November, then what is the percentage of unvaccinated who died? If unvaccinated die at 10 times the rate of vaccinated, that is just 1 in 100,000. If the unvaccinated die at a rate of a hundred times that of vaccinated, it still means just 1 in 10,000 unvaccinated died of Covid. So the chances of having died of Covid in Oct/Nov are very small, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated.

Somehow, Linker evades stating this. He leaves the statistics unstated because he is trying to influence readers without laying out all of the contextual numbers. He could have mentioned how long the odds were against unvaccinated dying, but he chose to keep those numbers to himself. This is manipulative. This is omitting what should clearly be stated. This is propaganda.

Not only does Linker not spell this out, but he also fails to write a single line about vaccine risks. Let me repeat that. In a story about vaccine math, he fails to devote a single line to vaccine adverse effects and deaths. While these events are uncommon, if this opinion piece is all about the math, certainly they should be mentioned. A recent JAMA paper indicates that myocarditis risks increase a hundred-fold after the second vaccine shot. While myocarditis is rarely fatal, the majority of people were hospitalized. Surely that paper and statistic should have at least been mentioned.

Not putting unvaccinated Covid death risks in the same overall odds context as vaccinated risks is dishonest. Similarly, skipping any mention of vaccination risk is in service of a particular filtered narrative.

Alternative View

Imagine, if you will, if Linker had led off his odds facts with, "In Oct/Nov, just 1 in 50,000 unvaccinated died of Covid." Imagine, if he led with that, and then later in the piece, he mentioned, "and the odds for those fully vaccinated dropped to 1 in a million."

Had he sequenced facts that way, the purposeful effect of this piece on readers would be completely, utterly different (despite stats being the same). Linker didn't want that, so he left out the stats he didn't want to clearly state. He featured overall statistical context for the vaccinated, and he omitted the same context when discussing the unvaccinated. This kind of writing is the very essence of propaganda.

Postscript:  I just wanted to mention two things. First, one of the problems with these opinion pieces is that we seem to be dealing with an almost interlocking directorate of writers and editors. Linker has been a senior editor at Newsweek and Daily Beast. The homogeneous spin evident in most media Covid pieces may have large roots in the heavy personal history overlap of many writers and editors of these publications. 

Second, I have walked in Linker's writing shoes a bit with this article. About 10 years ago, I was in a national handicapping competition and won 17 consecutive against-the-spread games. When I got to 13 in a row, I wrote a couple of articles about the streak. My angle was to dig up actuarial table numbers and feature those odds in the articles. My goal, as I wrote, was to get to 17 in a row, as the odds against that were the same as "death by reptile." Incorporating actuarial table numbers in writing is easy and eye-catching.

Bob Dietz

February 15, 2022

Apologies, Malone and Rogan

I'm referring to Dr. Robert Malone and Joe Rogan. I'm not apologizing FOR them; I'm apologizing TO them. 

As I laid out in the first "Propaganda Files," my initial strategy was to warm up with analyses of specific articles about Covid in national media and then move on to a broader view. That broader view involved examining general media coverage of both Dr. Robert Malone and Joe Rogan as a keyhole to understanding current media priorities and to what degree these priorities generate propaganda rather than objective journalism.

I didn't know anything about Malone until two years ago, and I had some minimal exposure to Rogan. I've listened to exactly one full Rogan podcast and chunks of half a dozen others. So I come into this project with no great familiarity or love for either gentleman. But what I'm seeing as mainstream media responds to them is the antithesis of responsible old school journalism. I am very surprised at the intensity of opinions directed at Malone and Rogan and the filtering of information regarding them. 

All of this leads me to today's apology. I am sorry it is taking me so long to get to what I see as the meat of this project. But almost every day, someone hands me a media piece that is stunning in its lack of balance and questions not asked. I take them one at a time and do the best I can. Eventually, I will get to analyzing the general media responses to Malone and Rogan. My apologies to them and the readers. 

This wading through propaganda is like dog paddling through quicksand.

Bob Dietz

February 11, 2022

Propaganda Files: Aaron Rodgers (Part Two)

In Part One (February 1), I laid out the journalistic errors made by author Dean Obeidallah and CNN's editors in Obeidallah's, "The spectacular rise and fall of Aaron Rodgers." In that Part One analysis, I operated under the premise that the implications and conclusions not supported by data were errors of understanding or logic by Obeidallah and CNN's editors.

Today, in Part Two, I'll operate under what I consider the more likely premise, namely that Obeidallah was acting as an apologist for the NFL by attacking Rodgers' criticisms of the ever-changing NFL Covid rules. Whether Obeidallah's presentation was of a piece with NFL spin due to an accident of fate or coordination, I leave to the reader.

