Farhi praises Wallace's fact-check of Trump!

FRIDAY, JULY 24, 2020

Krugman gets it right:
Here at the Howler, we're favorably disposed towards the Washington Post's Paul Farhi.

For one thing, he graduated from UCLA—and from University High in Los Angeles! Other Uni grads include Sandra Dee and Ryan O'Neal, plus Annette, Judy, Marilyn, Liz.

Those famous grads, plus Farhi. You can throw in Sinatra's kids!

Also, Farhi typically does good work. Until yesterday, when he actually praised Chris Wallace's fact-check of Trump—and no, we aren't making that up.

Farho thinks that Wallace rocked when he fact-checked Trump this Sunday. This is the way yesterday's report began:
WALLACE AND ELLISON (7/23/20): During his interview with President Trump, “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace may have uttered four of the most important words in the long, jagged history of Trump TV interviews: “That’s not true, sir.”

Wallace was referring specifically to Trump’s false assertion that the United States has the lowest coronavirus mortality rate in the world—but it set a more general tone...

The Sunday interview was widely praised for Wallace’s deftness in exposing Trump’s most bogus claims
, such as the covid-19 death rate.
According to Farhi, Wallace rocked when he challenged Trump's claim that we have the world's lowest mortality (or death) rate.

"Wallace wasn’t merely prepared with the facts—he knew how to deploy them," Farhi horrifically wrote. Making matters a million times worse, he also told us this:
FARHI AND ELLISON (7/23/20): Wallace’s encounter with Trump was recorded Friday and aired about 48 hours later. This gave Wallace and his producers time to insert context and fact checks into the interview. Wallace was able to note in a voice-over, for example, that the White House’s own figures didn’t support Trump’s assertions about the United States having “the lowest” covid fatality rate.
Wallace did insert that claim, but Trump proceeded to receive a document from Kayleigh and say it proved him right.

Each viewer could decide whose claim was more likely correct. No data were ever presented.

As it turns out, Wallace had two full days to prepare his fact-check, and that was the best he could do! All in all, it simply proves what we've said all along:

Facts play virtually no role in our discourse. Also, our highest-ranking journalists have almost no analytical skills.

As we've noted, Trump wasn't talking about "mortality rate" at all—or at least, he wasn't talking about mortality rate in the way the average viewer might understand the term.

Trump was actually talking about "case fatality rate," a rather arcane statistic which has little utility in the current general discussion.

As it turns out, we do have a relatively low "case fatality rate;" on the whole, that's only true because we have so many cases. Even there, we don't have the lowest "case fatality rate." But that statistic is largely useless in the current general context.

How good is our "mortality rate," if we understand that term in the way most people would? In the past few days, we've shown you data about total deaths to date—data which make the United States look like a charnel house as compared to countries like Germany, South Korea, Japan, Australia and Taiwan.

It's astounding to think that Wallace had two days to prepare a rebuttal and he showed viewers no such data. Meanwhile, for a second way of assessing this matter, consider Paul Krugman's new column.

As we've mentioned in the past, our current rates of daily deaths is much worse than the corresponding rate in such large European nations as Germany, Italy, France and Spain.

Today, Krugman compares the United States to Italy in terms of current daily deaths:
KRUGMAN (7/24/20): [Italy] was the first Western nation to experience a major wave of infections. Hospitals were overwhelmed; partly as a result, the initial death toll was terrible. Yet cases peaked after a few weeks and began a steep decline. And White House officials were seemingly confident that America would follow a similar track.

We didn’t. U.S. cases plateaued for a couple of months, then began rising rapidly. Death rates followed with a lag. At this point we can only look longingly at Italy’s success in containing the coronavirus: Restaurants and cafes are open, albeit with restrictions, much of normal life has resumed, yet Italy’s current death rate is less than a 10th of America’s. On a typical recent day, more than 800 Americans but only around a dozen Italians died from Covid-19.
As Krugman notes, after adjusting for population, Italy's current daily or weekly death rate is well less than one-tenth that of the United States. And that's just (initially hard-hit) Italy! France, Spain and Germany are all doing much better than that.

That's just four Euro nations. If look at other nations, Trump's claim is an ugly joke. Without adjusting for population, these are some of the current numbers of weekly deaths:
Deaths from coronavirus, previous week,
as of July 23:

United States: 5,771
Canada: 60
Italy: 85
Germany: 23
Spain: 13
France: 52
Japan: 5
South Korea: 6
Taiwan: 0
Australia: 17
What the hell! Denmark 1, New Zealand 0! It looks like World Cup soccer!

We haven't adjusted for population, and none of those countries is as large as the United States. (By population, Germany is almost exactly one-fourth our size. Japan's a bit more than one-third.)

We haven't adjusted for population. But using this metric, you don't have to adjust for population to see how crazy Trump's claim was. His general claim came from the suburbs of Crazy Town, like so many things he says.

Does it look to you like we have the best "death rate" in the world? (Farhi uses the terms death rate/mortality rate interchangeably.) It's astounding that Wallace, given two days, didn't present data like these when he "fact-checked" the commissar's latest ludicrous claim.

Wallace barely "fact-checked" Trump's claim at all; Farhi thinks he did great. We'll remind you again of two basic points:

Information plays almost no role in our discourse. Also, our major journalists possess almost no analytical skills at all.

22 comments:

  1. Not only is case fatality rate an important metric, but today's TDH comes not long after Somerby's effort to frame rising Covid cases in the context of deaths not also rising - nothing to see here folks! Somerby quickly changed his tune once deaths started spiking, predictably so to those without an agenda to push.

