On Wednesday, Variety published the headline: “J.K. Rowling Denies Inviting Jeffrey Epstein to ‘Harry Potter & The Cursed Child’ Broadway Opening, DOJ Docs Show He Was Turned Away at Door.” One wonders why the editors decided they needed the first part of that, which is accusatory in tone—even though the second part acquits her!
Luckily for Rowling, the new information, made available as part of the federal government’s mandatory Epstein files disclosure—3 million more pages became available last Friday—knocks down this particular smear campaign. But here’s my question: What if Epstein, a schemer and a charlatan whose entire shtick was worming his way into the company of rich and famous people for the purposes of manipulating and/or blackmailing them, had somehow snuck into the show?
If the response to this latest batch of Epstein files is any indication, Rowling would have been referred to as one of those notable names brought down by the Epstein files—guilty, by insinuation, of complicity in the most infamous sexual predator’s appalling crimes. Rowling, of course, is already persona non grata among progressives, owing to her views on transgender issues, which are perfectly mainstream but toxically unpopular amongst the left. But that’s the problem: The Epstein files have become an exercise in ax-grinding among partisan actors and knee-jerk critics of people who found themselves in Epstein’s orbit—wealthy entrepreneurs, academics, the chattering class, etc.
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This is not to excuse the appalling judgment of those who consciously and deliberately continued to court Epstein’s favor even after the full extent of his depravity was well-known. Such figures include Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky, Steve Bannon, and Stacey Plaskett. Bannon and Plaskett, in particular, sought Epstein’s political counsel right up until the end of his life. Chomsky gave Epstein advice on beating the charges against him. Gates is accused of despicable behavior, which he denies.
The best thing that can be said about the release of the Epstein files is that it sheds light on the incredibly poor discernment of several individuals who are influential in public policy. This is useful information that the public has a right to know.
But the release of the Epstein files has also meant that millions of documents containing thinly-sourced accusations, misleading information, and outright falsehoods are now flooding social media, giving a veneer of confirmation to rumors, gossip, and lies. This is very much by design, since Congress—by a vote of 427–1 in the House—opted to disclose everything, including transcripts of investigations, and reports that were never deemed truthful.
For example, the latest batch of docs prompted Keith Edwards, a Democratic strategist, to post on X the claim that Epstein is the one who introduced President Donald Trump to Melania is now “confirmed.”
The claim is not confirmed. Just because someone said this, and an investigator made note of it, does not mean it’s true. On the contrary, Donald and Melania have both denied that it’s true, and The Daily Beast was previously forced to retract the claim because the official timeline of events contradicts it.
So here we have a clear case of bad-faith political actors weaponizing the Epstein files to tarnish their political enemies, even though the new documents don’t prove anything about Trump. Indeed, for partisan figures who have been obsessed with the notion that the Epstein files would demonstrate Trump’s complicity in Epstein’s sex crimes, the most stunning revelation should be that there’s no evidence of this whatsoever. There’s also no evidence that the Clintons were involved in an international cabal of pedophiles.
No one’s priors are being reconsidered, however. On the contrary, those who were interested in the Epstein files mostly because they wanted evidence that their political enemies were child rapists are now mostly claiming that such proof is still being withheld. Much like people who believe the moon-landing was fake and the CIA killed John F. Kennedy, no amount of evidence to the contrary will dissuade them.
Initially, this category included many of the MAGA faithful, who earnestly believed they were about to unmask a global pedophile ring involving the Clintons. More recently, the Epstein files disclosure became a Democratic crusade, as it dawned on liberals that Trump had been friends with Epstein, too, and perhaps complicit in his crimes. Again, there’s nothing to incriminate Trump, and there’s nothing to incriminate the Clintons. Rep. James Comer (R–Ky.) won’t take no for an answer, of course. He has successfully pressured the Clintons to testify before Congress about Epstein.
It’s worth repeating that the real villain of the Epstein files is Epstein himself, a vicious sexual predator who abused underage girls. He is likely not the only one, and there are other individuals in Epstein’s orbit who reached settlements with accusers.
But the Epstein files do not contain a great deal of new evidence of sex crimes among Epstein’s friends, associates, and acquaintances. Yet everyone whose name appears in the Epstein files is now being treated like an exposed sex criminal. This includes hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, who appears in a photo alongside three young people, possibly on Epstein’s island. On X, high-follower accounts cited the photo as evidence that Dubin had sexually assaulted those children, who were probably procured for him by Epstein.
Except that’s not the case at all. Those are Dubin’s own kids!
That’s Glenn Dubin. Those are his own kids. This whole thing is becoming an insane moral panic along the lines of the Satanic child abuse panic, recovered memory, campus rape hysteria, and all of that.
Epstein was a predator, and people who kept in contact with him showed… https://t.co/1mFpPA8UXL
This is a witch hunt mentality; in fact, it’s reminiscent of the public panic over sexual misconduct on college campuses throughout the 2010s, in which junk statistics and one-sided journalism helped advance an utterly false notion that elite universities were a “hunting ground” for young women. The idea that scores of rapists hunted college women, lured them into attics, and attacked them during depraved rituals was the thrust of the infamous Rolling Stone hoax story, which was subsequently debunked.
Moreover, the release of the files may be setting a dangerous precedent. It is incredibly unusual for the federal government to unseal investigative records, which contain reports that lack corroboration. This is an unusual case, and there’s certainly an argument to be made that public confidence in the justice system requires disclosure here. But I can’t help but consider the statement by Rep. Clay Higgins (R–La.), the lone no vote on Epstein disclosure.
“If enacted in its current form, this type of broad reveal of criminal investigative files, released to a rabid media, will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt,” he wrote.
(We haven’t taped either yet. Stay tuned later this week!)
Freed Up, in case you are wondering, is my brand new show with Christian Britschgi, Reason‘s resident salmon-wrangler and housing reporter. Unlike Reason‘s other video products, we are not actively trying to make you any smarter or better informed about the news—though we expect, as a side effect of watching, you may accrue information about Star Wars, Chinese history, Pokemon, working out, and/or the Catholic Church.
Considers this our desperate attempt to capitalize on the success of all those two dudes hanging out podcasts. And we are inviting you to join us!
Two casting controversies took social media by storm this week, and they are both movies I’d like to see. First, conservatives were mad about Lupita Nyong’o, a black woman, portraying Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. (Elon Musk quipped that Nolan had lost his integrity.) It should be noted that this casting rumor isn’t even confirmed; all we know for sure is that Nyong’o will appear in the movie. Second, some liberals were irate that Jacob Elordi is portraying Heathcliff in the new Wuthering Heights movie. In the source material, author Emily Brontë describes Heathcliff as “dark-skinned,” whereas Elordi is fair-skinned. This is rather silly, though. For Bronte, a woman of Victorian England, “dark-skinned” could have meant anything from African or Indian to Spanish or Italian. (Elordi is of Spanish descent, for the record.) Moreover, though Heathcliff is definitely lowborn and an outcast owing to his origins—and that affects his temperament and the manner in which he is treated by the other characters—his specific racial identity is not particularly important to the story.
This is insane. Heathcliff is not a “person of color” in the modern sense. He is described as a “dark skinned gipsy,” and what that means is ambiguous. For Emily Bronte, Spanish people would have been dark-skinned. (The collective white identity did not exist until recently.)… https://t.co/DNSC71MuYA
As for Helen of Troy, in Greek mythology, she emerged from an egg after her father, Zeus, mated with a swan. It’s essential to depict her as very beautiful, but she does not need to be a fair-skinned white woman like Diane Kruger, who played her in the 2004 Troy movie. (That movie was pretty great, in my opinion, and I definitely liked Kruger as Helen!) Kruger isn’t Greek; neither is Matt Damon, who’s portraying Odysseus this time around—but no one is mad about that. It’s just Nyong’o generating the anger.
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by Reason senior editor Robby Soave to share the stories they believe didn’t receive sufficient media attention in 2025. Each panelist selected a story from 2025 in the categories of politics, private industry, global affairs, and culture that deserves a closer look as we head into 2026.
0:00—Political stories that deserved more attention
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie are joined by Reason senior editor Robby Soave to discuss President Donald Trump’s unexpectedly warm White House meeting with New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and why he now describes the socialist’s agenda as “practical.” They examine what this moment suggests about Trump’s shifting political instincts, how it fits with his recent comments on tariffs and the state of the economy, and what the disbanding of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) signals about his governing approach.
The group then looks at Trump’s attempt to influence the pending Warner Bros. merger and the broader media landscape, including worries about misinformation and new reporting that major MAGA influencer accounts on X are operating from overseas. The panel also considers the implications of six Democrats telling service members they do not have to obey illegal orders and the ensuing backlash. A listener asks how to reconcile consumer benefits from intense market competition with the need to preserve incentives for long-term innovation and investment.