Obeidallah attempted to debunk Rodgers' comments. One of Rodgers' comments under siege had to do with there being no proof that unvaccinated were superspreaders. 

Connecting the NFL Dots

Allow me to connect the NFL-damning dots. The NFL's testing and quarantine protocols kept shape-shifting as the season progressed. The later in the season it became, the more players became infected with new variants. Testing and quarantine became more and more disruptive to the NFL schedule, and things figured to get worse.

The NFL had spent months pushing vaccinations as an infection preventative. Given the new variants' transmissibility, however, sharing locker rooms and spending games in other players' personal space had rendered vaccination as a modest infection preventative at best. Given the viral loads of locker rooms and game-time personal space, vaccinated or unvaccinated status may have become a moot point as to who was likely to become infected.

So what was the NFL to do? The league's immediate reaction was Trump-esque. The more testing you do, the more infected players you find, so let's radically reduce testing. But for public relations purposes, let's keep testing the unvaccinated because, well, they're the problem.

That was the NFL's plan. As the playoffs drew near, disruption due to large numbers of positive-testing players would have been devastating. Thus, make sure as many players are vaccinated as possible and reduce testing of the vaccinated. In fact, test only those vaccinated players who self-report Covid symptoms.

Talk about a wink/wink set-up. It was clear as hell where this was going. Hardly anyone was going to self-report anything. Meanwhile, the spin, from both U.S. health officials and the NFL, was to frame the unvaccinated as superspreaders, as if they were the primary problem. There's just one problem. With the new variants, the unvaccinated are not superspreaders any more than vaccinated are superspreaders.

The self-reporting of symptoms was a don't ask/don't tell trick to prevent huge numbers of players from sitting out playoff games. The unvaccinated, however, were going to be tested for public relations, even though the infected unvaccinated were no more likely to spread disease than infected vaccinated. This was clearly discriminatory.

The NFL didn't want to test. They especially didn't want to test during the playoffs. They wanted to maintain the fiction that vaccinated players somehow didn't spread disease. Maintaining this fiction was propaganda, and also discriminatory against the unvaccinated players. If unvaccinated players tested positive and had to sit out playoff games, they would be blamed for not being available. Vaccinated players, however, would be given carte blanche whether infected or not. They simply wouldn't be tested unless they "self-reported" symptoms.

Rodgers Pushed Back

Well, Aaron Rodgers was having none of it. He knew that the unvaccinated were not superspreaders, and he understood the hypocrisy of what the NFL was doing., If it was about player safety, everyone would be tested. Instead, the NFL wanted to test as few players as possible. So Rodgers called out the NFL for its zigzagging protocols, its attempts at spin, and its hypocrisy.

His reward was to get lambasted on social media and have Obeidallah write the manipulative hit piece, which lays out not one iota of what I just explained. All of the gossip regarding Rodgers' stance was likely NFL-generated. The league didn't like that he publicly stated what was evident to anyone with eyes and some working neurons.

The NFL wanted to ride herd on its players, to use a Rawhide phrase. The owners routinely think they have the right and the power to shut everyone up, even when the narratives the NFL pushes are blatantly divorced from reality.

CNN Propaganda

Rodgers was silly with his homeopathy excuses. But he had the right to stand up for himself and push back against the NFL's spin machine. He called out the NFL for its illogical policies. The NFL public relations angles reeked of propaganda. 

As far as the Obeidallah piece, the construction of it seemed intricate and planned. What I try to do with these "Propaganda Files" is detail logical faults and highlight propaganda. Obeidallah's Rodgers piece is certainly propaganda.

Since I feel that CNN had, for years, been the best objective news source in the United States, it pains me to say the following. The truly frightening aspect to this particular storyline is that CNN ran the Obeidallah piece without mentioning one word of what the NFL was trying to pull. There wasn't much subtlety to the NFL hypocrisy. The NFL wanted "self-reporting" of symptoms. The league wanted as little testing as possible. This was upfront and obvious if you paid any attention. So how was it that CNN allowed and promoted the Rodgers article while not investigating what the NFL was trying to do? How do you blithely not report the bigger story?

How could Obeidallah make the comment, "The NFL protocols were simply designed to save lives, not play politics" when those protocols tried to reduce testing to nothing? This was a Trump tactic ("if you don't test, no one is positive") being employed by the NFL. Why would CNN give the league a pass on policies designed to purposefully not discover if players were Covid positive? 

And yet that's what Obeidallah and CNN did. They championed a pro vaccination narrative, even though the net effect of that vaccination narrative was to reduce testing. CNN championed wearing informational blinders as long as those blinders were in service of a pro-vaccination stance.

