Thread by @DrewHolden360

🧵Thread🧵

@charlescwcooke’s brilliant piece on Rebekah Jones, supposedly a COVID whistleblower in Florida, exposed her as a fraud & a charlatan.

You may be wondering how the grift went on for so long. My hunch: unscrupulous media attention.

I thought it was time to revisit.⤵️

First, quick background.

@GeoRebekah earned media fame after she was fired for, purportedly, refusing to “fudge” the #’s on COVID deaths/cases in FL. But as Cooke explains none of her story was (or even could be) true. She never had access to data at all: google.com/amp/s/www.nati…

But that of course didn’t stop mainstream outlets from rushing to report how big, bad Governor DeSantis had punished this poor whistleblower supposedly trying to do her job.

That’s, at least, how anyone would read the coverage from @CNN.

Any follow up from those legal experts?

In particular, @ChrisCuomo/@CuomoPrimeTime provided ample opportunities for @GeoRebekah to push unfounded conspiracy theories without even a hint of credulity, forget pushback.

Will we get an apology for this sloppy reporting, now that we know Jones was lying?

Jones was a frequent guest on @MSNBC, too. They ran a similar play as CNN: let Jones tell her tall tale without even pretending to determine it’s truthfulness.

That no one in her old office has (or can!) confirm her story or that a Dem judge upheld charges against her be damned.

And it wouldn’t be a lefty conspiracy theory if it weren’t endorsed full-throatedly by @JoyAnnReid, who was all too happy to talk to @GeoRebekah.

Perhaps it isn’t @RonDeSantisFL’s honesty we should be concerned about?

I want to pause here to drive the point home: no one in any official capacity supported Jones’ story. There was one random lawyer who resigned in protest and it made big news. But everyone - everyone - involved disputed Jones’ contentions & findings, as Cooke’s piece makes clear.

It boggles the mind, then, that these outlets would’ve run with this narrative - absent any evidence beyond what one unknown person had said *about herself!* - to create this narrative that just so happened to undermine a potential 2024 GOP candidate the press doesn’t like.

And yet, across outlet after outlet in the mainstream media, we saw this same framing.

Here’s @USATODAY, again, relying on a story that (if it were true) would be a huge deal, told by a well-known fabulist, with zero interrogation of the story’s veracity that has since imploded.

(A quick perusal of Jones’ personal history should give us A LOT of reason to doubt her truthfulness, including a hundreds of pages long manifesto after she was fired for having sex with a student as a professor. Jones was married with kids at the time: google.com/amp/s/www.foxn…)

Anyway, Cooke points out that this lack of a real story is why there wasn’t some big @nytimes scoop on FL undercounting COVID deaths, as Jones alleges.

He’s right, but the Times did report on Jones...just as a brave underling daring to take on Governor DeSantis.

Is it any wonder that people believed Jones when outlets like @NBCNews covered her story as if she was both the victim and the hero?

Mind you, this whole saga was yet another invention. Cops sat patiently at her door for over 20 minutes asking her to come outside. She wouldn’t.

Among the worst had to be @Cosmopolitan, who did a full exclusive sit down with her, where she repeated all of the same lies, spun into a truly ridiculous narrative.

Will we get any follow up on it, @emdrums?

I wish I was kidding, but this isn’t even the worst of it.

@Forbes made her their Tech Person of the Year in 2020. They even excused the charges against her!

@FortuneMagazine named her to their 40 under 40 list in healthcare, a subject matter she doesn’t have any knowledge of.

The central claim of this first @washingtonpost piece is simply wrong. All Jones did was run a website. She wasn’t the one creating or altering the data.

And this entire story is built only on *Jones’ telling of events* and ignores *everything the state said to the contrary*

@washingtonpost even plugged her GoFundMe!

I mean cmon. This whole piece is a PR dream. Read it for yourselves: google.com/amp/s/www.wash…

@NPR had Jones on, too. And here it was the same thing: no pushback, no interrogation of the details, no simple investigation of whether her story was even possible (it wasn’t), just puff.

There are too many more examples to list them all here. This perspective was genuinely everywhere.

But here’s a few more from @YahooNews (tough look, @alexnazaryan), @thedailybeast(I mean, cmon guys!) @TheVerge (might be time to revisit this one!) and @Newsweek.

And of course, it wasn’t just the media. Jones has built a sizable following on Twitter (but blocked me). And there were plenty of individual actors who pushed her grift as well.

Here’s @amandacarpenter, author of a book called “Gaslighting America,” helping Jones do just that.

We even had members of Congress get in on this one.

@RepTedDeutch, any follow up on this conspiracy theory you helped give voice to?

Or from you, @nikkifried? Not sure this’ll help your shot at Governor, in retrospect.

@Laurie_Garrett got this one all entirely wrong. Jones wasn’t an epidemiologist - nor did she have any health care background, she just ran the website - and her claims were entirely divorced from reality.

Maybe the most committed to this conspiracy theory was twitter’s most unscrupulous doctor, @DrEricDing.

Here’s just a smattering:

And of course, the usual unserious blue check brigade was all over this one. I don’t have the mental energy to include all of them, but here’s:

@davidhogg111 (go figure)
@funder (maybe the worst actor on here)
@donwinslow (see above) &
@DWUhlfelderLaw (weird grim reaper guy)

As Cooke says, this is a classic case of a known fraud knowing her mark better than the mark knows himself.

While this may be an excuse for everyday people, that so many who are tasked with bringing us the truth fell for it is a damning indictment of media wishcasting.

I’ve talked lots about the ridiculous coverage of @RonDeSantisFL.

The treatment of Jones is an outcropping of the same impulse: a need for the facts to fit one’s politics, not the other way round.

This time, it was all lies. And left wing conspiracy theories should matter, too.