    Somerby also wants to persuade us that Trump suffers from mental decline, yet in the Wallace interview Trump makes it clear that he aced a difficult test of mental acuity. Trump said doctors were amazed at his performance on the test, giving credence to his stable genius claim.

    Person woman man camera tv, Trump is something else.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Notice the free association in that list that Trump created. The words are not random, as they would be on an actual test. First he says "person," then lists two types of persons "woman, man" which leads him to "camera" which is obviously related to "TV". These are associated words, not random words, which makes them much easier to recall, once you come up with the first word in the sequence. Random words are harder to recall because they are not associated with each other and thus recalling the first doesn't prime the rest of the words on the list. A trick for remembering random words is to form an association between each of them by making them part of a story.

      Delete
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  2. Yeah, dear Bob, it's still zero mortality on the Moon, we know.

    And if you really want to play gotcha games with politicians... well, it's so stupid. No one cares, really, about your dembottery.

    ...and while at it, why don't you start with something like 'nothing to fear but fear itself' or 'all men are created equal' and write a million posts explaining how it's not true and how the people who said it must be insane...

    ReplyDelete
  3. "For one thing, he graduated from UCLA—and from University High in Los Angeles! Other Uni grads include Sandra Dee and Ryan O'Neal, plus Annette, Judy, Marilyn, Liz."

    Somerby habitually complains that journalists have attended elite schools and attend parties in the wealthy Hamptons.

    He is obviously ignorant about Los Angeles neighborhoods. University High School is adjacent to UCLA and it is a wealthy neighborhood inhabited by the same high income, intellectual and professional class as supply privileged children to those Ivy League schools that Somerby disdains.

    UCLA is a public university, but like Berkeley, it is very competitive to get into. The West Coast has far fewer elite private colleges (Stanford, Claremont colleges) but its top schools in the public university system are right up there with Princeton, Yale and Harvard in quality and in the stature of its faculty.

    There are enough actors and actresses in the world, that some of them are bound to have attended almost every high school in the Los Angeles area. I had several in my middle school and high school (Hollywood High). It doesn't make Uni High special.

    I always find it odd that Somerby never mentions Tommy Lee Jones, whom he also roomed with at Harvard.

    Actors who grew up poor in the Los Angeles area (valley or East LA) include Robert Redford and Leonardo Di Caprio, Forrest Whitaker, Kevin Costner, Steven Spielburg, Ronny Howard (Burroughs H.S.), and many many others. Nothing special about Uni High. Steve Martin worked at Knotts Berry Farm, grew up in OC and attended UCLA too, majoring at first in philosophy.

    I played bridge last year with two people who attended high school with the Righteous Brothers. It is hard to live in the area and not rub shoulders with someone famous that way.

    It would be better if Somerby liked Farhi for his writing skill.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Annette Funicello attended Hollywood Professional School, not University High School. Maybe he is talking about a different Annette?

      Delete
    2. Judy Garland grew up in Lancaster (desert beyond the San Fernando valley) but was performing during her high school years, so it is doubtful she spent much time at Uni high or at Hollywood High (where she is also listed as an alumni). Like other working child actors, she attended Hollywood Professional School. But you can see why University High likes to list these people as alumni.

      Delete
    3. Pete Seeger attended Harvard for two years, then dropped out, but they list him as a famous alumni.

      Delete
  4. Somerby insists that these journalists wade into the weeds to refute arcane statistics pulled out of a hat by Trump. That isn't the way to help people understand covid mortality. They don't need a number, they need to know how bad this pandemic is and whether it is getting worse or improving. You cannot provide the info with numbers and graphs. Somerby's insistence that journalists aren't doing their jobs right if they don't use the right stats, is idiotic. You need to address people in ways that they will understand. Somerby never thinks about what it means that his journalists are all unable to use basic statistics. If they cannot use them, how much less can the public understand them? Yet he beats this same drum every day.

    His bull-headed insistence about statistics is why I don't think his actual purpose is to improve journalism -- I believe it is just to beat up on journalists, providing evidence to support Trump's claim that news is fake and there is bad faith among the mainstream media, especially when it comes to showing Trump up.

    Somerby is thus an agent of propaganda, not a media critic.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. TDH: a reporter with even minimal competence could have fashioned a question like this...you'd think that someone in that ragtag band would ask some such question at some point, but none of these Potemkins will. (Trump) rambled on for over two minutes, offering exactly the type of pointless non-answer an open-ended "question" like that will elicit.

      The open-ended “question was from a CNN (our side) reporter.

      TDH: Facts play virtually no role in our discourse. Also, our highest-ranking journalists have almost no analytical skills.

      TRUMP: We have far more testing than any country in the world. There’s no country that’s even close.

      Imaginary Reporter: True sir, but why do 18 of the 19 countries that have done as much or more testing per million than the US have lower death rates?

      Imaginary Reporter: And sir, All but 9 of the 195 sovereign nations have a lower death rate per million that the US. Why is our death rate higher than 184 countries?

      Delete
  5. Harry Shearer taught English at Uni. I think he went there, too.

    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete
  7. Somerby doesn't understand that these BLM protests are not just a liberal effort, but have broad public support:

    “Avalanche found resounding support for the protests not just among Biden supporters, but among persuadable voters and even soft Trump supporters. The hardcore Vote Trump respondents were against the protests, with 56% opposing them. But among the softer Lean Trump set, an eye-opening 59% said the protesters were ‘completely right’ or ‘somewhat right’—probably not what the president had in mind when he commandeered Lafayette Square. And 72% of Americans with Mixed Feelings about the presidential race—precious undecided voters—said the protesters were right too.”

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