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
