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Fox News Promotes Fake Covid Report To Boost Red State Policies

Fox News Promotes Fake Covid Report To Boost Red State Policies

Murdoch media outlets are promoting an economic report declaring that Republican-led states did better than their Democratic-led counterparts in the COVID-19 pandemic. But the supposed “study” is simply an engineered conclusion produced by a political front group, which gives extra credit to Republican policies to not implement public health guidance or restrict normal life. And on top of that, it manipulates the typically higher death rates in red states by artificially adjusting them downward, while dishonestly fabricating higher death statistics in blue states.

The report, with the grandiose title “A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19,” is the brainchild of right-wing pundit Stephen Moore, along with conservative political organizer Phil Kerpen and libertarian University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan. (Both Moore and Mulligan served as political appointees in the Trump administration.) The report was released through the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a conservative group advocating the discredited principles of “supply-side” economics that has also promoted “pro-growth and liberty-based responses to COVID-19.”

The report, which is not peer-reviewed, also includes a note on the first page thanking Dr. Jay Bhattacharya “for his review of this study and his instructive advice.” Bhattacharya is a Stanford medical professor associated with the right-wing Hoover Institution, who has also informally advised Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) — a potential GOP presidential candidate in 2024 — and has appeared multiple times on Fox News and undermined the COVID-19 vaccines and public vaccination campaigns. Bhattacharya also co-authored the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a reckless libertarian proposal for loosening public health measures in the midst of the pandemic to achieve global “herd immunity.”

Fox’s Special Report covered this rigged “study” as if it were straight news

The study was touted on Monday’s edition of Fox’s flagship “straight” news program, Special Report with Bret Baier. A chyron on screen claimed, “Red states fare better on economic and health outcomes.” But as a close examination of the study reveals — briefly alluded to by Fox News correspondent Jonathan Serrie — this conclusion exists only after the authors made some creative adjustments “for age, obesity, and diabetes.”

The study was also promoted in stories on Fox’s website, as well as in the editorial pages of the network’s corporate cousins: the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. FoxNews.com and the New York Post both mentioned the metric of “age-adjusted death rates,” while the Journal was a bit more forthcoming in noting that the study also made adjustments for “the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (leading co-morbidities for Covid deaths).”

The reports in these three Murdoch publications all pointed to the report’s praise of Florida as supposedly one of the best-performing states — a possible sign of Bhattacharya’s influence on both Florida’s policies and this report’s verdict. By contrast, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has run through numbers from health care analyst Charles Gaba, which found that Florida is actually one of the worst-performing states in COVID-19 death statistics, even accounting for the state’s older population.

Moore also appeared on Monday morning’s edition of Fox Business’ Varney & Co., during which he claimed, “The big takeaway is that the lockdown strategy was pretty much a total failure. … States that remained open did not have higher death rates from the virus than states that completely shut down.” Serrie later mentioned Moore’s study again, on Tuesday morning’s edition of America’s Newsroom.

Moore has built a career as possibly the worst economist in the media, making serially wrong pronouncements and false calculations in service of his political agendas. In March 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced his nomination of Moore to the Federal Reserve Board, only for Moore to eventually withdraw from consideration due to multiple controversies over his past political comments.

Committee to Unleash Prosperity rewrites death numbers in red states with a fake statistic: “Metabolic-health adjustment”

In order to arrive at the favored conclusion, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity report actually looked at more than just health outcomes. The group’s press release explains that it used three metrics for its findings — COVID-19 deaths, economic performance, and school openings — and declared they were “equally weighted” in the analysis. The result is that the question of saving lives accounts for only one-third of the calculation. The study also essentially just rehashes in pseudo-scientific form Moore’s long-standing contention that saving lives in the pandemic might not be “worth trillions of dollars of losses” and that simply allowing the virus to spread was “a better strategy” than enduring the economic costs of lockdowns.

