Bad Journalism: How It's Done Now

Two examples of why nobody trusts the media any more

as opposed to your mom’s “dump truck” which just keeps getting bigger

Yesterday we talked about luxury beliefs. Here’s one I left out: you can trust and believe in the media. Our Coastal One Percent has no trouble treating people like Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper as entirely credible. Meanwhile, their Boomer Drywall Contractor counterparts watch Tucker Carlson on Fox and nod approvingly: he’s telling it like it is!

There are only two kinds of people who have any faith in what they see on any TV channel nowadays: the astoundingly fortunate (plus those who slavishly imitate them) and the depressingly stupid. This is not an accident. The Preferred Template For America’s Future only contains those two groups of people. There is no room for the disenchanted intelligent person without access to serious capital. Nobody wants you.

Last week I ran across two great examples of media-as-Kulturkampf that I want to share with you. One is automotive, one isn’t, which roughly mirrors the balance of this Substack.

Start with the one about cars — more precisely, about trucks. It’s from Axios, a left-ish news site owned by Cox Communications and run by former POLITICO staffers. Titled “Pickup Trucks: From Workhorse To Joyride”, it is yet another entry in the tidal wave of anti-pickup articles from goodthinkers in the media. I covered this phenomenon in depth a bit more than two months ago but The. Hits. Just. Keep. Coming.

You’d be foolish to ignore these articles because this is literally how “consensus” is built in America today; via a flood of identical think pieces that create the impression of an overwhelming social shift. Chances are you personally use several phrases that were ginned up this way, from “a woman’s right to choose” to “common sense gun control” to “domestic terrorist.” The playbook being followed right now with regards to privately-owned pickups is more or less identical to how we got the idea of “assault weapons”. Prior to 1985 or thereabouts, they were just called “guns”.

The irony is that the Pickup Cucks have some solid facts on their side. More Americans are choosing pickup trucks for entirely personal use than ever before, and those trucks really are bigger and more complex than their predecessors. History suggests that this came about as a result of CAFE regulations, which effectively killed large-car development and shoved those customers over to body-on-frame trucks. You could also credibly argue the idea that our increasing loneliness and social disconnection plays a part; in 1960 you could have borrowed a neighbor’s pickup, but in 2023 your neighbors are completely alien to you and in many cases grew up in another country entirely, so you’d better have your own truck.

In a world where you could still buy a real full-sized car or station wagon for $35,000, I don’t know how much appeal the F-150 would have to regular people. I’ve had a pickup truck of one sort or another for the last seven years, and currently have three of them, but that directly correlates to being part of a family that races multiple cars in a weekend, something I can no longer make happen with a Tahoe or Discovery.

So yeah, Axios could attack pickup-truck ownership without having to lie about it — but where’s the fun in that? So instead they created a completely false narrative by misrepresenting the history of Ford pickups from 1961 to the present. Here’s how they did it, one falsehood at a time.

1. They visually compare a 1961 longbed with a 1995 shortbed, making the claim that the “bed to cab ratio increased”. Not only were both size beds available in both trucks, the cabs are also essentially the same size. The change was in windshield rake, which increased slightly in the 1980 truck to help with fuel economy. Axios uses this environmentally friendly change, combined with an indirect lie about bed size, to create the impression that Ford shrunk the bed.

2. Axios talks about the 2001 introduction of the SuperCrew as an example of pickup trucks becoming less work-ish but they show a SuperCab in their graphic, implying that the SuperCab was introduced in 1997. In truth, the SuperCab arrived in 1973. SuperCabs were very popular in the early-Nineties F-150s; I know because I sold them. But by pretending that the SuperCab arrived in 2001, Axios is able to create another artificial increase in their Cab-To-Bed Ratio. Do I even need to mention that this ratio is further affected by the 1997 F-150’s aerodynamic styling, because Axios measures from the base of the windshield?

3. For the next generation, Axios claims that “By the mid 2000s, four full doors with a full second row of seats became standard. The bed shrank to accommodate the ballooning cab size. These models were also suspended higher off the ground, making a step-up standard on most models.” The first sentence is obviously a lie. I don’t have access to Ford production data, but I can tell you that looking at nationwide CarGurus data for 2005-2006 F-150s currently at resale, the breakout is: 18.5% Regular Cab, 41% SuperCab, and 40.5% SuperCrew. As for being “suspended higher off the ground”, I think Axios is confused by the fact that the cab is taller in this F-150 generation, which is a return to cab dimensions of the Eighties from the slightly shorter glasshouse of the 1997.

4. The ultra-villain new F-150 has the highest “cab to bed ratio” of all — because the cab is bigger, as a response to customer requests. There’s a bit of irony here, because in many cases that second row of seating is used as covered storage. Ford has worked hard to make this easier; in my Super Duty, for example, the seats fold vertical and then their support box folds flat, an arrangement that wouldn’t shame JDM Hondas with its ingenuity.