It is truly mind boggling. And obvious as hell. And yet, there appears to be no price for CNN's being hypocritical, discriminatory, and baldly propagandistic. I thought Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" catch phrase had cornered the market on absurd hypocrisy. I may have been quite wrong. Propaganda flying under the banner of pseudo Walter Cronkites is much more dangerous than propaganda flying under the banner of court jesters with megaphones.

Bob Dietz

February 10, 2022

Dr. Anthony "Corleone" Fauci: Some Notes

I think it will be useful to pull up some recent quotes from Dr. Fauci as a way to compare his relatively precise language with the foggy language currently employed in the service of propaganda. 

I had Dr. Fauci pretty much characterized properly from the start. If you check out my June 27, 2020 "Task Force Review," you'll see that everything I predicted for the parties mentioned has come to pass. Here's my Fauci summary,

"Fauci has recognized the clusterfuck nature of the task force from the beginning. He carries the assurance of an old mob boss who knows he's going to outlast all the morons around him while maintaining everyone's respect."

I'm a Fauci fan in the same way that I'm a Vito Corleone fan. I may not agree with everything they do, but I must admit, they do it with style. I have my Dr. Fauci bobblehead. He's wearing a black suit and a red tie, rather than a lab coat, so that I'm reminded of his Corleone-ishness. Please don't assume my owning a Fauci bobblehead means anything in particular; I also have a fine collection of horned, hooved statuary featuring pentagrams. 

Fauci Precision

Dr. Fauci is not really a propagandist. He's precise in what he says. Occasionally, he lies under the auspices of doing some greater good, but when he does, the lies are bald-faced, not some sleight-of-words.

Let me give you an example of Fauci truth-telling rather than propagandizing when presented with an option. If you'll recall, the Dean Obeidallah "Aaron Rodgers" piece that I analyzed featured Obeidallah trying to debunk Rodgers' comment that it was "not a pandemic of the nonvaccinated." Obeidallah referenced a particular study regarding rates of vaccinated infected versus unvaccinated infected in an attempt to debunk Rodgers.

Well, a transcript of an ABC 12-19-21 "The Week" interview yields interviewer Jonathan Karl asking Fauci, "Is this really becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated? I mean, is this really a crisis of the unvaccinated?"

Fauci is presented with two response options here. He can respond to the first question, "pandemic of the unvaccinated," or he can respond to the second question, "crisis of the unvaccinated." Because Fauci is precise, and because he knows that every word he says is fact checked, Fauci responds, "You know, it is certainly much more of a crisis of the unvaccinated, but there are other tools besides vaccine, and wearing a mask complements the protection you get from the vaccine, and a boost."

Fauci had the option of choosing "pandemic of the unvaccinated" or "crisis of the unvaccinated." He chose "crisis" because the phrase "pandemic of the unvaccinated" suggests that the unvaccinated are causing the pandemic in some sense, which is the narrative that Obeidallah and other writers are pushing. Fauci knows this is an overblown and somewhat incorrect spin. Fauci chose "crisis" because it suggests that unvaccinated are disproportionately victims of the pandemic, which is factually correct.

Obeidallah, in his Rodgers essay, was trying to frame the unvaccinated as superspreaders as opposed to victims. Fauci, with his careful word choice, was more precise.

Fauci Says

Here are some of the more interesting Dr. Fauci lies and admissions.

1) Gloves are more important than masks. First month of the pandemic. Fauci and the CDC pushed this, even as doctors in other countries emphasized masks as opposed to gloves. I was one of the idiots who listened to Fauci and the CDC instead of South Korean experts. If I had gotten ill and died, it would have been because Fauci and the CDC were hoarding masks for health care workers. They were preventing a general public run on masks. Their calculus did me no favors.

2) In December 2021, Fauci admitted to MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin that one of the reasons for the sudden explosion of "children with Covid" was that all children admitted to hospitals were being tested. If positive, they were listed as hospitalized "with Covid." It had taken months for Fauci to publicly admit this, and in the interim, people on social media making the same observations were banned for "spreading Covid misinformation."

3) In January 2022, Fauci publicly admitted that almost all Americans were going to get Covid due to Omicron. He obviously knew this for some time, but saying it out loud undercuts the basic "getting vaccinated so I don't get Covid" rationale. His blunt public admittance was therefore long delayed.

Conclusion

Dr. Fauci has had no issue saying one thing in public (while believing another) when he perceived a greater good to be in play. The question someone should really ask him is, "If you think more lives will be saved by publicly lying and omitting information rather than telling the truth, will you continue to lie and omit information in the service of what you see as the public good?"

Of course, the Don Corleones of the world don't answer those kinds of questions. And nobody ever asks.