0:00—DOGE disbands
4:02—Trump meets Mamdani in the oval office
14:50—White House seeks influence over Warner Bros. merger
27:58—Red Scare, Oliva Nuzzi, and cancel culture
38:46—Listener question on preserving incentives in a market economy
51:29—Democrats encourage military not to follow illegal orders
For critics of the mainstream media—myself very much included—it is tempting to always feel some kinship toward independent media commentators, reporters, and influencers. After all, we have lived through an era in which the skeptics of establishment media institutions were proven right again and again: from the hysterically off-base mainstream contentions regarding Russiagate and Hunter Biden’s laptop to insufficient scrutiny of official claims about the COVID-19 pandemic. Score one (or more) for the outsiders.
The complication, however, is quite obvious: Just because expert, mainstream, legacy media institutions made serious errors, it does not follow that every contrarian, fringe, or conspiratorial idea is automatically correct. It’s a mistake to dismiss the cranks entirely; it’s also a mistake to uncritically accept everything they say.
Enter Candace Owens. The independent podcasting giant certainly has a lot of outlandish opinions—and she utterly fails to back them up. This includes everything from her fervent, incorrect belief that Brigitte Macron is a man to her assertion that her friend, the conservative media giant Charlie Kirk, was assassinated by someone other than Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer.
To discuss this theory, Owens recently appeared on CNN and was eviscerated by correspondent Elle Reeve, who pointed out that Owens had no evidence for her claims that the messages sent by Robinson—in which he appeared to confess to the murder—were fake. In fact, Reeve corrected Owens on a relevant factual point about whether the underlying messages were texts or Discord chats.
Owens then asserted that the mainstream media are uninterested in pursuing the true story of the Kirk assassination; Reeve countered that of course a reporter would want to blow the lid off such a cover-up if any evidence could be marshaled in support of it.
Declining to take the word of law enforcement at face value is a useful tendency, and even a libertarian one. At the same time, there is no reason whatsoever to disbelieve the information provided by the FBI establishing Robinson’s complicity in the murder. Owens offers nothing but her gut feeling that Robinson’s confession was faked by the FBI.
CNN handled the interview correctly. At no point did Reeve interrupt Owens and accuse her of spreading misinformation, or call for her to be censored, or urge social media to deplatform her. She merely challenged Owens to demonstrate a shred of evidence backing up her claims. That’s the right way to handle such grifters.
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie are joined by Reason reporter Eric Boehm to discuss Paramount’s $150 million acquisition of The Free Press and Bari Weiss’ promotion to editor in chief at CBS News. They examine whether this represents a backlash to “woke” media, and debate if the success of outlets on Substack and YouTube shows that journalism may be entering a period of entrepreneurship and renewal rather than decline.
The panel then turns to President Donald Trump’s controversial National Guard deployments to cities like Portland and Chicago, weighing its constitutional limits and political consequences. They also cover the leaked texts from Virginia’s Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones about shooting his Republican rival, and the fallout for Democrats in a critical election year. A listener asks the editors to reflect on whether libertarians should focus more on defending freedom as an end in itself or on steering society toward specific outcomes. Finally, the conversation touches on Argentina’s economic crisis and what it means for libertarians.
0:00—Bari Weiss named editor in chief at CBS News
13:32—Consolidation and the changing media landscape
20:58—Federal troops deployed to Chicago and Portland
38:17—Democrat attorney general candidate fanatisizes about political violence
48:07—Listener question on prioritizing process over purpose
56:37—What Argentina’s bailout means for libertarianism
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BetterHelp connects you with mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise—so you can find the right fit. Your well-being is worth it. October 10th is World Mental Health Day, and this year BetterHelp is saying thank you to the therapists who make a difference every day—professionals who show up, listen, and help millions of people take steps forward in their mental health journeys. Visit http://betterhelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.
What is the Jeffrey Epstein story, and what does it mean? Just asking questions. Today’s conversation is with journalist Michael Tracey, who has been picking apart what he calls the “Epstein mythology” for the past several weeks over at his Substack. In short, he thinks 90 percent of what most people believe about this case is false, and that this is mostly the fault of credulous establishment journalists who chose to uncritically publish alleged victims’ narratives and ignore inconvenient facts, as well as opportunistic alternative media figures who spun the story into a sprawling conspiracy for political and personal gain.
Tracey has been attacked and on the attack, and you’ll hear him air his many grievances with other journalists, lawyers, and politicians in this conversation, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.), whom he calls out as his “enemy” because she instructed police to remove him from an Epstein-related press conference after he asked a question about an accusers’ credibility in Washington D.C. this week.
The goal of this episode was to move beyond the personality clashes and egos and wild speculation and drill down into what it is we actually know and don’t know about Jeffrey Epstein. But as we talked, it became clear that this kind of detached analysis just wasn’t going to be possible, that the egos and the clashes and the agendas remain intricately tied up with how this story has unfolded. The incentives faced by establishment journalists, podcasters, accusers, and politicians have shaped this story and our understanding of it, mostly for the worse.
But in the marketplace of ideas, there is also a countervailing incentive to move against the herd and correct the record. And maybe a turbulent and confrontational personality like Michael Tracey–who admits in this interview that he’s “wired differently”–was exactly what was needed to break taboos, ask uncomfortable questions, and push for real disclosure about the nature of the story that has loomed over American politics for at least a decade.
Regardless of how one feels about Tracey’s tone or the soundness of his analysis, anyone who purports to care about this story should at least engage with the questions he’s asking and start asking their own questions about what the Epstein story really means.
This conversation has been edited for time and clarity.
When Vice President Kamala Harris appeared in conversation with Oprah Winfrey last month, she dropped a tidbit that may have come as a surprise. “If somebody breaks in my house,” she said, “they’re getting shot.”
It was, or at least it should have been, one of the more relatable things she’s ever said. Whatever your politics—Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Jill Stein groupie, etc.—the right to protect your life and your family when threatened with potentially deadly aggression is something so basic as to transcend partisanship.
It’s a bit less relatable, however, when considering Harris’ past advocacy against other people accessing the same type of protection she has.
She provided more specifics during her recent 60 Minutes interview. “I have a Glock, and I’ve had it for quite some time,” she said. “My background is in law enforcement. And, so there you go.”
That admission should hardly be a bomb drop. But it’s difficult to reconcile with her support, as San Francisco District Attorney, for Proposition H, which banned the city’s residents from merely possessing (as well as manufacturing or selling) handguns. The ordinance passed in 2005, and a California appeals court threw it out three years later.
Harris hasn’t said exactly how long she’s owned her firearm. Yet if it’s been for “quite some time,” as she said, then one can reasonably assume that her owning a gun overlapped with her view that the state should curtail others from doing the same. But the next detail she provided—that she was in law enforcement—possibly provides some context for her position, at least attitudinally, as Proposition H provided gun ownership exemptions for law enforcement, military, and security guards.
Not long after, Harris would also go on to file a brief in District of Columbia v. Heller, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled D.C.’s handgun ban unconstitutional and established that people have a right to own a firearm for self-defense, divorced from military service.
That was not the outcome Harris sought in the brief she submitted. Citing past jurisprudence at the time, she said that “the Second Amendment provides only a militia-related right to bear arms,” “the Second Amendment does not apply to legislation passed by state or local governments,” and “the restrictions bear a reasonable relationship to protecting public safety and thus do not violate a personal constitutional right.” Had that view prevailed, the handgun ban in D.C., where she now lives, would have remained intact.
This position may be a bit easier to reconcile. “I don’t think there’s anything inherently hypocritical or duplicitous about someone owning a gun while also taking the position that the Constitution doesn’t protect the right to own a gun,” says Clark Neily, who successfully argued Heller as co-counsel, via email. “For example, many thoughtful people think women should be able to have an abortion—and have had or would have an abortion themselves—but nevertheless don’t believe there’s a constitutional right to an abortion.”
The abortion comparison is an apt one, and it’s an interesting one to interrogate when considering Harris believes the U.S. Constitution promises a right to one, despite there being no text touching the topic directly. She has not struggled, meanwhile, to argue over the years that gun ownership should be heavily regulated, the Second Amendment notwithstanding.
Neily is still correct, though, that these things are not necessarily inconsistent logically. But it’s still worth noting the practical implications: Had the Supreme Court ruled her way, the law would prohibit the people in the city where she lives from having the very sort of gun she now openly acknowledges she keeps to protect her safety—a contradiction that a journalist should be interested in cross-examining at some point during one of her campaign trail interviews, should she continue to give them.
Harris’ interests as a prosecutor, it seems, directly contradicted her interests as a private person, and the interests of the little people generally. That discrepancy, if anything, is cause for introspection.
Having survived a second assassination attempt in as many months, former President Donald Trump knows precisely whom to blame: his political enemies, the media, and the Democrats. (Three sides of the same coin.)
“He believed the rhetoric of [President Joe] Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump told Fox News—referencing Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old would-be assassin who was apprehended on Sunday after camping out at the Trump International Golf Course. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country—both from the inside and out.”
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Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), has said similar things.
“No one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months,” said Vance. “I think that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric or somebody is going to get hurt.”
