Yellow Journalism

Last night, various of my social media interlocutors shared this opinion piece from the Washington Post, which chided biotech fave Moderna for releasing early data from its Phase 1 trial studying its Covid-19 vaccine candidate. We wrote about Moderna’s announcement on Monday morning.

The gist of the WaPo piece is that “the rush to share scientific progress in combating covid-19” is undermining faith in medicine and science. Further,

Private companies, governments and research institutes are holding news conferences to report potential breakthroughs that cannot be verified. The results are always favorable, but the full data on which the announcements are based are not immediately available for critical review. This is “publication by press release,” and it’s damaging trust in the fundamental methods of science and medicine at a time when we need it most.

The most recent example is Moderna’s claim Monday of favorable results in its vaccine trial, which it announced without revealing any of the underlying data. The announcement added billions of dollars to the value of the company, with its shares jumping almost 20 percent. Many analysts believe it contributed to a 900-point gain in the Dow Jones industrial average.

Regarding this, we have a few observations.

First, a quibble, but a relevant one. Moderna is not a “private” company as Americans use the term. It is a public company, meaning that the public owns its shares, and as such Moderna has the duty to make public “material” information. There is flexibility in the timing of such announcements, and biotech companies often wait until a medical meeting of specialists in the field to release early data in a “poster” (which isn’t peer reviewed or reviewed at all), but the established fact of the massive reaction in the stock price — and indeed the entire stock market — is powerful evidence that the information is “super material” and ought to have been disclosed forthwith, as Moderna did. We were trained in our youth as a securities lawyer and spent many years advising companies as to their obligations, and can easily imagine that we would have advised Moderna to get its interim data out quickly.

Second, Moderna’s announcement was standard operating procedure in biotech — an industry we know more than a little about — and might well have happened whether or not Covid-19 were the subject. For better or worse, biotech companies are assessed by investors on the basis of “catalysts,” which are upcoming events that are expected to drive the stock price. Since such companies are in constant need of capital since they rarely actually become profitable themselves, they are routinely and as a matter of course quick to publish clinical data that might act as a catalyst. Again, completely normal. So normal that Moderna raised money on the news, as anyone familiar with the industry would have expected it to do.

Third, there is a significant short interest in Moderna, more than 22 million shares as of April 30, the most recent date for which data are available. Measuring the price gain in the stock between April 30 and last night, the shorts took it in the shorts to the tune of almost $800 million in losses. We suspect that some of the media pushback we are seeing today (and especially this piece from Stat) have been promoted by investors betting that Moderna’s stock will decline. Again, completely normal in biotech.

Fourth, regardless of the small number of patients in the Moderna data reported Monday, we know more than we knew on Sunday night. The prospects for a successful vaccine have increased, even if still far from certain. Given that the world has sacrificed trillions of dollars worth of wealth to fight Covid-19, and will sacrifice trillions more, a risk-adjusted net decrease in the estimated time to a vaccine of only a few days would easily justify a big jump in the stock market.

Have faith. There are more than 100 vaccine candidates, and at least 10 that are credible and reasonably far along, all things considered. Both Moderna’s announcement and the criticism of it are completely routine in biotech, and in that we also ought to take some comfort.

There have been a lot of media stories lately that essentially say “jurisdiction X is reopening its economy, and Covid-19 cases soar.” Examples here, here, here, and here. CNN:

America marked that grim death toll Monday as almost every state has made plans to partially reopen some businesses, something critics fear might contribute to an increase in the daily reports of fatalities.

Of course reopening the economy “might” — we would say will — “contribute to an increase in the daily reports of fatalities.” If reopening didn’t increase fatalities, wouldn’t that be powerful evidence that the lockdown didn’t make a difference? How do you write a story with a paragraph like CNN’s without, at least, suggesting that?

There is another problem, which is that we still do not understand why cases are rising. Indeed, several of the linked stories above fairly suggest that increased testing might be revealing more cases that are there, rather than reflecting a true increase. We don’t know. We are still tip-toeing through the dark house.