Bob Dietz

February 7, 2022

Propaganda Files: Recap

This will be a quick review and summary of what I learned from the first three pieces under the "Propaganda Files" lens. In order, these were Neil Baron's "Legal Culpability" piece in Newsweek, the Dean Obeidallah "Aaron Rodgers" piece for CNN, and the Father Martin "How Do You Respond?" essay for the New York Times.

All were opinion pieces vetted by Newsweek, CNN, and the New York Times, respectively. As such, fact-checking and editorial oversight were the responsibility of these three media titans, while direct responsibility for the pieces could be laid at the authors' feet. 

I'm an analytic plodder. The worst writer employed by any of these three entities is a far better writer than me. Any editor in their employ is a far better editor than me. Frankly, that is a large part of what bothers me. The misdirection and spin, sometimes edging into the realm of misinformation, should have been evident to any editor reviewing these articles.

What We've Learned

I'll be returning to Obeidallah's Aaron Rodgers piece for "Part Two" later this week to connect some big dots. For now, what we've seen and, more importantly, not seen from these three published opinions include the following:

Missing

1) No mention of viral loads at all. Viral loads of infected vaccinated compared to viral loads of infected unvaccinated is important.

2) No mention, ever, of estimated R-values, which would compare vaccinated transmissibility with the transmissibility of the unvaccinated.

3) Very little mention of the Biden administration's Covid death toll, which undercuts the vaccine effectiveness narrative.

4) No discussion of vaccine efficacy for Delta and Omicron, and especially no comparison of vaccine efficacy for the original strain versus the new variants. No comparisons of Covid vaccines' efficacy to previous normal flu vaccines' efficacy.

I suppose that if you're going to pitch vaccination as a cure-all, these topics need to remain unstated and undiscussed.

Emphases

What gets emphasized are very specific statistics. These stats are presented with little discussion, as if the stats themselves provide a self-evident story.

1) Despite no viral load or R-value discussions, the stats that get repeated are the hospitalization and death rates for unvaccinated versus vaccinated. The tone and fear factor are reminiscent of the old "This is your brain on drugs" advertisements. The death rates for unvaccinated are much, much higher, and people need to be aware of them. However, all of the summaries I have read addressing the increased risk for the unvaccinated fail to frame the death rates in any kind of overall context. 

For example, as the U.S. approaches a million Covid deaths, if we assume an adult population of roughly 260 million, the actual chances of dying of Covid have been less than .4%. That means, of course, that you have had more than a 99.6% chance of NOT dying of Covid. I say this not to make any particular point but to provide context, regardless of where the context takes anyone's decision-making. 

In a similar vein, the case fatality ratio in the United States has been 1.2%, and this is a recent (thus presumably accurate) number from Johns Hopkins. This 1.2% represents a blend of vaccinated and unvaccinated dying from Covid. Obviously, being vaccinated now reduces this by a large factor, perhaps knocking down fatality likelihood to under a tenth of a percent. The question for individuals is whether the difference between under a tenth of a percent chance of dying and, say, a two percent chance of dying (assuming, as Dr. Fauci has said, that everyone will eventually be infected) is something that should be legislated. If you're not legislating tobacco products or morbid obesity with regard to mortality percentages, should the government be legislating vaccines for Covid? Why are some mortality risks treated differently than others? 

If you're giving people statistics to make decisions, give them all of the statistics. The job of the federal government and national media is not to cherry pick what is presented for "the public good." The job is to present the data, unvarnished and unspun, to the public. If people are innumerate or simply distrustful of government, spinning the narrative and omitting stats is still not the job of government or media.

2) Another emphasis features (perhaps dated) stats, varying quite a bit, that the unvaccinated are 4.5 times to 10 times more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated. These are interesting statistics if the modest vaccine efficacy versus new variants is to be believed. It's hard to reconcile the (usually unstated) modest vaccine efficacy with the high rate of infection among the unvaccinated. What's strongly suggested by the stats (but not the authors we've examined) is that the correlation must be largely due to behavioral differences or varying laws. If the unvaccinated are clustered in states with minimal masking, social distancing, and lockdown rules, then of course the unvaccinated are more likely to be infected, and by a wide margin. The difference can likely be due more to behavioral differences and location laws than to actual vaccination efficacy in preventing infection. Need it be said? Correlation does not equal causation. In this case, because the current vaccines do have some ability to prevent infection, there is a cause-effect between vaccination and not getting infected in the short term, but nowhere near the disparity being presented. And with Dr. Fauci stating on January 12 that he expects almost every American to get Covid, the role of vaccines in preventing infection can be viewed as quite limited in the long term.

What's Implied

It's what's implied in these essays, and implied by much American institutional Covid public relations, that is the most bothersome, manipulative element of these influence communications. Writers and American institutions are relying on implication to convince people how to behave because the stats themselves, honestly presented in context, aren't going to get the job done.