It’s true that the other side increasingly talks about Trump in apocalyptic terms: a threat to democracy, fascist, Hitler, etc. But Trump’s own rhetoric is often quite inflammatory. He’s called Harris a Marxist, a communist, and, for good measure, a fascist. And back when he was a prominent Never Trumper, Vance himself called Trump every awful name in the book.
Political figures often use heated rhetoric, make unfair comparisons, and aggressively inflate the views, statements, and character of their political enemies. This has gone on forever. Whether it exacerbates the problem of political violence is extremely unclear. Republicans once claimed to understand this, and correctly pushed back on Democrats and media figures who lazily and falsely blamed the right for inspiring the shooting of former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D–Ariz.). It’s demoralizing to see Trump and Vance easily succumb to the temptation to do the exact same thing.
Calls to tamp down on inflammatory rhetoric are fine, but the public should be wary of attempts to draw any causal lines between heated language and real-world violence. As always, it’s important to remember that there is very, very little political violence in the U.S. Americans are far more likely to engage in violence against one another due to tensions in the workplace or the home—politically-motivated hatred is a component of shockingly few crimes.
I’m joined by Amber Duke to discuss the second Trump assassination attempt, the pet-eating controversy, Hillary Clinton’s idea to criminalize the spreading of misinformation, and Anna Navarro’s latest hot take.
I have finally had time to begin the second season of Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series, which opens with an extended sequence filling in the backstory of the antagonist, the Dark Lord Sauron.
Of course, this isn’t his entire backstory. The Rings of Power takes place during an interim age; the previous dark lord, Morgoth, was vanquished, and Sauron was seemingly destroyed. We know that our heroes are destined to feud with Sauron and destroy him yet again so that he can ultimately return to power a third time during the better-known events of The Lord of the Rings films. As such, this all feels a bit tedious. Sauron’s conflict with Adar, the mysterious leader of the orcs, does not have particularly high stakes: We know definitively that Sauron will eventually beat out all the other bad guys, which include a dark wizard who seems suspiciously similar to—but is not, I don’t think?—Saruman, the rival of Gandalf. (At least, it would be very weird to have Saruman already being evil.)
I am enjoying the performance of Charlie Vickers, the actor who portrays Sauron. And the storyline involving the Stranger—who is presumably young Gandalf—and his hobbit-like companions has an entertaining, whimsical quality. The rest of the show is a tad boring. The actors who portray Galadriel and Elrond have not imbued these characters with nearly enough vibrancy. (Though anyone would seem inadequately bad when compared with Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving.) The dwarf scenes are extremely dull, bordering on unwatchable. I am only two episodes in, and so far there hasn’t been much else.
This week’s first and possibly only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump was not nearly as consequential as the June debate, which ended President Joe Biden’s political career. It also differed in another key way: The moderation was incredibly one-sided and unfair.
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This was not true of the previous debate, between Biden and Trump. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash asked questions but did not interrupt or attempt to fact-check the candidates—they left that to Trump and Biden. Such an approach is preferable; politicians make so many incorrect statements that if the moderators really felt the need to intervene every single time, debates would devolve into showdowns between the moderators and each candidate, which isn’t the point. There are also frequent examples of moderators asserting that a given claim is abjectly false when it may be complicated, ambiguous, or a case where reasonable minds disagree.
ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis thrice followed a remark by Trump with an attempt to fact-check him. These fact-checks introduced valid, conflicting information; Trump said violence in the U.S. was out of control and the moderators pointed to FBI data that contradicts this, and Trump said that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—a completely erroneous claim.
But when Harris made statements that could have been fact-checked, the moderators declined to do so.
Harris said that Trump had threatened there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost the election, and Harris implied that this was a threat of actual political violence; the moderators could have pointed out that Trump was describing the state of the economy under prospective progressive governance. Harris also said there were currently no U.S. military service members in active combat zones; this is flatly untrue, as American troops are currently serving in informal war zones in places like Iraq and Syria.
Then there was bias reflected in the kinds of questions the candidates were asked. Trump was deservedly grilled on his appalling conduct surrounding the 2020–2021 presidential transition, and comments he made about Harris’ race. Meanwhile, Harris fielded zero questions about her complicity in the vast cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline and infirmity. When she declined to give specific reasons for her flip-flopping on fracking—or even concede that she has flip-flopped—the moderators did not follow up.
Trump largely failed to elucidate his vision for making the country a better place, and for that he has no one to blame but himself. Still, this debate was often a three-on-one affair, and there’s no reason for that. Future debates should stick to the CNN model.
During the debate, Trump gestured at a viral claim on X and asserted that Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating pet dogs and cats.
Springfield police have said there are no reports of stolen pets. Just because the police are not paying attention to an issue doesn’t mean it’s made up, but it should also be emphasized that there are no credible claims of pet-eating being made on social media. The one cited instance of a person accused of eating a neighbor’s pet cat did not involve a Haitain migrant and did not take place in Springfield.
Springfield residents have claimed that the migrants hunted wild ducks and geese, killing and perhaps eating them. If people are not respecting the rules of the commons, local authorities should do something about it. But this is obviously a far milder problem. Killing people’s pets is wrong; killing wild birds is not. Duck-hunting isn’t even some specifically Haitian custom, as conservatives well know.
AI-generated memes of Trump protecting ducks and kittens have gone very viral on social media lately. It’s fine to laugh at these. But anyone who truly believes that pets are routinely abducted in small-town America by gangs of migrants has fallen for a hoax.
On the other side, some commentators who correctly identified Trump’s citation of the Haitian pet-eaters as fake news nevertheless failed to note that a second wild-seeming claim—about Harris’ support for gender-affirming care for detained illegal immigrants—was actually true.
“Trump made history last night for sure,” wroteThe New Yorker‘s Susan Glasser on X. “Who will ever forget him ranting on stage about immigrants eating people’s dogs? Or insisting that the Vice President ‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in jail’?”
But as CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported earlier this week, Harris did in fact support this policy. In 2019, she answered a questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union indicating that she would support paying for detained migrants to undergo gender transition surgery.
TIME magazine must have missed the CNN story. In a write-up of the debate, TIME knocked Trump for accusing Harris of supporting such a policy. Finally, the magazine had to add a correction, making clear that their own fact-check needed a fact-check.
Amber Duke joins me to discuss Harris’ policies, the war on Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders admitting that Kamala has flip-flopped, and the Democratic Party welcoming the Cheney family into the fold.
I neglected to mention last week that I saw Wolverine and Deadpool… and it was great! While the MCU has gone totally off the rails since Avengers: Endgame, this film succeeded in making me excited for whatever comes next. The movie did a particularly good job incorporating aspects of the Loki series on Disney+, including the Time Variance Authority—enforcers of peace throughout the multiverse—and the Void, where time-displaced variant heroes live out their days.
A consensus is swiftly forming among Republican politicians, activists, and media figures that the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump can be blamed on the heated, occasionally violent anti-Trump rhetoric deployed by President Joe Biden, leading Democrats, and mainstream media pundits.
This is a deeply cynical and misguided tactic—and Republicans are well aware of it, since they have rightly criticized their political opponents for doing the exact same thing.
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” wrote Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), Trump’s pick for vice president, on X (formerly Twitter). “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Conservative author Ben Shapiro said that likening Trump to Adolf Hitler—an action taken by “nearly everyone on the Left, up to and including the current president”—had increased the likelihood of political violence. Reps. Lauren Boebert (R–Colo.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) blamed anti-Trump rhetoric for the shooting.
“To the media,” said Greene. “This is your fault.”
Conservatives also specifically faulted Biden for recently promising to “put Trump in a bullseye.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) flagged this comment in a recent interview with Anderson Cooper, insisting that such rhetoric has consequences. (Cooper pointed out that Trump had just recently used heated rhetoric, calling Biden a threat “to the survival and existence of our country.” Johnson replied that “everybody is prone to overstatement.”)
Asserting that Biden’s bullseye comment had anything to do with political violence is obviously ridiculous. Moreover, Republicans know that it is ridiculous. In fact, they rightly criticized The New York Times and other media outlets for embracing the preposterous idea that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was morally responsible for the attempted assassination of Gabby Giffords. The accusation against her was remarkably similar: The media seized on a map, circulated by her political action committee, that placed target crosshairs over Giffords’ district. There is no evidence whatsoever that Giffords’ shooter ever saw the map or that he was influenced by Republican rhetoric or even motivated by conservative ideas at all.
It is absolutely fair to call out the double standard. It’s true mainstream media wholly embraced the idea that Republicans are to blame for political violence because of things like the crosshairs on the map but said nothing critical about Biden’s bullseye comment. But Republicans like Vance aren’t calling out that double standard—they are participating in it. They are doing the same thing from the other side: blaming political violence on Democratic rhetoric.
It’s true that both parties, their activists, and their acolytes in the media could all benefit the country if they turned down the overheated rhetoric. Routine accusations that such-and-such political leader is a fascist, or Hitler, or a communist, or a dictator are not making things better for anyone. But words do not have some hypnotic power to induce others to commit violence. As always, when a deranged person takes up a gun and attacks someone, we should blame that individual—not other people’s words.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld on Sunday gave the commencement address at Duke University—a ceremony that was dominated by students walking out in support of Palestine.