Our own hometown paper, the Austin American-Statesman, yesterday published two stories in the same print edition that, taken together, were particularly egregious. The first story made much of Texas reporting more than a thousand new cases a day over the weekend for the first time since late April, and appeared to pin the blame on re-opening:

It’s been 10 days since Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the gradual reopening of Texas businesses amid the coronavirus outbreak. Saturday and Sunday marked the highest infection rate since the May 1 reopening order, which allowed all retail stores, malls, restaurants, movie theaters, libraries and museums to reopen at 25% capacity.

The reopening ignored benchmarks recommended by federal health officials as precursors to reopening businesses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that states show a reduction in cases for at least 14 days, dramatically boost testing, and track people with confirmed infections and those they come into contact with.

Got it. Texas ignored the benchmarks, reopened, and now it has more cases. Which we were going to have if the lockdown made any difference at all, but never mind.

Then, next door in the same Statesman print edition (but reprinted from the Dallas Morning News), there is this story, which begins:

Tarrant County reported 423 cases of coronavirus Sunday in a federal prison outbreak that led to the highest one-day increase in a North Texas county’s tally since the pandemic began.

Got that? The Statesman slyly connected Texas reopening against federal guidelines with new cases surging, and in the same print edition published another story that said that 423 of those cases came from one federal prison in Dallas, reported in a one-time batch because “of lags in reporting.”

Both of these omissions — the implications if cases don’t increase after reopening, and the true source of the weekend’s case increase in Texas — are as obvious as the nose on an editor’s face, yet the Statesman pointed out neither.

It would be so refreshing if the media, which claims prestige and nobility because “democracy dies in darkness” and such, actually illuminated, especially when the topic involves, as the pandemic does, tremendous uncertainty for leaders and citizens alike.

In the last 20 hours we have seen a spate of articles from the prestige media comparing American deaths from Covid-19 to American casualties in the Vietnam War, and making much of the factoid that the former now exceed the latter: NPR, The Los Angeles Times, New York magazine, National Geographic. There are many more such stories.

There are a few things that may be said about this phenomenon, including a comment that we put up under a Facebook post promoting one of these stories:

Of course more than 3,000,000 Vietnamese died [in the Vietnam war], and so far [no Vietnamese] are known to have died of the Covid, so from that point of view (equally illogical) it is no big deal! (Stories like this exist only to drive clicks and provoke rage.)

Obviously — so obviously that it ought not have to be said — if the comparative casualties between Covid-19 and the Vietnam war are relevant, as a matter of, you know, reasoning, the American experience is no more relevant than the Vietnamese. In fact, in other contexts, at other moments, our betters in the chattering classes would have denounced an argument like this as “racist” because it ignores the Vietnamese “experience.” Does anybody doubt that?

The fact that publications all over the corporate media world wrote essentially the same story within a couple of hours of each other suggests one of two things: (1) That many different oh-so-“brave” journalists have been waiting for this moment for days now because it provides a handy opportunity, if nonsensical, to connect the Trump administration to one of the great disasters of American policy and to associate Trump’s policy failures to the last century’s most anti-American moment, or (2) this is actually a Democratic Party talking point emailed around to editors a few days ago. We suspect both are true, at least to some extent. Both purposes are shameful in the current moment.

Why does the current moment matter? Because the combination of the pandemic and its direct casualties and the lockdown and its casualties, both human and economic, are driving intense anxiety, itself very destructive. Does anybody doubt that is true? Well, publishing stories that serve no useful purpose other than to make people more anxious — and it is very hard to see any substantive value in these “Covid-19 is worse than Vietnam” stories — is particularly destructive right now.

There was a day when the press did not actively try to make people feel worse during a period of national crisis. If, during the Great Depression, the media had run endless irrelevant stories about policy failure (“More Americans have died from hunger than died during the Spanish flu pandemic!”), our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents would have viewed the publishers as ignoble and unpatriotic. Does anybody doubt that?