The concept of age-adjusted deaths across populations is a tricky issue. While it is a legitimate line of inquiry, Fox News has exploited it ever since the start of the pandemic to create a nonchalant response to COVID-19 deaths among the elderly. Looking at this metric from a neutral source does show some interesting effects, but the ranks of worst-performing states would still be Republican-led ones such as Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Moore and his compatriots at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity have gone even further, however, by setting up a new metric in the fine print of their supposed study. They call it an adjustment for “metabolic health” in different populations — “the pre-pandemic prevalence of obesity and diabetes.” But what it really amounts to is a manipulation of the statistics to declare that higher death tolls should be discounted in populations that were less healthy to begin with, and to act as if public health responses can be separated from the overall health of the public.

Much of the discourse around the role of obesity in COVID-19 deaths has framed it as “another ongoing pandemic,” and the role of diabetes has been addressed in media as a “public health train wreck” and evidence of “America’s diabetes crisis.” But the Committee to Unleash Prosperity instead treats these deaths as somehow a mitigating factor in the public health responses of the states most affected. It’s almost as if, by the standards of Moore and his co-authors, the deaths of unhealthy people are not a problem at all.

As a result of this statistical chicanery, death rates in the South and some other Republican-led states were magically revised downward, while deaths were “adjusted” drastically higher in many Democratic states — skewing the data to make blue states look like the worst offenders.

“NV, NY, NJ, and DC were the four states with the highest metabolic-adjusted mortality, even though none is in the top four without the adjustment,” the report says — as if that were a good thing for the authors’ credibility — because those four places all have obesity and diabetes rates that are below the national average. By contrast, in the real-world statistics they began with, the worst contenders were all red states.

Fox News has waged a two-year propaganda campaign against public health, in which it has lied about COVID-19 vaccines, promoted fake cures, encouraged the spread of the virus, and turned people defying public health measures into culture war heroes even as their actions have gotten them killed. Fox also clearly does not believe any of what it preaches — see its own corporate vaccination and testing policies — but the network nevertheless pursues this framing because it is “great for ratings.”

Who knows, perhaps the network will be able to come up with a study showing that watching Fox News is good for surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, once the analysts can adjust for the comorbidities associated with watching Fox News.

Printed with permission from MediaMatters.

Katie Hill Won’t Be The Last Political Victim Of Revenge Porn

Katie Hill Won’t Be The Last Political Victim Of Revenge Porn

Return with us now to those titillating days of yesteryear.

Or yester-month, anyway. It’s been at least that long since a name-brand Washington politician was forced to resign due to a sex scandal. And everybody’s favorite kind of sex scandal at that: nude photos of an attractive young congresswoman, California Democrat Katie Hill, in intimate association with another woman.

“Revenge porn,” they call it. “Bisexual,” they whisper.

Which in the influential porn-for-profit industryis less politely known as “hot girl on girl action.”

Actually, there’s nothing particularly erotic about the photos published to date, although the basics are clear: An embittered ex-husband peddling his wife’s intimate secrets to right-wing mischief makers at Red State. Who along with Britain’s Daily Mail claim to possess hundreds more naughty images of the photogenic congresswoman. Just about the cruelest, most classless thing a man could do to somebody he supposedly once loved.

The man should be horsewhipped, and forever banished from polite society—assuming such a thing as polite society exists anymore.

Not to mention the “journalists” who printed them. In many jurisdictions, Washington, D.C. among them, publishing what the law calls “nonconsensual pornography” is a crime—although it wouldn’t take much of a lawyer to argue that the images, which don’t depict sexual activity, aren’t technically pornographic, even if Red State’s openly acknowledged motive was to wreck the congresswoman’s career.

This boundary once crossed, we’re almost certain to see more of it.

Katie Hill herself, a charismatic Democratic star once seen as California’s answer to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and whose sexual orientation was never a secret, cast the blame widely in her farewell speech on Capitol Hill.

“I am leaving,” she explained “because of a misogynistic culture that gleefully consumed my naked pictures, capitalized on my sexuality and enabled my abusive ex to continue that abuse, this time with the entire country watching.”

OK, fine, although I’m left with a couple of questions. First, who took the photos? Assuming it was Hill’s jealous rat of a husband, did she ever think it was a good idea? If so, she’s been extraordinarily foolish, basically a political time bomb waiting to explode. Just as well that it happened early during her congressional career, rather than later, when there might have been greater collateral damage to persons and issues greater than herself.