Oh, wait. No, it wasn’t. But you’d be forgiven for having thought so, as a huge portion of the media coverage bafflingly put that protest front and center, despite that it was a blip on the event’s radar.
“Duke students walk out to protest Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement speech in latest grad disruption,” reads a USA Today headline. “Dozens walk out of Jerry Seinfeld speech at Duke commencement in protest of his support for Israel,” reportsThe Hill. “Duke University students walk out on Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement speech, chant ‘free Palestine,’” writes Fox News.“Duke students walk out of Jerry Seinfeld graduation speech in Gaza protest,” says The Guardian.
I could go on. But I’ll bookend the list with an article that, whether it meant to or not, made the case for why the demonstration wasn’t really a story at all: “About 30 students walk out on Jerry Seinfeld at Duke commencement,” notesPolitico.
Thirty students out of the approximately 7,000 graduates and a crowd estimated to be composed of around 20,000 in total. Assuming those numbers are basically correct, that is 0.43 percent of students and 0.15 percent of the audience. Put differently, roughly 99.6 percent of students and 99.8 of the crowd watched Seinfeld’s address, which went on undisturbed after a brief period of chanting from the protesters.But it is very likely that many news consumers walked away with the polar opposite impression after consuming the press reports.
The out-of-touch Seinfeld coverage wouldn’t necessarily merit a mention if it were an anomaly. The problem: It isn’t. It has become fairly standard practice in the press to take voices on the fringe and shove them to the center of the conversation without contextualizing where they came from. Journalists are incentivized to find engaging angles, and fringe characters tend to be interesting. The impulse is understandable. But it creates a distorted picture of reality and comes at the expense of the truth. And journalists should foremost be invested in conveying the truth.
There are many such examples. But in keeping with the protest paradigm, I am particularly reminded of the phenomenon when reporters show up to cover controversial, hot-button demonstrations only to find that there are more journalists in attendance than actual protesters. That’s a pretty good clue that the media, perhaps subconsciously, is looking to create a story that isn’t really there.
As was the case at Duke. If anything, the demonstration should have been a footnote in the coverage, a line or two. Instead, it was portrayed as the main course. The press has shown a particularly insatiable appetite for stories on Israel-Palestine protests on college campuses; the division sells. Some of those demonstrations have certainly been newsworthy. This one wasn’t. Taken as a whole, the coverage unwittingly reenacted an iconic GIF, excerpted from the satire Arrested Development. Except it wasn’t supposed to be funny. “There are dozens of us,” character Tobias Fünke screams, after being outed as a never-nude. “DOZENS!”
Former White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci doesn’t believe the lab leak explanation of COVID-19’s origins is a conspiracy theory. He admitted as much during a closed-door grilling session before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Monday. Legislators did not release a transcript of his testimony, but Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R–Ohio), the chairman of the subcommittee, published some highlights on X (formerly Twitter).
✔️Dr. Fauci acknowledged that the lab-leak hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory.
This comes nearly four years after prompting the publication of the now infamous “Proximal Origin” paper that attempted to vilify and disprove the lab-leak hypothesis.
— Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (@COVIDSelect) January 10, 2024
In recent months, Fauci has denied he ever categorically rejected the possibility that COVID-19 accidentally escaped from a laboratory. But he faces very serious allegations that he deterred scientific experts from considering it. At issue is “The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2,” a paper that appeared in Nature Medicine, a scientific journal, in March 2020 at the very start of the global pandemic. Fauci—who was then head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—and Francis Collins—then director of the National Institutes of Health—participated in a conference call with the authors, whose initial openness to a lab leak explanation changed significantly prior to publication. The paper ultimately ruled out a lab leak as not just “unlikely”—the phrasing used in an early draft of the paper—but “improbable.”
More recently, Fauci has contended that he always remained open to the idea, but was persuaded by scientific arguments—including those in the proximal origin paper—that a zoonotic spillover was more likely. This claim would be more persuasive if Fauci had not stated over and over and over and over again, in media interviews, that he “strongly favored” the zoonotic origin theory; his subsequent suggestion that he did not lean in either direction is flatly contradicted by his literal words.
“I wasn’t leaning totally strongly one way or the other”
It was certainly in Fauci’s interest to downplay the possibility that human experimentation on viruses accidentally unleashed COVID-19 upon the world; during his career, Fauci remained one of the foremost advocates of public funding for gain-of-function research, in which scientists manipulate viruses in order to make them deadlier and more transmissible. Fauci and other public health experts have straightforwardly denied that the U.S. funded such research in Wuhan, China, but critics say this is an exercise in semantics. Indeed, EcoHealth Alliance—a U.S. nonprofit that obtained public funding to conduct research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China—was caught actively misleading Pentagon officials about the nature of the experimentation: Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, advised colleagues to deceive regulators about the fact that the research would be conducted in China under laxer lab safety standards.
A cadre of elite scientists deliberately lied to U.S. security officials in order to spend American tax dollars performing risky experiments under substandard laboratory conditions in a notoriously secretive and authoritarian foreign country. Maybe those experiments created COVID-19, and maybe they didn’t. In any case, it’s clearly not a conspiracy theory; good of Fauci to recognize the obvious, however belatedly it might be.
One can debate the extent of Fauci’s wrongdoing here—but it’s the mainstream media that really dropped the ball in terms of lab leak discourse. The Washington Post was an early offender, accusing Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) of “repeating a coronavirus theory that was already debunked.” The article explicitly applied the phrase “conspiracy theory” to the lab leak idea; The New York Times did the same, noting that the lab leak had been “dismissed by scientists.” In fact, The Times‘ lead coronavirus reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, went a step further, calling lab leak a racist theory.
Mandavilli’s tone toward the lab leak was broadly representative of a whole host of mainstream journalists, media commentators, and so-called fact-checkers and misinformation experts. Following this flawed consensus, social media sites—including Facebook—brutally suppressed any and all discussion of the lab leak theory on their platforms. As recently as August 2023, The Journal of the American Medical Associationwas still counting lab leak discourse online as evidence of the unstoppable spread of misinformation online. And the Global Disinformation Index—a British non-profit that received funding from the State Department, and tarred Reason as an unsafe news website—warned that blaming the pandemic on a lab leak could lead to racist attacks on Asian people.
That’s a long way of saying that self-appointed misinformation cops went to great efforts to censor and stigmatize this topic of conversation, on grounds that it was either racist, or a conspiracy theory, or both. Yet it is neither; even Fauci says so. One might hope that this would prompt some self-reflection within media circles. The anti-misinformation crowd wasn’t just wrong—they were militant that it was of vital importance to stop everyone from even contemplating the possibility of a lab leak theory.
There’s a perniciousness underlying this attitude, and one that clearly threatens free speech, as many U.S. political figures—including President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.)—have decided that the federal government should do more to combat purported misinformation. They might consider whether they themselves have been misinformed.
“America has a life expectancy crisis,” asserted a recent headline in TheWashington Post. Why a crisis? Because American average life expectancy has been flat and then declining for the past decade or so.
One bit of recent good news: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in November that average life expectancy at birth in 2022 was 77.5 years. While that is down from its 2014 peak of 78.8 years, the CDC notes that this is a post-pandemic increase of 1.1 years from its nadir of 76.1 years in 2021. The increase from 2021 to 2022, according to the CDC, “primarily resulted from decreases in mortality due to COVID-19, heart disease, unintentional injuries, cancer, and homicide. Declines in COVID-19 mortality accounted for approximately 84% of the increase in life expectancy.” While the big recent dip in American life expectancy was largely the result of the ravages of the COVID pandemic, the trend over the prior 10 years was basically flat.
(MedPage Today)
The Post article correctly noted that “the United States [was] increasingly falling behind other nations well before the pandemic.”
(Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality)
The Post asked numerous members of Congress, including all 100 Senators, what they thought about falling life expectancy. While many replied that it was a serious problem, the article concluded that it “is not a political priority.” The Post did acknowledge that “there also is no single strategy to turn it around.”Politics being the art of the possible, there is little that politicians can do at this point in biomedical history to significantly increase average life expectancy.
Public health efforts beginning the the late 19th century to provide access to clean water and improved sanitation, improve food safety, and champion widespread vaccination against infectious microbes were chiefly responsible for the increase in average American life expectancy from just 47 years in 1900 to the mid-70s in that late 20th century. “In 1900, one in 40 Americans died annually. By 2013, that rate was roughly one in 140, a cumulative improvement of more than two thirds,” reported a 2016 analysis by University of Pennsylvania researchers.
Today the leading causes of the deaths that mainly afflict older Americans are cardiovascular diseases, cancers, unintentional injuries, lower respiratory illnesses, and diabetes. Nostrums prescribed by politicians are not likely to have much effect on them.
(CDC)
Among other policies, the Post reported that many of the public health officials and lawmakers with which it spoke decried, “a health-care payment system that does not reward preventive care.” And why not? After all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? Not necessarily, according to a comprehensive analysis of preventive care studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2021. “General health checks were not associated with reduced mortality or cardiovascular events,” noted the researchers. This bolstered the findings of a similar analysis in 2019 by researchers associated with the non-profit medical evidence review collaborative Cochrane that concluded that “health checks have little or no effect on total mortality.”