1) If a writer states infection rates for vaccinated as compared to unvaccinated, and then doesn't even mention correlational variables, he is implying that direct cause-and-effect is all that is in play. Why skip the possible correlational variables? It's misleading.

2) If a writer bundles not masking and being unvaccinated together so as to be able to state that "they" are "dangerous to others," that is purposeful. It is misleading because with these current vaccines and variants, the unvaccinated, once infected, are no more superspreaders than the vaccinated. Bundling "not masking" and "being unvaccinated" as a "they" is misleading. The "they" in this case are two completely different things. Labeling them as "they" is propaganda. 

3) If a writer bundles the argument that "unvaccinated are not superspreaders" with the separate argument "not a pandemic of the nonvaccinated" so as to employ a specific study as a debunking tool, that is manipulative. When the study in question does not actually debunk the "not superspreader" argument, but the author doesn't point that out, he is being purposefully misleading. It is propaganda.

None of these writing decisions are accidental. They are planned and quite carefully executed, a kind of Don King "trickeration" with the goal of making public some statistics, masking others, and having   particular effects on audiences.

Purposeful Propaganda

When phrases are bundled or unbundled in service of specific hoped-for effects, that is purposeful writing. It's writing that emphasizes the writer's end (influencing the audience) over what should be the writer's means (using objective facts to share the truth as the writer knows it).

When writers employ these strategies with a scripted end in mind, this is propaganda. When editors see these obvious manipulations and allow them in service of a smooth, homogeneous narrative, this is also propaganda. 

We are awash in it. It's occurring at the highest levels of American writing and at the most experienced, polished levels of editing. 

Bob Dietz

February 6, 2022

Propaganda Files: How Do You Respond?

The title of the piece is "How Do You Respond When an Anti-Vaxxer Dies of Covid?" James Martin, a Jesuit priest, is the author, and the article was published January 30 by the New York Times. This will be a brief and focused analysis of Father Martin's piece. His essay attempts to do good and addresses what he feels are stressful questions and emotions all too common to the pandemic.

I have issues with certain aspects of Father Martin's essay. While I don't question the good faith of this man of faith, I feel that his informational inclusions and exclusions follow many of the patterns of the previous pieces listed in "The Propaganda Files." My first three critiques have now featured analyses of opinion pieces from Newsweek, CNN, and the New York Times. All three have access to the best writers and editors on the planet. Yet I see problematic writing and editing patterns that scream groupthink.

Headlines often set the framework for these patterns, and I have issues with Father Martin's title. The interesting thing about titles is that they are usually suggested or imposed from above. That is, the writer often doesn't choose the title. To the extent that a title establishes expectations not really representative of the piece, or to the extent that the title misinforms, those effects are often purposefully massaged into place from above.

Precise Language

I think that the importance of using language with precision has been overlooked during this pandemic. When words come to represent much more than what they actually mean, we have entered the arena of influence communication and propaganda.

I'm going to quote the beginning of the seventh paragraph of this piece, then examine it. The paragraph in question starts, "The welter of strong feelings can be disorienting:  We see someone resisting vaccines or masking (which frustrates us); thus endangering others (which angers us); perhaps even endangering ourselves (which frightens us); and then dying -- which should sadden us but, some of us are horrified to discover, doesn't."

Father Martin's presumed good intentions aside, this paragraph is laced with misinformation. Can you spot it? It's obvious, but American culture's red/blue auto-dichotomization has trained us to miss it. 

The problem is simply this. The author labels two very different things together as if they were two sides of the same coin. It's because Americans see and experience almost all aspects of the pandemic through the lens of us/them politics that these things get categorized together. Political meanings provide overwhelming labels, neat categories that have nothing to do with reality.

Resisting vaccines is one thing. Resisting masking is something entirely different. Vaccines carry a real element of both immediate self-risk and long-term currently unknowable self-risk. People's various biological idiosyncrasies can elevate vaccines into the realm of significant self-risk. Masking, however, has no such self-risk attached. Masking protects self and others with no biological risk, known or unknown. Taking vaccines entails measurable risk, even if the culture prefers to not report specifics, and taking vaccines has an unknown long-term risk component, however small. 

As such, wearing masks and taking vaccines are two disparate behaviors. There's not much suggesting they should be tied at the hip, yet here they are, presented by the author as if they are two atoms of the same element.

With Delta and Omicron viral loads, infected vaccinated spread the disease as effectively as infected unvaccinated. This does not get repeated very often by major news networks. With these current variants, the infected unvaccinated are no more "endangering others" or "endangering ourselves" than infected vaccinated are "endangering others" or "endangering ourselves." Why does the author not state this? Is he unaware? Does it make for a better narrative if he ignores this?

