COVID fake news in the NY Times -- Missing the forest for the trees

 Last update: Tuesday 1/24/22

Although Donald Trump spent every one of his 365 days in the White House denouncing criticism that he called "fake news", all good liberals and progressives knew that the real fake news was on conservative media, like Fox News. It was easy to recognize Fox fakes. They were lies, often blatant lies. So when the defeated president proclaimed his biggest Big Lie that he had actually won the 2020 election, and by a super majority, his proclamations received endless amplification by the mavens on Fox and other conservative outlets.

This blog note is not about conservative fakes; it's about the fake news that is often featured in the headline stories of the NY Times and other mainstream media. Whereas Fox make no effort to disguise the absurdity of its fakes, the facts in mainstream fake tales are mostly true; the lies are more difficult to perceive because they are embedded in the misleading contexts in which the facts are presented. 

The immediate trigger for this blog note was a recent front page article in the NY Times, coauthored by four of its most renowned reporters.

• "Biden’s Pandemic Fight: Inside the Setbacks of the First Year", Michael D. Shear, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Sharon LaFraniere and Noah Weiland, NY Times, 1/23/22 

The article purports to be an authoritative, nay a magisterial overview of what really went wrong in the Biden administration's efforts to manage the pandemic during its first year in office. 

It claims to be based on interviews with scores of high ranking officials in all of the right agencies, including the White House. So pay heed, dear readers, and you shall hear a blow-by-blow recall of who said what to whom and what whom said to someone else. Fascinating .. Edifying ... only if you are one of the scores of informed sources who are concerned that you might be misquoted. It quickly bogs down into endless rounds of "He said, she said" without the sex; so it's boring. Worse still, it's depressing. 

If this article really accounted for why things were so screwed up in 2021, then it's no wonder that 2021 seemed at times to be far worse than 2020, and there's no reason to hope for anything better in 2022 ... unless all of the scores of important people who were interviewed are fired and replaced by scores of smarter important people in 2022. Oh wait. That's what newly elected President Biden did in the early days of his administration in 2021. He replaced all of Trump's  important people with his own much smarter important people. But as noted above, 2021 was as bad as 2020, possibly worse.

And that's why this article and too many other headline articles in the NY Times and other mainstream media since the pandemic began in early 2020 are fake news. Their focus on the holders of important positions via extensive interviews implies a solution that has already failed. When everybody is wrong, that's a reliable indicator that the problem is systemic and should not be addressed at the level of individual office holders, no matter how smart they are. 

So let's elevate our perspective and assume that the U.S. has a system for managing epidemics and pandemics that's composed of various organizations and agencies that interact with one another. The most important would be the ones that had ongoing responsibilities for managing the control and prevention of infectious diseases ... (wait for it, wait for it) ... Do we have any such agencies, especially at the federal level, centers that employ cadres of experts in infectious diseases whose job is to provided guidance in the control and prevention of these diseases ... (we're almost there) ... hmmmmmmm ... centers for the control and prevention of infectious diseases ... (too long) ... centers for disease control and prevention (still too long) ... a CDC ... Yes, we have a CDC that employs cadres of experts in infectious diseases.

So how has our CDC performed throughout the pandemic? Badly, under both Trump and Biden. Aha! An agency that employs cadres of experts should produce guidance that is far more consistent, timely, and effective than experts scattered all over the country, because a whole should be greater than the sum of its parts ... unless ... unless its parts are not properly aligned. So maybe, just maybe, President Biden should reorganize the CDC from top to bottom!!! ... Note: Readers are referred to the related posts on this blog (below) ... :-)

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Links to related notes on this blog:

• "The CDC needs to be reorganized from top to bottom ... Part 1 (Trump's Disdain)", Last updated: 1/22/22
  
  
• "The CDC needs to be reorganized from top to bottom ... Part 2 (Biden's Turnaround Artist)", Last update: 1/11/22