The Post article also suggested that fighting between congressional Democrats and Republicans has stymied “legislation linked to gains in life expectancy, including efforts to expand access to health coverage and curb access to guns.” As it turns out, various studies over the past two decades have calculated that lack of health insurance is associated with only a slightly higher risk of death.
A 2009 study in the American Journal of Public Health reported estimates that the lack of health insurance among Americans ages 25 to 65 may have been responsible for between 18,000 and 45,000 (0.8 to 1.8 percent) of deaths annually. At the time, 46 million Americans under the age of 65 were uninsured; by 2023 that had dropped to 23 million. As health insurance coverage increased, U.S. life expectancy stagnated and then fell.
What about guns? Unfortunately, the trends in both the rate and absolute number of firearm deaths—homicides, suicides, and accidents—have been upward over the past decade. The rate of firearm deaths hovered around 15 per 100,000 during the 1970s and 1980s and began to fall in the mid-1990s, reaching its lowest point at 10 per 100,000 in 2004.
(Pew Research)
The rate of firearm mortality in the U.S. remained slightly over 10 per 100,000 over the next decade when in 2014 it began to rise, hitting in 2021 14.6 per 100,000, a rate last seen in the bad old days of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Deaths from suicide have consistently been greater than those from homicide. In 2022, for example, the number of people who killed themselves using firearms reached 26,993 whereas those killed by others numbered 19,592. Most gun deaths occur at earlier ages, thus proportionately lowering the U.S. population’s overall life expectancy. A 2018 study in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine calculated that firearm deaths between 2000 and 2016 reduced U.S. average life expectancy by 2.48 years. The researchers argued that other health gains during that period masked this countervailing downward life expectancy trend. And it does coincide with the slow-down in life expectancy increase that began around 2010.
What could politicians do about this? Setting aside constitutional issues, a 2023 comprehensive analysis of various policies aiming to reduce gun violence by researchers at the RAND Corporation think tank found relatively weak evidence that any of them worked all that well. For example, with respect to reducing violent crime, the evidence for the efficacy of policies such as banning assault weapons, imposing firearm safety training requirements, and requiring licenses and permits was inconclusive. Supportive evidence did, however, suggest that child access prevention laws could reduce youth suicides, accidents, and some violent crime deaths; and limits on concealed carry and stand-your-ground laws might reduce violent crime deaths.
The Post reported that some politicians pointed to the rising death toll from “lethal drug overdoses” as a significant factor in declining U.S. life expectancy. The Post did, however, acknowledge that drug deaths “are not solely responsible for the decline in life expectancy.” It is worth noting that opioid overdose deaths began truly soaring after 2010 when users turned to illicit heroin and fentanyl after the introduction of Food and Drug Administration–approved abuse-deterrent formulations.
(CDC)
So how much do drug overdose deaths contribute to the recent decline in U.S. life expectancy? A 2021 comprehensive review of factors affecting mortality trends in the U.S. between 1999 and 2018 found that average life expectancy would “have been 0.3 years greater were it not for increases in unintentional drug poisoning.” In a 2023 preprint article, two Johns Hopkins University researchers calculated that opioid overdose deaths between 2019 and 2021 reduced U.S. life expectancy by 0.65 years. If politicians and policy makers really want to make increasing life expectancy a priority, one huge step would be to actually end the war on drugs. A cease-fire in the drug war would likely reduce gun deaths too.
The fact that Americans have been getting fatter has also contributed to the recent stalling of and then decline in U.S. life expectancy. A 2022 preprint by researchers associated with Oxford University and the University of Texas Austin calculates that properly accounted mortality from obesity is perhaps cutting U.S. life expectancy by 1.7 years.
(Heliyon Kranjac & Kranjac)
In a 2023 working paper, Socio-Behavioral Factors Contributing to Recent Mortality Trends in the United States, a team of demographers observed with considerable understatement that “hundreds of factors affect levels of mortality in every population.” They nevertheless gamely sought to identify possible factors for the changes in U.S. adult mortality over the period 1997–2019, using data from the National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS) for years 1997–2018. The variables they examined included alcohol consumption, cigarette smoking, health insurance coverage, educational attainment, mental distress, obesity, and race/ethnicity.
Among other things, the authors, in line with earlier studies, concluded that “changes in health care coverage, as measured here, had a negligible effect” on U.S. life expectancy trends over the past two decades. The two biggest factors they identified as affecting U.S. life expectancy trends were that “mortality falls with rising educational attainment” while “increasing mental distress contributed to the stagnation of mortality improvement.” Between 1997 and 2019, the percentage of college graduates rose from 24 percent to 36 percent of the U.S. population age 25 and above. Research consistently shows that college graduates tend to be less obese, smoke less, and eat better. Rising mental distress among NHIS participants as measured using the K-6 scale, especially after 2008, correlated with increasing mortality rates.
The nine-year difference in adult life expectancy between those Americans who are college graduates and those who are not is particularly striking.
(Brookings Institution)
However, the U.S. is not alone with respect to differential socioeconomic life expectancy outcomes. Even countries famed for their government-run universal health care systems such as France experience them. For example, the European Commission’s 2019 country health profile of France reports that life expectancy for men and women in the top 5 percent of income is 84.4 and 88.3 years compared to those in the bottom 5 percent, which average 71.7 years and 80 years, respectively. This correspondingly results in male and female socioeconomic life expectancy gaps of 13 years and 8 years. The report notes that the gap in longevity can be explained at least partly by differences in education and living standards.
In the Post article, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) says that achieving Norway’s average life expectancy of 83 years should be our goal. It is worth noting that the life expectancy of adult American college graduates is 83.3 years, three years higher than the 80.3 years average for the relatively well-off countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
A 2019 report from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health compared the average life expectancies of that country’s richest 1 percent with its poorest 1 percent. The report noted that “the differences in life expectancy between the one per cent richest and one per cent poorest in Norway were 14 years for men and 8 years for women.” A 2016 study in the JAMA reported essentially the same gap between America’s richest and poorest citizens. “The gap in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals was 14.6 years for men and 10.1 years for women,” observed the researchers in JAMA.
“It has surprised researchers and policy makers that even with a largely tax-funded public health care system and relatively evenly distributed income, there are substantial differences in life expectancy by income in Norway,” said Dr. Jonas Minet Kinge, senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, in a press release about the report.
So why did U.S. life expectancy trends slow and then peak in 2014? And what, if anything, can policy makers and politicians realistically do to make increasing it a priority? As noted above, the big recent dip largely resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2023 Scientific Reportsarticle “estimated that US life expectancy at birth dropped by 3.08 years due to the million COVID-19 deaths” between February 2020 and May 2022. But let’s set aside that steep post-2020 downtick in life expectancy resulting from nearly 1.2 million Americans dying of COVID-19 infections.
A 2020 study in Health Affairs chiefly attributed the 3.3-year increase in U.S. life expectancy between 1990 and 2015 to public health, better pharmaceuticals, and improvements in medical care. By public health, the authors meant such things as campaigns to reduce smoking, increase cancer screenings and seat belt usage, improve auto and traffic safety, and increase awareness of the danger of stomach sleep for infants. With respect to pharmaceuticals, they cited the significant reduction in cardiovascular diseases that resulted from the introduction of effective drugs to lower cholesterol and blood pressure.
So a big part of what propelled increases in U.S. life expectancy is the fact that the percentage of Americans who smoke has fallen from 43 percent in the 1970s to 16 percent now. Smoking is associated with higherrisks of cardiovascular diseases and cancers, rates of which have been dropping for decades. In addition, the rising percentage of Americans who are college graduates correlated with increasing life expectancy.
However, since the 2004 peak, countervailing increases in the death rates from drug overdoses, firearms, traffic accidents, and diseases associated with obesity contributed to the flattening of U.S. life expectancy trends.
A 2021 comprehensive analysis of the recent stagnation and decline in U.S. life expectancy in the Annual Review of Public Health (ARPH) largely concurs, finding that “the proximate causes of the decline are increases in opioid overdose deaths, suicide, homicide, and Alzheimer’s disease.” Interestingly, the U.S. trend in Alzheimer’s disease prevalence has been downward since 2011. In addition, the ARPH review noted that “a slowdown in the long-term decline in mortality from cardiovascular diseases has also prevented life expectancy from improving further.” So enabling and persuading more properly diagnosed Americans to take blood pressure and cholesterol-lowering medications would likely boost overall life expectancy.
Hectoring members of Congress to make increasing life expectancy a “political priority” does not change the fact that there simply are no “silver bullet” policies available for achieving that goal.
“Serious Medical Errors Rose After Private Equity Firms Bought Hospitals” was the headline of a New York Timesarticle looking at the findings of “a major study of the effects of such acquisitions on patient care in recent years” published in the December issue of JAMA. The paper was also written up in USA Today, MarketWatch, Common Dreams, and The Harvard Gazette.