If I try to answer the whys of what the author chooses to not mention, I begin with a couple simple, minimally conspiratorial ideas. I don't really think these are the crux of the problem, but I'll start here anyway. First, perhaps cognitive dissonance makes it easier to label people into discrete good and bad categories -- the responsible and caring versus the irresponsible and uncaring. Maybe it's easier for people to stereotype and process fewer variables during this time of high stress and social rules outside the experience of most Americans.

Or perhaps it's a variation of this, an inability to tolerate ambiguity. Categorize a bunch of behaviors as appropriate because they somehow "go together" even if they're very different. Reduce variables and processing of information. Condense decision-making into black/white reflexes. It makes life easier.

Or Maybe It's Propaganda

Here's what frightens me. Father Martin may have tied resisting masking and resisting vaccines together because he's aware that resisting masking "endangers others," and he's aware that the resisting of vaccines does not do that against current variants. Resisting vaccines puts the resistor at increased risk. Someone resisting vaccines with the current variants is not, once they are infected, a greater risk to others or us than a vaccine lover. 

Perhaps Father Martin or the New York Times editors understood that for the seventh paragraph to pass a fact check, "resisting vaccines or masking" had to include the "or masking." If you extract the "or masking," the paragraph is pure speculation and arguably false.

I would, in normal times, attribute this phrasing to an accident of editing. But really, in writing, there are very few accidents. And I am running into this kind of subtle manipulation quite often these days. Things are implied that are not true, but they make particular Covid-19 narratives hum, and editors go with them.

Back to the Title

Curling back to the title's use of the word "Anti-Vaxxer," I wonder why "Anti-Vaxxer" has been chosen as the word to cover (1) not masking, (2) not social distancing, and (3) not getting vaccinated, which are three very disparate behaviors. Father Martin and the New York Times editors also had a word choice to make regarding "Anti-Vaxxer" in that headline. They could have chosen "Non-vaccinated" or "Vaccine Hesitant," or something else, but they went with the sexiest, most dynamic, most attention-grabbing label, which happens to be a political label. Michael Shermer in contrast, in this month's Skeptic cover headline, went with "Vaccine Hesitant."

Despite our possible preferences to internalize and adopt homogeneous propaganda when under pandemic stress, we need to shake ourselves free from kneejerk categorizations. We need to recognize imprecise, garbled language and categories that serve primarily as political shorthand. Glossing over reality by using foggy language loaded with political dog whistles is not the key to actually seeing that reality or coping with it.

Bob Dietz

February 4, 2022

Brady Retires

Tom Brady retired yesterday. Surprisingly, I have nothing bad to say about him.

I remember Brady at Michigan. The Wolverines kept trying to unseat him as their starting quarterback, but he saved their bacon at crunch time so often that they finally conceded that he was their starter.

Rather than repeating all of Brady's well-known accomplishments, I'll focus on his record against the spread. The following numbers are courtesy of Marc Lawrence's fine annual football magazine, Playbook. Heading into the 2021 season, Brady's career record against the spread was 191-131, which is awesome. Even more awesome was his record as an underdog, a scintillating 41-17 ATS. As a home underdog, get this, he was 11-1 ATS. Coming off a loss, which are crucial games for perennial winning teams, he was 48-22 ATS. 

Being a gambling man, I was aware of these numbers and tried to find spots this season to bet against him, since the value was in going versus. Well, Brady was never an underdog in 2021, so I didn't really have an opportunity. He finished 10-9 ATS for the season.

Brady's retirement comments never mentioned CTE directly, but there was a flavor of awareness to what he said. The older quarterbacks get, the more hits they take. 

Brady called it a day at, if not the height of his abilities, at least an elevation far above most mortal quarterbacks. I doubt that he will return to the game. He doesn't, to use his own words, do anything "half-assed." I suspect that being a retired Tom Brady as husband and father is going to be challenge aplenty. He'll undoubtedly give it his all.

Bob Dietz

February 2, 2022

 

Propaganda Files: Aaron Rodgers (Part One)

The title of the piece we'll examine is "The spectacular rise and fall of Aaron Rodgers." The author is Dean Obeidallah, and the updated version was published January 23 by CNN.

Here's what I won't be doing in this entry. I won't be supporting Aaron Rodgers regarding his use of homeopathy as a path to being "immunized." Homeopathy is junk. I would call it "junk science," but the words "science" and "homeopathy" do not belong in each other's company. There is no mechanism, besides placebo effects, by which homeopathy can work. Whatever The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper would say about homeopathy, my response will be just as harsh. Don't take my word for it, however. Go search the dozens of homeopathy-debunking articles in Michael Shermer's The Skeptic magazine during the last decade. In summary, I am not defending homeopathy.