Put all these lies and misdirections together, and you get a clear picture, shown at the top of this article, of a Cab To Bed Ratio that has steadily and predictably increased over the years. Except no such thing has actually happened. The most you could plausibly say while retaining some connection with the truth is that four-door pickups are more popular than they used to be.

The genuine irony is that the “working pickups” idolized in slightly fetishistic fashion by the Axios crowd often had lockable external storage added after the fact. Our 2008 longbed Silverado, “George”, has a very nice toolbox that reduces the bed from eight feet to just over six. This was never an ideal solution. What the “trades” wanted was lockable internal storage, which is what they now have with SuperCrews, and that’s why so many of the electrical and plumbing pickups now are SuperCrews without an external toolbox.

None of the above will keep that picture, and others like it, from being aggressively used by Axios readers to push for legislative changes regarding pickups. Look for a new term to come into vogue shortly to describe those trucks: “bro dozer” had a good run in the media but it just isn’t unpleasant enough.

(Brief digression: Am I the only person in America made uncomfortable by the fact that our society quietly accepts and even encourages a vast increase in luxury and consumption in everything from beachfront homes to sex toys — but draws the line in blood at what electricians and plumbers are allowed to drive to work? Where is the logic in endlessly promoting a “foodie” lifestyle for city dwellers that is ephemeral, gluttonous, and astoundingly expensive, only to turn around and get pissy because some drywall hanger wants to drive a SuperCrew XLT? And how does that mesh with the odd aforementioned fetishizing of “regular trucks”, which seems oddly similar to fantasies of “rough trade” manual laborers in certain subsets of the gay community?)

The Axios piece is a lie, both in the sense that it contains multiple individual falsehoods and in the deliberately misleading media that accompanies it. But there are other, less obvious, ways, to deceive the reader. Let’s look at Saturday’s article in Forbes, search-engine-optimize-titled No, Project Veritas Video Doesn’t Prove Pfizer Is Mutating Covid-19, Who Is Jordon Trishton Walker?

Here’s the backstory on this: “Project Veritas” is a sort of muck-raking performance art project run by a fellow named James O’Keefe. The PV pieces almost always follow the same pattern: they choose a target who is using dating apps, then use an actor who “swipes right” on that person for a date. During the date, the actor encourages the person to talk about work. That talk is then recorded, edited for maximum impact in what some people feel is deceptive fashion, and then released to the public.

The Project Veritas method is brilliant. I don’t know if it is ethical. Certainly it takes dead aim at a soft underbelly of the Uniparty/Corporate beast, namely: a significant percentage of its servants are constantly on the hunt for anonymous and/or short-term sex.

Here’s the latest one, in which “Jordon Trishton Walker” tells a propsective Grindr hookup that Pfizer is doing all sorts of unpleasant stuff with COVID-19 research and development:

Project Veritas @Project_Veritas

BREAKING: @pfizer Exploring "Mutating" COVID-19 Virus For New Vaccines "Don't tell anyone this...There is a risk...have to be very controlled to make sure this virus you mutate doesn't create something...the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest." #DirectedEvolution

When he was confronted by O’Keefe after the fact, Walker screamed that “I WAS LYING TO IMPRESS A DATE!” Why a “Grindr boy” would be turned on by gain-of-function experimentation and irresponsible virus mutation isn’t entirely clear, but there you go.

Immediately after the video was released, several sources in the media responded with stories meant to cast doubt on it. Was there really someone with that name? Did he work for Pfizer? Was the whole thing a setup, a Punking of O’Keefe, if you will? Pfizer themselves were concerned enough to release a statement on gain of function research. Here’s what Pfizer very conspicuously DID NOT SAY:

Jordon Trishton Walker doesn’t exist / doesn’t work for us / is not a director of the company

The reasonable reader would make one of two assumptions:

• He does work there, at that position, or;

• Pfizer fears legal repercussions from making that claim.

So when I saw the Forbes article in my newsfeed, I eagerly read it because I figured that Forbes would be able to get to the bottom of it. Unlike, say, Avoidable Contact Forever, Forbes has enough juice to get Pfizer to return a call, right? So let’s take a look at some snippets from the opener of the article:

Wow, a Pfizer exec bragging about “Frankenstein science?” That sounds like a monstrous revelation, doesn’t it? But before Carlson’s claim makes you sit bolt upright in your chair, keep in mind that this was Carlson who had said this. Yes, this was the Tucker Carlson whom John Oliver has called a “superspreader” of Covid-19 vaccine fears and doubts and a “scrunch-faced fear baboon,”

Is Tucker Carlson telling the truth? Uh, John Oliver called him a fear baboon!