“This is a big deal,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told Times reporters Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz. “It’s the first piece of data that I think pretty strongly suggests that there is a quality problem when private equity takes over.”
Abelson, Sanger-Katz, and their fellow reporters misrepresented the findings of the study, which suffers from its own “quality problems.”
Even its premise is fuzzy. The authors never say what they mean by “private equity,” which has no formal definition. Half of the hospitals in the study were already privately owned, for-profit hospitals before they were acquired. The authors suggest that what they call “private equity” is characterized by excessive leverage and short horizons, but present no data on either factor. Times readers may interpret the phrase private equity to mean “evil Wall Street greedheads,” in which case it seems logical that patient care would deteriorate.
Even the paper’s lead author started with that assumption. “We were not surprised there was a signal,” Massachusetts General Hospital’s Sneha Kannan told the Times. “I will say we were surprised at how strong it was.”
Bias was built into the study design. Research that looks only at “adverse” events and outcomes is designed to dig up dirt and will tend to come up with meaningless conclusions. Serious investigators study all events and outcomes—good and bad—in search of accurate, balanced conclusions.
The study’s strongest finding shows that lives were saved in hospitals acquired by private equity—the opposite of what Kannan expected to find. Patient mortality, the most important measure, dropped a statistically significant 9 percent in the study group, which represents nearly 500 lives saved.
The paper could have been headlined “Patient Mortality Fell After Private Equity Firms Bought Hospitals,” except JAMA might not have published it, TheNew York Times certainly wouldn’t have bothered to write it up, and Common Dreams couldn’t have run with the headline, “We Deserve Medicare for All, But What We Get Is Medicare for Wall Street.” So the study authors fell over themselves to explain this finding away. They theorized, without any evidence, that maybe private equity hospitals routinely transfer out patients who are near death. Though they raise legitimate reasons for skepticism that private equity acquisition saved patient lives, they apply equally to the negative findings that are trumpeted both in the study and the news write-ups.
Another one of the 17 measures the study authors looked at was length of stay. They found that at the private equity hospitals the duration of stays was a statistically significant 3.4 percent shorter, which was another finding the authors were quick to downplay.
Falls are the most common adverse events in hospitals, and the study found that they were more likely to occur in hospitals acquired by private equity. According to the Times, the “researchers reported…a 27 percent increase in falls by patients while staying in the hospital.”
This isn’t what the study says. The rate of falls stayed the same at hospitals after they were acquired by private equity at 0.068 percent. Falls didn’t decline at the rate that they did at hospitals in the control group—from 0.083 percent to 0.069 percent—which is where the 27 percent number came from.
In other words, the situation improved in the control group but didn’t get worse or better in hospitals acquired by private equity. So the authors assumed that there was some industrywide drop in hospital falls and that this positive trend didn’t take place at the private equity hospitals.
What this finding actually suggests is that the control hospitals were badly chosen and run worse (at least when it comes to preventing patient falls) than the acquired hospitals both before and after private equity acquisition. That falls could change by 27 percent without any cause (the control hospitals were not purchased by anyone) makes nonsense of claiming statistical significance for much smaller changes in other factors.
Let’s even assume that there was an industrywide decline in falls and that private equity hospitals didn’t see the improvement that would have taken place had their greedy new owners not been allowed to acquire them. If that improvement had taken place, there would have been 20 fewer falls in the study group. Doesn’t that matter less than the 500 deaths prevented—the stat that the authors chose to downplay?
The Times article mentions that bed sores increased at the private equity hospitals even though that wasn’t a statistically significant finding, meaning that there weren’t enough data included in the study to make that assertion. The study authors acknowledged that this finding wasn’t significant, but the Times journalists chose to report it anyway.
The study authors did claim that another one of their adverse findings was statistically significant: Bloodstream infections allegedly increased in private equity hospitals from about 65 cases to 99 cases. This is indeed serious, as such infections can easily be fatal. However, the finding had marginal statistical significance, meaning it was unlikely, but not completely implausible, to have arisen by random chance if private equity acquisition did not affect the rate of bloodstream infections. If the only hypothesis that the authors had tested was whether private equity acquisition increased bloodstream infections, then the finding would meet standard criteria for statistical significance.
If you run a fishing expedition for adverse events and outcomes, you are very likely to find some findings that occur by random chance. The authors were aware of this and adjusted the claimed significance of this result as if they had tested eight hypotheses. But the paper reported 17 measures, and the authors may have tested more. If we adjust for 17 hypotheses, the bloodstream infection result loses its statistical significance.
The rigorous way to do studies is to pre-register hypotheses to ensure that the authors can’t go fishing in a large amount of data to pick out a few conclusions that they like that happen to appear statistically significant by random chance. The authors did not report pre-registration.
So what can we conclude from this study? The Times reporters seem to have gone on a second fishing expedition, this one for a scholar willing to conclude from the study’s findings that we need more government regulation, or perhaps a ban on private equity hospital acquisitions. To their credit, none of the experts they quoted fully delivered, forcing the reporters to blandly conclude that the study “leaves some important questions unanswered for policymakers.”
“This should make us lean forward and pay attention,” was the best Yale economist Zack Cooper was willing to give Abelson and Sanger-Katz, adding that it shouldn’t lead us to “introduce wholesale policies yet.” Rice economist Vivian Ho told the Times that she “was eager to see more evidence.”
Setting out to find “more evidence” of a conclusion that researchers already believe to be true, instead of going where the data lead, is what leads to such sloppy and meaningless research in the first place.
Remember when Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) accused then–White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci of funding China’s Wuhan virus lab?
Fauci replied, “Senator Paul, you do not know what you’re talking about.”
The media loved it. Vanity Fairsmirked, “Fauci Once Again Forced to Basically Call Rand Paul a Sniveling Moron.”
But now the magazine has changed its tune, admitting, “In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan” and “Paul might have been onto something.”
Then what about question two: Did COVID-19 occur because of a leak from that lab?
When Paul confronted Fauci, saying, “The evidence is pointing that it came from the lab!” Fauci replied, “I totally resent the lie that you are now propagating.”
Was Paul lying? What’s the truth?
The media told us COVID came from an animal, possibly a bat.
But in my new video, Paul points out there were “reports of 80,000 animals being tested. No animals with it.”
Now he’s released a book, Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up, that charges Fauci and others with funding dangerous research and then covering it up.
“Three people in the Wuhan lab got sick with a virus of unknown origin in November of 2019,” says Paul. The Wuhan lab is 1,000 kilometers away from where bats live.
Today the FBI, the Energy Department, and others agree with Paul. They believe COVID most likely came from a lab.
I ask Paul, “COVID came from evil Chinese scientists, in a lab, funded by America?”
“America funded it,” he replies, “maybe not done with evil intentions. It was done with the misguided notion that ‘gain-of-function’ research was safe.”
Gain-of-function research includes making viruses stronger.
The purpose is to anticipate what might happen in nature and come up with vaccines in advance. So I push back at Paul, “They’re trying to find ways to stop diseases!”
He replies, “Many scientists have now looked at this and said, ‘We’ve been doing this gain-of-function research for quite a while.’ The likelihood that you create something that creates a vaccine that’s going to help anybody is pretty slim to none.”
Paul points out that Fauci supported “gain-of-function” research.
“He said in 2012, even if a pandemic occurs…the knowledge is worth it.” Fauci did write: “The benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”
Paul answers: “Well, that’s a judgment call. There’s probably 16 million families around the world who might disagree with that.”
Fauci and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) didn’t give money directly to the Chinese lab. They gave it to a nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance. The group works to protect people from infectious diseases.
“They were able to accumulate maybe over $100 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars, and a lot of it was funneled to Wuhan,” says Paul.
EcoHealth Alliance is run by zoologist Peter Daszak. Before the pandemic, Daszak bragged about combining coronaviruses in Wuhan.
Once COVID broke out, Daszak became less eager to talk about these experiments. He won’t talk to me.
“Peter Daszak has refused to reveal his communications with the Wuhan lab,” complains Paul. “I do think that ultimately there is a great deal of culpability on his part.… They squelched all dissent and said, ‘You’re a conspiracy theorist if you’re saying this [came from a lab],’ but they didn’t reveal that they had a monetary self-incentive to cover this up,” says Paul.
“The media is weirdly uncurious about this,” I say to Paul.
“We have a disease that killed maybe 16 million people,” Paul responds. “And they’re not curious as to how we got it?”
Also, our NIH still funds gain of function research, Paul says.
“This is a risk to civilization. We could wind up with a virus…that leaks out of a lab and kills half of the planet,” Paul warns.
Paul’s book reveals much more about Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance. I will cover more of that in this column in a few weeks.
Donald Trump once famously bragged that he could shoot someone on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters.
What he didn’t mention was how quickly the news media would pretend like it never even happened.
Instead, we’d focus on the latest juicy tidbits of who was in and who was out among the Mar-a-Lago crowd. We’d write features about how his old crew had migrated to South Florida with him and how the state itself had become “Trump-ified” in his image. And we’d scramble over each other for “scoops,” such as who is about to endorse him, or when and where his next rally would be, with the hope of winning an invitation aboard his private jetliner.