I am also not defending Rodgers' squirrely use of the word "immunized" in response to presser questions. That was a dishonest attempt at ducking a question. Of course, the fact that nobody at the presser thought to follow up with "What exactly do you mean by 'immunized?'" speaks to the sophistication of the sports press corps (and yes, Sheldon, that was sarcasm).

I don't know much about the author, Dean Obeidallah, but he seems to be trying too hard in this piece. He butchers something obvious, which CNN editors should have caught immediately. The fact that they did not catch it, or caught it and allowed the piece to publish anyway, is damning. It's not like I read this a dozen times. The obvious botch was evident on my initial read. Obeidallah's journalistic whiff is the centerpiece of this entry, and I'll get to it in a minute. First, however, some comments on Obeidallah's approach to the piece.

Axe to Grind

I don't know what issues Obeidallah has with the Green Bay quarterback, and I don't know if they are personal or imposed by CNN management, but the entire piece comes across as a hatchet job. And I'm not an Aaron Rodgers fan (I mean, homeopathy -- c'mon, man). But the author is off the rails on some self-righteous quest to denigrate Rodgers.

The title, for one thing, is ridiculous. Just ridiculous. The author evidently feels that Rodgers should be measuring himself by social media love as opposed to his professional play. There has been no "fall" for Aaron Rodgers except for social media grief. Green Bay's loss to San Fran had little to do Rodgers' performance. He was fine. Not ultra-sharp, but fine. I say this as someone who has gambled on football professionally for 40 years. There was no Rodgers professional "fall" because the Packers simply lost a game. 

Now, if Obeidallah is talking about some Rodgers social media "fall," well, unless Obeidallah has numbers to share regarding percentage of positive versus negative tweets, emails, and so on, then he's just spouting his opinion with not much to back it up. In terms of writing, nothing is easier than sampling social media and cherry-picking whatever you like to make a case for whatever you want to say. Plugging in this and that social media quote to make your case is lazy writing. It's junk "writing" like homeopathy is junk "science." 

Propping up an article with cherry-picked quotes is easy and manipulative. If you have social media statistics, share them (not that Rodgers would give a damn). But don't select quotes and slap them together to invent a narrative. That's cheap, junk writing. Basically, the author is using his personal filter to quote the most useful-to-his-spiel social media content, and the author gets to wash his hands of direct responsibility under the guise of "I'm quoting others."

CNN's Journalistic Botch

Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, so I wouldn't have singled out this piece for analysis. Shrillness of tone and righteousness aren't that interesting to me. But what CNN allowed, which I will point out shortly, is either a Journalism 101 botch or cynically manipulative writing with an end justifying the means. I'm going to take the high road for a while and theorize a botch. If Obeidallah didn't catch himself, any CNN editor should have. This was a grade school journalism flub.

I'm going to quote the paragraphs in question, then examine them closely. Obeidallah says, "But instead, Rodgers fumbled badly in late December by again sharing misleading information about Covid. While on a radio show, Rodgers slammed NFL protocols designed to keep players safe as unmerited, saying, 'It makes no sense to me to continue to spread this narrative that nonvaccinated players are more dangerous or these superspreaders, which hasn't been proven to be true.'"

Okay, digest that, and we'll get right back to it. Obeidallah continues, "He (Rodgers) added, 'It's obviously not a pandemic of the unvaxxed.'"

Obeidallah then writes, "In reality, a CDC study last fall found that unvaccinated people were about 4.5 times more likely to be infected with Covid-19 and 10 times more likely to be hospitalized. The NFL's protocols were simply designed to save lives, not play politics."

Alright, I'm going to pause for a moment. I'm going to assume that many if not most readers, like CNN editors, find nothing immediately wrong with Obeidallah's comments regarding the Rodgers' quotes. I am going to do my best Dragnet's Joe Friday imitation and slowly walk through why this is a journalistic and writing fail.

Debunking Obeidallah

First of all, this piece was published January 23, 2022, which means that the dominant strains of Covid in the United States are Delta and Omicron. This matters for a number of reasons. Foremost, it matters because viral load for the vaccinated who are infected with these strains is roughly the same as viral load for the unvaccinated who are infected. This wasn't the case for the original strain. So an unvaccinated person, once infected with Delta or Omicron and in contact with someone, is no more likely to transmit the disease than a vaccinated person. There is some debate, still ongoing, about length of infectiousness varying with Omicron. The debate is whether the vaccinated tend to be infectious for a day or two less than the unvaccinated. The CDC has recently gone quiet regarding that argument. The motive for investigating the possible difference was that the United States had started sending people back to work after five days while most other countries stuck to the 10-day quarantine formula. The U.S. was trying to add leverage to the case for getting vaccinated while also arguing that the vaccinated were not terribly infectious after five days.