So let’s not hear anything more about the nobility of today’s press. They are trying to make you feel worse, which is the last thing you need.

We often read news articles and wonder why they never answer the questions we would have asked. Something is missing. For example, remember those stories about farmers destroying crops, milk, eggs and so forth because restaurants are closed? “Food waste of the pandemic,” “Staggering quantities of food are being destroyed,” and so forth, played prominently for a day or two a couple of weeks ago until the news cycle moved on. Read the top comments to the New York Times version of the story to get some sense of the uncritical hanky-twisting this news provoked.

Anyway, these stories are true in their own way, and obviously very bad news for the individual farmers and producers, another economic tragedy in the midst of calamity. But aren’t they all missing something?

Yeah, you beat me to it: What about all the food that restaurants and school cafeterias used to toss out one dumpster at a time, but no longer do?

In fact, do we even know we are wasting more food now than before, er, The Event? This article on food waste asserts that we were losing up to 40% of our food from waste all along the supply chain. This web site claims “the average restaurant produces 100,000 pounds of garbage a year.” Pretend that’s true, which is roughly how journalists do fact-checking these days. Since there are, or were, on the order 660,000 restaurants in the United States, that suggests that 66 billion pounds of garbage are chucked out in restaurant dumpsters alone each year, or around 180 million pounds per day. Let’s guess that a quarter of that garbage isn’t comestibles and there has been an 80% reduction in restaurant waste during the lockdown. If all that is true, we’ve been avoiding more than 100 million pounds of food waste going out to the back alley each day.

None of the “food waste” stories we found on our simple search so much as asked whether aggregate food waste was going up, or going down, during the lockdown. Even though it is an almost fantastically obvious question.

It is cheap to suggest — as we will now do — that qualifiers such as “maybe this isn’t all bad” are not interesting to journalists because they don’t drive clicks and “engagement” from “readers.” The better explanation is that we all are far more prone to look at the information in front of us — millions of eggs being destroyed and vast acres of crops being plowed under — than we are willing to reason our way to potentially contradicting information that is not so obvious or readily available.

We believe that this asymmetry between the seen and the unseen is confusing the “national conversation” even more than usual. We see the deaths and morbidity from Covid-19 infections. They are reported on dashboards in every jurisdiction, updated incessantly. It is much harder to see countervailing information that is not collected or reported on dashboards. For instance, how many people are putting their lives or health at risk because they are avoiding their doctor or the emergency room or deferring their chemotherapy because they “don’t want to get the covid?” We’ve spoken to physicians and people in the hospital game in places like California and Texas in the last few days, and this seems like a very real problem, at least by pre-Event standards. Sadly, the omission of necessary care barely weighs in the public discussion compared to the fact of the day’s new infections number.

We are still in the dark house, but perhaps we would find our way out a little more quickly if the media would, just occasionally, look for the unseen.

In these parlous times, the media would do well to use words correctly, especially when incorrect usage is alarmist rather than calming. Since, you know, there is a bit of a surplus of alarmism just now.

This has been especially true, it seems to us, of the word “rate,” which is best understood as “rate of change” but which is often used to describe “increase in absolute quantity.” See, for example, this bit of click-baiting that popped up in our inbox moments ago:

A quick examination of the “trends” tab at the Texas Covid-19 dashboard shows rather clearly that the rates of change of both infection and death — the point of the sub-headline — are actually declining. Yeah, sure, the absolute numbers are increasing and will for a while, but the rates of change are in evident decline. The words “rates” and “increase” need to maintain social distance for the headline to be even remotely true.

So, basically, the headline writer is either lying, presumably to bait clicks, or doesn’t understand rate of change. Given the constant public discussion about “flattening the curve” it seems a little late in this cataclysm for the latter to be true.

While we are often pedantic — more, certainly than is healthy for us — this is an important substantive point. If the journalism class wants to recover even a bit of its squandered prestige and bolster its now laughable claim that it performs an essential social function, it needs to start using words carefully to communicate rather than to stoke rage and fear.