Katie Hill was her own worst enemy.

I’ve been surprised to learn how strongly older women I’ve spoken with about this issue feel about Katie’s folly. Maybe it’s generational. After all, my wife and I grew up in an era when priests sat in darkened confessional booths encouraging teenaged children to confess “touching impurely.”

So posing for sexy-time photos in threesomes and more-somes strikes us as deeply self-destructive, politically speaking. If that’s your hobby, find a different profession. Maybe men shouldn’t be so interested in gazing at images of naked women, but a visit to any art gallery from the Louvre to the Arkansas Arts Center shows it’s been a major human preoccupation since forever. Expect no changes.

Indeed, back when digital photography and the Internet first became a thing, I distinctly recall warning a group of college girls to be cautious. “I don’t care what he promises he makes or how much he begs,” I remember saying. “If you let your boyfriend take naked photographs, your father will end up seeing them on the Internet.”

You see, I know a thing or two about old Dad.

One time I wrote a column empathizing with TV sportscaster Erin Andrews after a Peeping Tom shot naked video of her through her hotel room keyhole. A distinguished gentleman of my acquaintance messaged me wanting to know how he could see it.

That’s old Dad for you.

Even so, I remain relatively unmoved by rhetoric about “slut-shaming,” and efforts to “weaponize women’s sexuality against them.” Nobody made Hill resign. Presumably, she couldn’t stand up to what she feared would be coming if she didn’t. She was blackmailed, yes. Too bad she didn’t think she could face it down.

Writing in the Washington Post, Molly Roberts opined that if nude beefcake photos of a male congressman appeared, “he’d probably earn accolades for his virility instead of attacks for his wantonness along the way.”

Well, former Massachusetts GOP Sen. Scott Brown did some R-rated male modeling as a lad, but no candid camera stuff. Otherwise, I don’t think so.

Fellow Washington Post columnist Christine Emba fears for her entire millennial generation, citing “one 2015 study [that] found that 82 percent of adults have sexted in the past year.”

Editor, please: if that were even remotely true, Katie Hill wouldn’t have a problem, now would she?

Look, Washington sex scandals are as old as Congress. True, Alexander Hamilton’s wasn’t a congressman when his adultery came to light in 1797. He was Secretary of the Treasury.

Hamilton lived it down. Too bad Katie Hill couldn’t.

Why GOP Strategists Worry About 2020 Battleground Districts

Why GOP Strategists Worry About 2020 Battleground Districts

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Much of the coverage of the 2018 midterms focused on how well Democrats performed in suburban areas of blue states or swing states: the suburbs of Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, and Boston — or Orange County, California, which was once a GOP stronghold but now has a Democratic majority.

But in a report for the Washington Post, Robert Costa focuses on another source of Republican anxiety: suburban areas in red states.

The fact that a state generally leans Republican doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t have large urban centers that are more Democratic. In Texas, for example, major cities like Houston, Austin and El Paso lean Democratic — an abundance of rural counties are what have given the GOP an advantage in the Lone Star State. Similarly, Atlanta is heavily Democratic even though Georgia’s rural counties are heavily Republican.

A blue city, however, can have red suburbs, and according to Costa, the worry of GOP strategists is that those red suburbs will turn blue — especially if President Donald Trump says and does things to alienate suburban voters.

Scott W. Reed, senior political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the Post that in the GOP, there is “so much angst” over some GOP congressmen in Texas deciding not to seek reelection in 2020 and “so much hope that President Trump would just talk about the economy for three days straight” — that is, as opposed to what Costa describes as “Twitter outbursts.” And Reed fears that Democrats could regain the U.S. Senate next year if Republicans don’t make an “aggressive effort” to win votes in suburbia.

In Georgia, Costa reports, Republicans view Democrat Stacey Abrams’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign as a troubling sign. Abrams narrowly lost the election to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, but she performed well in the Atlanta suburbs. A heavy white rural turnout helped Kemp fight his way past the finish line in that competitive statewide race.