This video featured someone described by Project Veritas as “Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development - Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning,” answering questions from an unidentified interviewer. So you could either take Project Veritas’s or Carlson’s words for it or search for this name on Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go yourself. After all, someone with that kind of title should be fairly easy to find on the Internet, right? Well, a Google search didn’t really reveal any legitimate source that could verify the person’s name and title. Similarly, a search on LinkedIn doesn’t reveal any such verifiable profiles either, just some accounts trying to spread his name.

This dude has a Forbes media credential — but instead of calling Pfizer, he is searching DuckDuckGo?

OK, let’s suspend disbelief for a second and assume that the video featured an actual Pfizer exec.

“Suspend disbelief”. That’s a nice touch because everybody knows that “suspending disbelief” is what you do when watching fiction. But the author of this article could easily find out whether Pfizer employs the guy. At worst he could get a “no comment”. But isn’t “no comment” an admission of guilt to some people? So you don’t want that.

Can you say for sure that this Project Veritas video is fake or staged and that “Jordon Trishton Walker” is actually a crisis actor and that Triston doesn’t really have the softest hair in the world? No, not 100% at this moment. Walker may really be that person’s name and that stated Pfizer title may or may not be his real title. But one has to wonder why it’s so difficult to find and confirm his identity with verifiable sources.

It wouldn’t be difficult for you, motherfucker! You could make a call!

In this case, you’ve got to look at the source of this video, Project Veritas, as well. PBS News Hour has described Project Veritas as “a conservative group infamous for recording undercover videos” and “promoting voter fraud accusations on social media.” … Ed Pilkington described Project Veritas as “a discredited rightwing attack organization run by James O’Keefe that specializes in sting operations against liberal groups and the established media.” Does that sound like a credible news source?

I don’t know. Is the news true or not? Or are we just going to whine about Project Veritas? The accusation that they are “a conservative group infamous for recording undercover videos” is particularly hilarious. Yes, of course they are, this whole thing is about an undercover video! It would be like “Ed Pilkington” describing Ford as “a corporation infamous for building half-ton trucks”!

That doesn’t mean that every single thing uttered by Carlson on his show was not credible. Carlson did say some things that do deserve more attention. He did express concerns about the power and influence of big pharmaceutical companies in the U.S… So, in the end, this Project Veritas video really hasn’t proven or even provided strong evidence of anything. Sure, journalists are open to hearing more about this Walker person, if that indeed is his name, and whatever Pfizer may be doing as long as that info is supported by verifiable sources.

If that is indeed his name!

This whole thing reads like the half-assed effort of an unpaid “intern” at Vox Media trying to “throw shade” on the PV video without saying anything that will land Vox in court — but it’s not. It’s Forbes. And this story is currently the

#1 search result on Google for “Jordon Trishton Walker”

Knowing a few Googlers from way back, and seeing the company’s public operations occasionally exposed by former employees, I can say that there is little to no chance that Google is simply letting the #1 result for that search be the impersonal result of a search-spider crawl. No, Google wants you to see this article. Note that the original PV video isn’t in the top fifty results.

I have no idea how legitimate any of this Jordon Trishton Walker business is. But I am an experienced pattern-recognizer and I see a lot of “figure” in the “ground” here.

Pfizer hasn’t disavowed the dude — and Forbes, which has the ability to get plenty of quotes for a partner-link compensated article on how to buy Pfizer stock, seems unwilling to take the most basic steps to verify the story, choosing instead to literally smear it with ad hominem accusations and slightly slimy examples of slander by proxy.

With all that “ground”, there’s at least a vague “figure” visible, and it goes something like: He’s a real person, he really works for Pfizer, and he had some basis, however slight, for the claims he made. The basis could be as simple as what Pfizer claims in their statement, or it could be something more.

Make no mistake: If a representative for Glock was caught on a Grindr date claiming that the company was gonna make guns that could go through airport security — a claim that was made in the Washington Post, among other credible outlets, in 1986 even though it was obviously false — do you think that the media would display this level of, ah, disinterest in the video?

(You can get a sense of it by reading the Giffords site on “ghost guns”, which resurrects the metal detector claim with no real evidence.)

You can argue that the Forbes contributor, and Forbes themselves, were simply being lazy — that they’d rather search Google and blogpost rather than make a single call to Pfizer — but what about Axios, which required the services of at least five contributors for their Scary Pickup Trucks article? That piece has full-motion, 3-D renders of five different trucks. If we had done that at Hagerty or Road&Track, it would have cost us five grand minimum in art fees.

There’s nothing “lazy” about the Axios article. It’s misleading, it’s deliberately false, and it transparently advances a particular agenda with zero regard for facts or logic. But it’s not lazy.

Is all of today’s journalism this bad? Not at all. Is enough of it this bad for you to feel justified in not trusting America’s “most respected” media sources? I’ll leave that up to you, but my opinion is this: you’d have to be exceptionally fortunate in life to think that you’ll never find yourself under a lens as maliciously cloudy and distorted as the ones hovering above the F-150, and O’Keefe’s gotcha circus, right now.