Because we’re doing it right now. Donald Trump is the only president who used the threat of violence and then actual violence in an attempt to remain in power — the very definition of a coup. It was the singular unique act of his tenure, truly historic. In 232 years of elections, no other president had done anything remotely close to what Trump did.
Failing to mention Jan. 6 in a story about Trump is akin to writing about Neil Armstrong without mentioning the moon landing or about Jeffrey Dahmer without bringing up cannibalism.
Donald Trump speaks at a rally on the White House Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, ahead of the Capitol riot.
Kent Nishimura via Getty Images
Yet, somehow, this key bit of context almost never makes it into news coverage of Trump’s 2024 campaign. Instead, he is treated like any other candidate — with the focus on things like how he will fend off Ron DeSantis, what nickname he’ll come up with for Nikki Haley, and what strategy he’ll use to win back suburban women voters. We’re already seeing the puff profiles about his campaign staff that make those stories possible.
It all raises an intriguing question. What level of depravity would Trump have to engage in before news outlets regularly mentioned it in coverage? Serial killing? Child molestation? Both? Or would we, even then, ignore that conduct to get an inner circle aide to return a phone call?
The answer could be critical to the future of American democracy. While he was still in office, Trump spoke regularly about deserving a third term because the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia had ruined so much of his first. With his handling of COVID driving down his approval numbers in 2020, he actually floated the idea of postponing the November election when polls suggested he would lose.
If he were to regain the White House, on what basis does anyone believe that he would ever willingly leave?
Quid Pro Quote
Do you want a ride on Trump’s shiny, newly refurbished airplane to cover one of his campaign events? Or an invite to a news conference at one of his pre-rally photo opportunities with his “special” guests? How about an actual interview at his Mar-a-Lago country club?
Well, then you’d better be careful about what you write and say about Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump’s role in it. Stating the simple truth of that day in plain language must be avoided. Instead, craft a tortured sentence or two, preferably in the passive voice, that completely decouples Trump’s repeated lies about a “stolen” election that began in the wee hours of election night, continuing right through his vitriolic Jan. 6 rally, and the subsequent bloody assault on police officers that took place just up the street at the Capitol.
It is astonishing, reading much of the coverage about him these days — not just in the right-wing media echo chamber, but from normal, mainstream news outlets. Often, there is no reference to Jan. 6 at all. When it is mentioned, it’s typically described as if his supporters just spontaneously turned up at the Capitol on that particular day and became a bit unruly, having nothing to do with Trump whatsoever.
How we got to a point where a man who attempted an actual coup is treated like any other candidate for office cannot really be fathomed without an understanding of how political journalism has come to be practiced.
Trump speaks with reporters aboard his plane after a campaign rally in Waco, Texas, on March 25, 2023, while en route to his resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Reporters who cover entertainment — sports, say, or movies — have long understood that their livelihoods depend on their subjects liking them. Not respecting them as professionals who have jobs to do, but actually liking them. Because celebrities can choose to speak to you, and make your career a success, or can freeze you out, making your job damned-near impossible. Exclusive interviews and quotes and photos are gold in this world. Getting them means promotions and higher-paying jobs with more glamorous outlets.
So it is, nowadays, in political journalism as well. Not government journalism, which often requires expertise in a particular subject area — banking or health care, for example — but which at the very least involves knowing the rules and processes of the governmental body in question. Political journalism today, in contrast, is really only about who is winning and, perhaps more important, who is likely to win.
Subject area expertise is almost nonexistent. Instead, it’s all about how Candidate X will message voters better than Candidate Y. Covering this is obviously easier if you have good connections with “senior advisers” and “top strategists” to both X and Y, so you can file reports based on “people familiar with” X and Y’s “thinking.”
It is no coincidence that this type of reporting has come to be called “horse race” journalism. Except unlike in sports where the results — who wins, who loses, who will get high-round draft picks to start rebuilding next year — in the end carry no real consequence, the failure of political journalism can be catastrophic.
‘Scoops’ In The Age Of Trump
A big piece of the problem is the value my industry places on “scoops,” that is, having a story before anyone else.
In three and a half decades in this business, I’ve never understood this obsession. So what if you get details of a campaign announcement the day before everyone else? How has that improved your readers’ ability to understand this world?
I’ve often seen SCOOPs in Twitter posts by reporters, with a news release from a candidate containing identical information coming literally minutes later.
The only “scoops” that constitute a public service are stories that would not have been known to the public at all without your having written them. Frankly, those are the only scoops we reporters should ever worry about getting.
I was lucky enough to have spent my formative years as a journalist in Florida, where the public records laws were among the strongest in the country. If a city council member or a county commissioner or, later, a state legislator or governor’s appointee refused to provide me information about public business, fine. I would find out some other way, usually through official documents.
It often took longer than I would have liked, but in every instance, the story was something that otherwise would never have seen the light of day.
Trump exits Trump Tower to attend court for his arraignment on April 4, 2023, on charges related to the hush-money payoff of porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign.
Noam Galai via Getty Images
Those sorts of articles take time, though. Days or even weeks. Meanwhile, the incentive structure in political journalism rewards a “scoop” that drives traffic not merely today, but right this minute. And that means having sources in various campaigns willing to tell you things first. And it means having a tacit agreement that you won’t make them look bad.
In days past, of course, most political journalism was also bad political journalism. It wasn’t ideal, but it did not represent a threat to the republic. Having various outlets handle Mitt Romney or John Kerry or John McCain or Barack Obama with kid gloves for self-serving reasons didn’t really hurt American political discourse because all of those people shared basic American values about fair play and the rule of law and the sanctity of elections.
None of them, for instance, would have dreamed of trying to overturn an election defeat.
Today, we’re in a different place. Trump has shown very plainly that he does not believe in any of those things we long assumed were in the DNA of any serious candidate for major office.
Trump vs. Democracy, Round 2
Despite all this, journalists continue to invent all manner of justifications about working to maintain access to Trump, even if it requires soft-pedaling his actions in his final two months in the White House.
We need to have people close to Trump who will talk to us, because like it or not, he is a major player in American politics and we don’t want to be shut out.
We will play good cop-bad cop to get information, with some of our team sucking up to Trump and others taking it right to him, so we get all the coverage, not just some of it.
We are not betraying our audience by ignoring Jan. 6; rather, by cozying up to his people we are getting leaks about his plans and his thinking that our audience needs to know.
And, finally and least convincingly: People already know all about what he did, and, besides, it’s not our job to remind them.
What these rationales have in common is the failure to view Trump’s behavior as having crossed not just a red line in a rule-of-law democracy, but a barb-wire-fenced no-mans-land with a neon sign above it flashing: “Thou shalt not pass.”
We’re not talking about marginal tax rates here, or what an appropriate social safety net should look like. We’re talking about the very foundations of our constitutional republic. American journalism, after all, is not a thing separate and apart from American democracy. The former does not exist without the latter.
As a young reporter in upstate New York, I was taught that if a city council or a school board or a judge tried to close a hearing to the public, it was my job to stand up and object and ask for a delay until our lawyer could arrive. News outlets sue elected officials all the time for the release of public documents. In other words, we are not merely stenographers of our democracy, but active participants.
We treat political corruption as unequivocally bad, as we do murder and other violent crimes. We don’t waste time quoting experts telling us that bribery and homicide are wrong. We proceed from the premise that they are. Yet when it comes to Trump, we impose the “neutral observer” standard to an actual attempt to end our democracy?
I sometimes wonder if my colleagues have already forgotten that Wednesday afternoon and evening.
Stop for a moment and think: What if Donald Trump had succeeded that day? What if, instead of Mike Pence, the vice president had been someone with the character of Mark Meadows or Scott Perry and they’d gone along with Trump’s demands?
What should we have called Trump, had he managed to remain in office despite losing the election by 7 million votes? How should we have described the government we would have had at that point? Because it sure as hell would not have been a democracy anymore.
That it did not happen does not mean it could not have happened, or that it cannot.
Collectively, I think, America has already forgotten that — and no small thanks to my profession.
The Insurrection Was Televised
Constantly reminding our audience of what Trump did, by the way, is not “partisan” or taking sides. To the contrary. Not constantly reminding our audience is taking sides. Trump’s side.
Nor is it a matter of interpretation. This is not a he-said, she-said thing.
If you personally witness that shooting on Fifth Avenue, you don’t have to say that so-and-so is accused of shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, or that so-and-so allegedly shot someone.
We use the “accused” and “alleged” qualifiers when we write police stories because we are relying on law enforcement officials to describe events. That does not apply when we personally observe something.
The shooting happened. You saw it happen.
In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo, rioters break into the Capitol in Washington.
Just so, there is no need to water down descriptions of what Trump did leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021. He did it in plain sight, on live television, on social media. Every single day, for two full months.