Another troubling sign for Republicans in Georgia: Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath’s 2018 victory over Republican Karen Handel in a congressional district that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich once represented. McBath, Costa notes, is an African-American woman and “gun-control advocate” who achieved victory last year in Atlanta’s northern suburbs “by building a diverse coalition that drew support from college-educated white Republicans who have drifted away from Trump.” In other words, Trumpism didn’t defeat McBath in a district that once voted for Gingrich — it got a Democrat elected to Congress.

Costa’s article drives home the point that Republican strategists and organizers are not only worried about the suburbs of northern cities — they are also worried about the suburbs of Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta. And if Democrats continue making inroads in those suburbs, it could be bad news for Republicans on Election Day 2020.

Analysis: Why Rubio, Bush, Walker, And Kasich Are Not As Purple As They Look

Analysis: Why Rubio, Bush, Walker, And Kasich Are Not As Purple As They Look

By Ken Goldstein, Bloomberg News (TNS)

WASHINGTON — There are now 17 announced, or soon-to-be-announced, Republican candidates for president. And to the degree that they’re serious about winning the White House (an open question in some cases) they’re all trying to accomplish contradictory, if not mutually exclusive things: They have to sell themselves to the passionately partisan voters and caucus-goers in the early primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada), while simultaneously making the all-important case that they would be the strongest candidate to defeat Hillary Clinton, before a very different electorate than that of the GOP primaries, in November 2016.

But what do we actually know about which of these 17 would be the strongest general election candidate? Which of these 17 could compete and win in the nine battleground states (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin) that will likely determine the 2016 election? Which of the 17 could expand the playing field into states like Michigan or Pennsylvania?

There’s a lot to take into account when answering that question — but the partisan composition of the electorate is the single most important factor in American elections. And accordingly, a straightforward way to assess the candidates’ prospects in November 2016 is to take a close look at the electorates they’ve faced in the past.

Six of the Republican contenders (Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, and Rick Perry) are from states that are reliably red — and have never faced electorates that would have the partisan distribution they would encounter in purple states. Two of them (Ben Carson and Donald Trump) have never ever faced any electorate whatsoever and one (Carly Fiorina) ran and lost in a blue state.

Five (Jeb Bush, Jim Gilmore, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker) have won statewide elections in purple states, and three GOP contestants have won statewide contests in blue states (Chris Christie, George Pataki, and Rick Santorum).

But, even for those purple and blue state winners, presidential year electorates are fundamentally different than midterm electorates. Presidential electorates are less white, younger, and more Democratic than midterm electorates. And only one of the eight candidates who have previously won in blue or purple states has ever run statewide in a presidential election year. Gilmore ran for Senate in Virginia in 2008 and lost by more than 30 percentage points. In fact, according to my calculations, of the 40 elections that the 17 announced or soon-to-announce GOP candidates have collectively run in at the state level (not all of them wins), only four of those contests were in presidential election years — Gilmore lost in Virginia in 2008, Graham won re-election in South Carolina in 2008, Cruz was elected in Texas in 2012, and Santorum was re-elected in Pennsylvania in 2000. None of the other 13 candidates has ever faced statewide voters in a presidential election year.

This means that even candidates who have won in battleground states face significant hurdles. For example, Rubio won election to the Senate in 2010 in an electorate which, according to the exit polls, was 71 percent white, and in which Republicans enjoyed a four percentage point (40 percent to 36 percent) advantage in party identification. In 2012, the Florida electorate was 67 percent white and Republicans suffered from a two-percentage-point deficit in partisan identifiers (33 percent to 35 percent). Looking at the voter file in Florida, of the approximately 4 million registered voters who vote in just about every election, Republicans have a five-percentage-point advantage. But among the 3 million-plus registered voters who vote only in presidential elections, Democrats have a six-percentage-point advantage.

There are two Americas when it comes to midterm year electorates and presidential year electorates and while Republicans have enjoyed great success in recent midterms, the eventual nominee will need to attract or disproportionally mobilize a significant chunk of those citizens who only cast their ballots in presidential election years. Who votes is the most fundamental question in understanding who wins, and none of the Republicans have faced the who that will decide the 2016 election — presidential election year only voters in purple states.

Image: Election map by county that shows electoral tendency by shade of purple via Wikimedia Commons