Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com has done its summer interns a disservice by letting them push fake news and partisan narratives instead of engaging in actual, fair-and-balanced joiurnalism. We saw this misuse again in a June 2 article by intern and "Investigative Journalism Fellow" Micky Wootten:
Attorney and former Ambassador C. Boyden Gray held a press briefing on the phone Wednesday to introduce a new lawsuit being filed against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over its claims that ivermectin is an ineffective treatment for COVID-19.
“Tomorrow we will be suing the FDA over its unlawful attempts to interfere with the practice of medicine, specifically, this crusade to halt the use of Ivermectin to treat COVID-19,” said Gray in a conference call with reporters. “This lawsuit is very important to preserve medical freedom and the doctor-patient relationship in the United States.”
[...]
Gray, former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush and founding partner of Boyden Gray & Associates, is representing Drs. Mary Talley Bowden, Paul E. Marik, and Robert L. Apter, who have faced obstructions to their practice due to their promotion of Ivermectin as an effective COVID treatment.
The lawsuit was filed June 2 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, where one of the doctors being represented, Dr. Mary Bowden, resides.
Transcribing a conference call is hardly "investigative journalism," and that's all Wootten has done here -- he couldn't even be bothered to reach out to the FDA for a response to the lawsuit or even to explain or link to the FDA's stance against ivermectin. And he certainly wasn't going to tell readers that studies claiming that ivermectin works tend to get retracted for shoddy data.
Wootten also failed to examine the background of the plaintiffs for his readers -- presumably to hide how they're not really the most credible people when it comes to medicine. He noted that Bowden "was derided by Houston Methodist Hospital and forced to resign her privileges there as a result,” suggesting it was only due to her ivermectin advocacy; in fact, Bowden reportedly told patients that she had done research suggesting "the vaccine is not working," then falsely suggested and then walked back a claim that Methodist was not treating unvaccinated patients.
Marik, meanwhile, is an anti-vaxxer like Bowden and runs an organization that is dedicated to promoting non-approved COVID treatments like ivermectin -- which has shown itself to be something of a grift; according to STAT News, Marik's group charge $90 for an online appointment to get an ivermectin prescription and as much as $1,650 to meet with the group's founders. (The co-founder of Marik's group, Pierre Kory, got COVID despite following his own ivermectin-centric protocol.) Marik has also published research papers promoting ivermectin that have been retracted.
Wootten also made sure to inject his employer's partisan arratives into the "news" article:
CNS News asked the three doctors if they thought the mainstream media played any role in perpetuating the narrative against ivermectin.
According to Dr. Marik, “the mainstream media are responsible for perpetuating this misinformation and disinformation that has originated from the FDA,” which he attributes to the fact that the media “receive most of their advertising revenue from big pharma.”
Since Wootten made no effort to defend ivermectin as effective refused to debunk (let alone acknowledge) anything the FDA has published on it, there's no possible basis for Marik to attack accurate reporting on the ineffectiveness of ivermection as "misinformation and disinformation."
We've aready caught Wootten not living up to his title as "Investigative Journalism Fellow" when he uncritically repeated Tucker Carlson denying that the suicide deaths of law enforcement officers after the Capitol riot cannot be blamed on the riot when, in fact, the death of at least one officer has been ruled a line-of-duty death stemming from the injuries he received that day. Whatever CNS is teaching its interns to do, it ain't journalism.
