26 February 2022

This is Journalistic Malpractice

Over at the Washington Post,  Joanna Slater, writes about how a North Carolina based right-wing Q-Anon type group organized a campaign of harassment and threats against a hospital in New Hampshire over the use of Ivermectin.

What precipitated this was that a patient, Lee Chamberlain to the hospital with Covid, who subsequently died of the disease.

He had told hospital personnel that he did not want the drug, though his wife Janet claims that she could not confirm this because she was only allowed to visit him twice.  (Probably because she is not vaccinated)

This is a story about deplorable story about people doing deplorable things, up to and including making a bomb threat against a hospital, but in covering the story, Ms. Slater names, but does properly describe, the group in question: Truth Seekers 88.

Their name is a tell, and a powerful one, but it's not the "Truth Seekers" part, it's the 88 part.

You see, 88 is a very specific white supremacist hate symbol, referring to the 8th letter of the alphabet repeated twice, so 88 = HH = Heil Hitler, a fact from which a reasonable person could deduce that the principals involved in this dispute on the pro Ivermectin side are neo-Nazis/

She had to know, and her editor had to know, what 88 means, and in choosing not to report this, they have both failed the story and the institution of journalism.

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