Sad to See a Journalist Pass Along Bad Work as Journalism

I’ve respected Matt Taibbi’s direct work, but a recent third-party video he promoted through his newsletter is an example of the worst cynical manipulation out there.

I’ve held Matt Taibbi in respect for years. His reporting during the global financial crisis and so much of the nonsense large corporations were performing was exemplary. Although many have derided his work on the Twitter Files, there was some real value in there, and the attacks on him by people in power, down to a carefully timed IRS investigation that led to nothing, were vehement and a sign that he was digging up material that many didn’t want unearthed.

In that context, I was terribly disappointed in his promotion of a specific Matt Orfalea video. Here is Taibbi’s intro:

“Look on the WHO webpage and you’ll see a count of over 769 million confirmed cases of Covid-19, above 6,955,141 (as of this writing) cumulative deaths. This is still a serious mortality rate, but as Matt Orfalea’s damning new video above shows, far short of what the same organization estimated at pandemic’s start. We were told experts estimated a 3.4% death rate, which scared the pants off a lot of people, leading to fears of interaction with workers delivering food and all sorts of other behaviors.”

As I’m not a paid subscriber, I can’t see what he wrote after this. But I’d be hard-pressed to see what he might have said that could have balanced having shared the video as something valuable unless he went through and debunked Orfalea’s approach.

The WHO March 3, 2020 Mortality Estimate

The video supposedly broke open malfeasance on the part of the World Health Organization (WHO) when it made its 3.4% mortality rate estimation on March 3, 2020, and the incompetence of anyone who challenged Trump’s views by trying to use some scientists to “prove” that Trump was right. He wasn’t and neither was any scientist who tried to project an absolute answer at a time of questionable data, the collection thereof, and the fast pace of events.

The Orfalea video attempts to mock all those who took the side of WHO over Donald Trump’s March 4 pronouncement on Sean Hannity’s program that he thought the mortality rate was probably far under 1%. “Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number,” he said. “Now, this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this, and it's very mild. They will get better very rapidly. They don't even see a doctor. They don't even call a doctor.”

A hunch, fine. Based on a highly slanted sample of people who talked to the country’s chief executive at the time. And many people on media immediately jumped on the remark because, at that point, many (not only television media figures) were ready to sneer at Trump for any reason.

But sneering in retrospect at anyone for not knowing the “right” answer at the time is unhelpful. If the attempt was to show how all sorts of people took up positions that they couldn’t reasonably support, that would have been fine.

But Orfalea arranged the clips without context in as classic a case of misusing journalism to push an agenda as I’ve seen. It’s also an example of why, as a journalist, you have to be careful when quoting someone and check what you’re viewing or reading to see if there are any big problems that jump out.

Early Estimates, Limited Information

I’ll assume that anyone sufficiently interested will click on the link at the top of this piece and follow on to the video.

In his video, Orfalea quoted Fauci as saying that the Covid-19 death rate could be well under 1%. That Fauci quote was in a New England Journal of Medicine editorial in which he was one of the authors. It was also dated March 26, 2020. Here is part of what they wrote: “If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

Ultimately, the rates may not have climbed as high as previous cases of SARS or MERS, but the easy of transmission and the vast number of cases would lead to huge numbers of fatalities, making the potential triviality the U.S.-based authors seemed to convey look ludicrous in retrospect.

Given publishing times, they would likely have written a week or possibly two in advance of the March 26 publishing date. On March 21, the weekly deaths in the US were 586. By April 18, they jumped to 17,201 per week, dropped again but only to around 3,800, and eventually spiked to 25,974 on the week of Jan. 9, 2021 (CDC historical data). Fauci and co-authors could not have known what would happen, so were too optimistic.

Leaving Out What Doesn’t Make Your Point

Then there was a video clip of Dr. Stephen Redd testifying before the Senate on March 4, 2020. Orfalea edits the video to show Ted Cruz, who chaired the session, asking Redd what the mortality rate was and then Redd immediately answering 0.5% to 1%. Here is the beginning of Redd’s answer that landed on the cutting room floor: “There’s a number that I could give you, but I would say that, as more cases occur and we gain more experience, that number is likely to change.” He mentioned a number of questions that had come up early on about the reliability of the data, which would at that point eventually prove inadequate, meaning that the accuracy of an estimate was unknown. Only then did he provide a number, which would, for that period, turn out to be wrong.

In the Kim Iverson Show appearance of Dr Jay Bhattacharya, the researcher mentioned the study he did — in April 2020. But when in April? Too early to see the sudden jump? Possibly. And adequate science wouldn’t make bold statements as events were only starting to unfold. To question whether the WHO was correct so you wouldn’t get fooled again, certainly. But to engage in a game of “I told you so” after so many have died? No.

The video quoted Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis and his study that was first posted on April 17, 2020, which, given the amount of time necessary for data analysis would mean the data had been collected weeks before. And Orfalea didn’t mention the massive criticism that eventually came from the scientific community (wired.com/story/prophet-of-scientific-r…) that was beyond the use of “evidence” so early in the pandemic that it should have been questioned. He had to have done the research in very early April, being generous, and likely March, so unable to know what was really going on, and some of the other criticisms of his methodology were even more fundamentally scathing.

Dangers of Advocacy Journalism

This video wasn’t journalism, muckraking, or an angry denunciation based strongly on facts of something that it deeply wrong. It was a deliberate misuse of video clips without addressing the historical context and the limitations of what could be known at the time. I’m surprised that Matt Taibbi ran this without doing the pretty basic checking I just did. I’m assuming he had a bad day/week/month/year, and I’m sympathetic as to the often-ridiculous attacks he’s faced from powerful forces. But he shouldn’t be promoting this video. It’s bad on the face and only hands ammunition to many who would like to attack him.

By the way, according to WHO data, the cumulative global deathrate is a touch under 1% and just over 1% in the U.S. but this is long after the high initial waves, the existence of vaccines, and strong actions taken with initial shutdowns to stop what would otherwise could have been a runaway train. And the almost 7 million global deaths that are a consequence of the virus. With the U.S. being the country with the single highest number, at 1,127,152. Arguing who was right in early March and ignoring the many issues that led to these deaths is the real mistake.