Too good to check
Bias.
Related highlights:
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A journalism advocacy group has egg on its face following its decision to invite and then disinvite a phony “whistleblower” to star in its annual data reporting conference.
Investigative Reporters and Editors had scheduled Rebekah Jones to appear Wednesday as a featured speaker on a panel titled “When doing the right thing gets you fired.” Jones claims, without evidence, that she was fired from the Florida Department of Health because she refused to manipulate the state’s COVID-19 data.
However, Jones, whom Florida media, National Public Radio, CNN, MSNBC, and even the New York Times catapulted to minor celebrity, has now been removed from the conference’s agenda.
"After further consideration and gathering additional information, IRE staff determined that the panel would not meet our educational goals for the conference," spokeswoman Denise Malan told me, declining to go into further detail.
An update that appeared briefly on the Investigative Reporters and Editors website read, “[National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting] panels are designed to focus on issues involving training and education for data journalists.”
It added, “Because of some unresolved issues surrounding this case, we believe it would be difficult to maintain the original focus of the panel, so it has been removed from the schedule.”
By “some unresolved issues surrounding this case,” the group presumably is referring to the fact that the Florida Department of Health maintains that it fired Jones in May of last year not because of any vast conspiracy but because of chronic insubordination. Or perhaps the note explaining Jones’s canceled appearance is referring to the felony charge brought against the “whistleblower” this year by state law enforcement officials.
Authorities say the ex-health department employee broke into Florida’s “emergency messaging system multiple times and downloaded a spreadsheet with the contact information of more than 19,000 Floridians who provided email addresses and phone numbers to the state ‘for emergency contact purposes,’” according to the Tampa Bay Times.
The state also says Jones, who raised more than half a million dollars online after launching her own Florida COVID-19 tracker, used the emergency messaging system last year to send a personal note to some 1,750 public employees, urging them to “speak up before another 17,000 people are dead.”
“You know this is wrong,” the Nov. 10 message reads. “You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.”
It’s for the best that Investigative Reporters and Editors removed Jones from an otherwise professional and serious journalism conference, but one can’t help but wonder why she was invited in the first place.
For starters, Jones’s core claim to fame, that she has inside information showing Florida is cooking its COVID-19 numbers, is an outright falsehood. By her own calculations, which basically involve her misreading and manipulating publicly available data, the number of “all Florida COVID-19 deaths” stands at 31,696. She gets to this number by combining the total number of cases detected in both residents and non-residents, which goes against the CDC’s recommendation that both groups be counted separately. Florida’s official tally, which follows the CDC’s guidance on tracking state infections and fatalities, shows that the number of Floridians who have died from COVID-19 stands at about 31,135. That’s a difference of 561, a disparity of less than 2%. In other words, Jones’s claim to have uncovered a vast conspiracy doesn’t hold up even when she juices the numbers with her own made-up methodology.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, Jones has yet to produce evidence to support her claim that she was fired from the Florida Health Department because she refused to comply with secretive orders to manipulate the state's coronavirus numbers to support Gov. Ron DeSantis’s push to reopen. None at all.
Yet, Jones was slated anyway to appear on an Investigative Reporters and Editors panel titled “When doing the right thing gets you fired.” What “right” thing did she do, and what evidence is there that she was fired for it?
Third, it is unclear whether the journalism group was aware at the time of the invite that Jones, the self-declared “scientist” who claims to be an expert in infectious disease data tracking, has no relevant formal background in healthcare reporting, healthcare data collection, virology, or even website design. She double majored in geography and journalism. She also has a Master's in geography.
Lastly, there is the uncomfortable fact that Jones has changed her story, including claiming recently that Florida has done “better than expected” in terms of managing the pandemic, which undercuts her entire narrative.
This is to say nothing of Jones's personal issues, including her arrests for trespassing, theft, and resisting arrest, charges she sexually cyberharassed a student with whom she engaged in an extramarital affair when she worked at Florida State University, and the fact that the Florida Department of Health is the third employer to give her the boot. These issues are not quite germane to the question of whether she's telling the truth about Florida’s coronavirus data, but they still raise serious doubts about her reliability as a self-proclaimed “truth-teller.”
Everything mentioned above, by the way, was known well before the journalism conference this week.
So, the question remains: Why was Jones invited in the first place?
The answer, it seems, is both simple and sad: It’s because her story was too good to check.
It’s the same reason why entertainment blogger Michael Wolff was feted by the press in 2018 for his stupid White House “tell-all,” Fire and Fury, despite his reputation as a notorious fabulist.
It’s the same reason why convicted felon Michael Avenatti appeared on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC a combined 147 times between March 7-15 in 2018, despite his obvious character flaws and shady business dealings.
It’s the same reason why unhinged conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch was given space in the New York Times in 2017to speculate wildly about former President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow.
It’s the same reason why some in the press made that idiot Grim Reaper lawyer, Daniel Uhlfelder, into a minor cable news celebrity, even though he is obviously a partisan clown and troll.
If we have learned nothing else from the past five years, it's that there's a significant subset of journalists who will repeat anything they hear so long as it confirms their biases, even if it comes directly from obvious cranks and lunatics.