What's known is that an unvaccinated infected person has a viral load similar to that of a vaccinated infected person. Just because someone is vaccinated does not mean that, if infected, they spread the disease less. Thus, Rodgers is correct when he says that infected nonvaccinated are no more dangerous than infected vaccinated. This is correct. Vaccinations do not prevent you from transmitting the disease. The unvaccinated are no more superspreaders of the current dominant variants than the vaccinated.

I'll get into R-values another day, but the fact is that we have no public R-values for vaccinated versus unvaccinated infected. There's likely a reason for that, but for now I want to focus on this piece.

Here's the journalistic botch. Obeidallah quotes Rodgers, then follows with his, "In reality, a CDC study last fall found that unvaccinated people were about 4.5 times more likely to be infected with Covid and 10 times more likely to be hospitalized." That line by Obeidallah is a complete non-sequitur to Rodgers, "It makes no sense to me to continue to spread this narrative that nonvaccinated players are more dangerous or these superspreaders, which hasn't been proven to be true." Let me repeat this. Rodgers was correct. Obeidallah's response, to the extent it's meant as a rebuttal to what Rodgers said, is simply a non-sequitur. Rodgers never said anything at all about the likelihood of unvaccinated being infected or anything about hospitalization rates. He simply stated that infected unvaccinated were not more dangerous or more likely superspreaders than infected vaccinated.

There are nuances here that I'll briefly examine and then delve into in a later entry. For example, if it's true that unvaccinated are 4.5 times more likely to be infected, how does that affect the overall context? Well, the likelihood of people being infected or not infected is the result of many, many variables. If the vaccine efficacy rates, which are modest for Delta and Omicron, are correct, then other variables are responsible for the 4.5 times number, if indeed other studies have verified the 4.5. Also, since Dr. Fauci stated on January 13 that "just about everybody" in the U.S. would be infected at some point, that 4.5 times figure is largely irrelevant and may be a statistical snapshot of a particular time many months ago that no longer applies.

More Obeidallah Writing Choices

If Obeidallah had simply followed Rodgers, "It's obviously not a pandemic of the unvaxxed," with the CDC study info, then one could argue that Obeidallah had a point regarding that specific Rodgers line, but that point would rely on one's definition of "pandemic of the unvaxxed." Instead, however, Obeidallah pasted the two Rodgers quotes (one about "not superspreaders" and the other "not a pandemic of unvaxxed") back-to-back, which means that the Obeidallah CDC lines are placed as a rebuttal to both of Rodgers' quotes. This is not a small point.

Obeidallah and CNN's editors chose to place these lines as they did. Had they not meant to attack both of Rodgers' lines by referencing the CDC study, the first Rodgers line about superspreaders would have been placed somewhere else. By implying that the first Rodgers line was somehow debunked by the CDC study, Obeidallah was being dishonest. The CDC study did not contradict the first Rodgers statement in any way.

Obeidallah had every opportunity to mention viral loads for unvaccinated infected being similar to viral loads for vaccinated infected. He and CNN chose to not do that. When writers use non-sequiturs posing as rebuttals and they skip something like viral load info, well, that equals propaganda.

"Pandemic of the Unvaxxed"

The CDC study quoted by Obeidallah opens up the debate about what is meant by a "pandemic of the unvaxxed." The reality is that the unvaccinated may be at more risk for getting infected on any given day, but Dr. Fauci has said we're all going to eventually be infected, so that doesn't really clarify a difference long-term between vaccinated and unvaccinated. What's clear is that the unvaccinated are at much more risk of hospitalization. If you want to define "pandemic" as "who is hospitalized," then it's accurate right now to say it's a "pandemic of the unvaxxed." But if "pandemic of the unvaxxed" is supposed to imply that the unvaccinated are predominant spreaders of Covid, that is, as Rodgers says, unproven. And likely wrong.

Conclusion

I cannot believe that CNN's editors allowed the structure of Obeidallah's piece. The CDC study quotes are meant to anchor the Rodgers-is-obviously-wrong argument, but they are largely a non-sequitur to the gist of what Rodgers actually said. 

What's missing from the piece are any discussions of vaccinated/unvaccinated viral loads, transmissibility sameness of vaccinated/unvaccinated with Delta and Micron, and any speculation regarding R-values. Why are these key elements of the discussion missing in action?

The piece is a Rodgers hatchet job, but I don't care about that. What concerns me are the decisions made as to what to say and not say about Covid. When you consider the choices as to what was said, what was skipped, and the tricky sequencing of particular sentences for effect rather than truth value, the overall result is propaganda.

Bob Dietz

February 1, 2022