His lying about the election results (he’d already been seeding this storyline for months, by the way, with claims that the only way he could lose was if Democrats cheated) began just hours after polls closed, when he claimed that he already had won and demanded a stop to all ballot counting.
His lawyers followed with a series of lawsuits alleging fraud in key states. Not a single one of them cited evidence to back up any of those claims, and he lost every one.
Then the Electoral College voted on Dec. 14, and that should have been the end of it. Of course, it wasn’t, and Trump then shifted his focus to stealing a second term through fraudulent “alternative” electors from the various states that his vice president would be able to cite during the congressional certification.
But Pence refused to go along with that illegal, unconstitutional scheme. So, on Dec. 19, Trump called his followers to Washington on the morning of that ceremony, and his plan morphed into a literal coup attempt.
No, Trump did not call out the military to keep himself in power, but it’s important to remember why he did not do this. Seven months earlier, during a protest outside the White House, Trump had ordered a public square cleared so he could walk to a photo op outside a church. Accompanying him were Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley. Both soon afterward publicly apologized for their presence, and they and other top military leaders made clear that they had zero role in presidential elections.
Trump did not execute a Third World-style miliary coup because his military leaders had pre-empted him by publicly stating that they would refuse to take part. Trump aide Peter Navarro to this day continues to vilify them for taking this stand.
But “coup” — in Trump’s case, technically an “autogolpe,” or self-coup — is not defined by the participation of the military. It is defined by violence or the threat of violence.
And starting with that Dec. 19 tweet — “Be there. Will be wild.” — the threat of violence was ever-present. It was there when he opened the French doors to the Oval Office so Pence could hear his followers at a protest a few blocks away the night of Jan. 5. It was there the following morning, when he told aides that he didn’t care if some of his supporters were armed, that he wanted them allowed into his rally anyway, where he would urge them to march on the Capitol, with himself leading the way. And it was there at 2:24 p.m. on Jan. 6, when he tweeted that Pence lacked the “courage” to go along with his plot, which sent his mob into a boiling rage. His followers, having already breached the Capitol, swarmed the entrances minutes after that post.
A Coup By Any Other Name
All of which makes the use of that word, “coup,” critically important.
While many outlets did use it during the Jan. 6 hearings last summer, with the evidence of Trump’s behavior getting plenty of airtime, you almost never see it now that Trump is actively seeking the White House again.
It would be one thing, perhaps, if Trump had apologized for his actions leading up to that day, for all the lying he had done about the election and riling up his followers to the point where they were beating police officers with flagpoles bearing the United States ensign.
But he hasn’t. To the contrary, he has continued the election lying, and recently has been lionizing those who wound up in jail for their actions that day as “patriots” and “political prisoners.” He has lent his name to a “J6 Choir” of accused domestic terrorists, and publicly honored them at a recent rally.
Trump greets convicted rioter Micki Larson-Olson while visiting the Red Arrow Diner after a campaign rally on Thursday, April 27, 2023, in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
In fact, 17 of the 20 still behind bars in Washington have been charged with assaulting police officers. The remaining three are charged with other serious crimes related to Jan. 6.
Despite this, Trump is almost always covered as if he were any other “normal” candidate for office. The entirety of his actions from Nov. 4, 2020, through Jan. 6, 2021, are now wrapped up in a cute shorthand about the legal peril out there related to that day, and how it could affect his dream of returning to the Oval Office.
We’ve seen this movie before, obviously, in the way the news media collectively covered Trump’s White House. We came up with euphemisms like “unpredictable” and “shambolic.” The term of art for Trump himself was “mercurial.” Just as coverage of his 2016 campaign, once he became the nominee, tended to normalize his various abnormal pronouncements, so did his White House coverage normalize his behavior.
Imagine for a moment that the mayor of your town owned a restaurant a few blocks from City Hall and that anyone who needed a building permit or a zoning variance was expected to frequent it. That mayor would be in jail, right? Well, that’s exactly what Trump did with the White House. But instead of making this unprecedented, Third World-level corruption a sustained focus of coverage, reporters instead used Trump’s Washington hotel as a place to hit up administration sources who’d had a drink or three for those all-important SCOOPs.
Ironically, from a practical standpoint, Trump needs the news media right now a whole lot more than the news media need Trump.
If every single story about Trump in every single news outlet mentioned his role in Jan. 6 — as well it should, for the sake of accuracy and thoroughness ― do people think his campaign would shut us all out? Of course not. It just means that his people would not be able to use as a criterion the willingness of a reporter to hide important facts from the audience when doling out access.
Democracy Hanging In The Balance
In his first run for president, Trump was treated as an entertaining joke. Someone who would make those boring summer months before primary voting started more tolerable. Print outlets and television appreciated the enormous audience that reflexively responded to Trump content, even if it was to read and watch with the sole purpose of being angry. Hence the camera shots of an empty stage with a chyron promising that Trump would soon appear.
Yes, there were plenty of stories about his past in New York and Atlantic City that made it obvious that the genius businessman he played on television was just that — a character he played on television. There was even a fair amount of analysis of his statements through the years that warned of his authoritarian bent. Overall, though, he was seen as a harmless buffoon. And that more or less set the tone for the coverage of his White House.
Sure, he was unusual by the standards of all his predecessors, or most elected officials, or, for that matter, most adult human beings — but he made for great copy and for great ratings! As CBS’s Les Moonves put it in 2016 about Trump’s campaign: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
Despite this prologue, I had honestly believed that Jan. 6 would end that attitude forever, at least when it came to Trump.
One prominent reporter trapped in the Capitol that day literally pleaded for help. Others who had for the previous six years covered Trump with all the aforementioned euphemisms suddenly accepted the gravity of what was going on and accurately put the blame on the one person who had caused it. All of the ironic, above-it-all detachment, the nothing-can-faze-me tone was gone as thousands in Trump’s mob attacked hundreds of police officers, with democracy hanging in the balance.
I had thought, going forward, that the description of Trump as an autocrat who had betrayed the Constitution would be hung around his neck in every story that mentioned him.
Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally March 25, 2023, in Waco, Texas.
Starting with his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando just weeks after his failed coup attempt, where Trump all but announced his campaign to retake the presidency in 2024, reporters began their efforts to ingratiate themselves with him and his staff.
And by reporters, I’m not just talking about the “journalists” in the Trump Apology Corps — that is, those organizations that exist entirely in the Trump disinformation bubble, where, for example, the domestic terrorists who violently attacked police, leading to the death of five of them and injuries to another 140, are instead portrayed as the victims of that day.
Actual reporters for genuine news outlets, many of whom I know and like and respect, who have somehow developed the same relationships with Trump and his inner circle as they would with any other candidate and treat him as such in their coverage.
And in so doing, they are normalizing Trump’s coup attempt as an acceptable political tactic. After all, if news media professionals, who follow this stuff in detail day in and day out, don’t treat Jan. 6 as particularly significant, why should ordinary Americans who pay minimal attention to politics?
Whitewashing Jan. 6 Away
Republican consultant Sarah Longwell recently described focus groups that found, initially, that even Trump-supporting voters were on Ukraine’s side after Russian dictator Vladimir Putin invaded in early 2022. Then right-wing media began offering a steady diet of anti-Ukraine “news.” Volodymyr Zelenskyy was corrupt. Billions of dollars of American aid were being squandered. Russia actually has a right to that land.
Month after month it continued, until a year later, support for Ukraine among Trump’s followers has fallen dramatically.
Mass media matters. What journalists say, and just as important, what we don’t say, shapes public opinion. And the consensus practice of not mentioning what Trump did leading up to and on Jan. 6 — how it was without precedent in the nation’s history, and how his scheme would have literally ended our democracy — is whitewashing that day away.
In the days and weeks immediately afterward, an overwhelming majority of Americans understood that the former president had incited it, for the purpose of staying in the White House. Two years of Trump lies and lukewarm media pushback later, that percentage is far lower, and an increasing number of Republicans now believe Trump was not responsible for his own coup attempt.
How much deeper into the looking glass are we going to fall if journalists fail to provide the most basic of context to our audience?
I’m not suggesting that we not ask for interviews, that we not try to travel with his campaign. We absolutely should be making those requests, as we do for other candidates.
Trump supporters gather outside the U.S. Capitol building on the second anniversary of the coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2023.
Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
But we absolutely should not make that request, or accept an invite, with even the hint of an implicit agreement to soft-pedal or, worse still, to not mention Trump’s post-election words and deeds. You would never have agreed to interview Charles Manson on the condition that you not mention his murders. Well, what Charles Manson and his groupies did to Sharon Tate and her friends is what Donald Trump tried to do to our democracy.
In an age when most journalism is produced and consumed online, with no physical “column inch” limit like with print, there is simply zero excuse not to include just a sentence or two of context about Trump’s Jan. 6 conduct in every news account about him. The relative clause “who attempted a coup to remain in power” adds precisely eight words to a story.
In the end, if American voters decide that they would prefer an autocracy to a representative democracy, that is their prerogative, to end this 236-year-old experiment. But they should do so with their eyes wide open. And it is our job as journalists to make sure they have the necessary information to make an informed choice.
