Trump 2020 legal team defends suing CNN over opinion piece
Jenna Ellis, Trump 2020 senior legal adviser, says the campaign was left with no choice but to file lawsuits to fight 'false and defamatory statements' by the press.
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CNN has been accused of “an egregious misreading of the data” used in a recent report claiming 68 percent of Americans say they need a coronavirus vaccine before returning to "normal life."
CNN published an article Monday that declared in its headline, “68% of Americans say a vaccine is needed before returning to normal life,” citing a “new survey.” It cited “two new Gallup surveys” but didn’t link to either of them. CNN promoted the story with a tweet using the same statistic.
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Nicholas Grossman, an international relations professor at University of Illinois, responded with a column headlined, “No, 68% of Americans Do Not Think a Vaccine is Needed Before Returning to Normal Life.”
Grossman first points out that the term “normal life” is unclear and confusing for readers regardless of whether or not the data is accurate.
“Does it mean a return to pre-coronavirus normal, with no masks in public, packed restaurants, and no worries about large indoor gatherings such as concerts, basketball games, and conferences? Does it mean the end of government-mandated lockdowns, which many states are easing already? Maybe it means something in between. The CNN article doesn’t say,” Grossman wrote.
“The data doesn’t match CNN’s headline or tweet, which is all many people will see in the age of social media."
CNN’s article didn’t lead with the information promised in the headline, instead noting that one survey found that “fewer people avoiding small gatherings than were doing so last month” and “around 74% of Americans say they’re avoiding small gatherings.” The CNN piece finally gets to the “normal life” tidbit in the third subhead of the story -- and that's what really vexed Grossman.
Grossman wrote that he searched Gallup’s polling on coronavirus and found a question mentioning vaccines, presumably where CNN got the “68 percent” number, because 68 percent of respondents said a vaccine is very important -- but CNN presented it differently in its headline.
“Return to normal life: Another release from Gallup finds 80% of Americans say it is very important for those who test positive for Covid-19 to mandatory quarantine. They said this measure needs to be in place before they'd be willing to return to normal life,” the CNN article read. “Nearly three-quarters consider it very important for there to be a significant reduction in the number of new cases or deaths, and 68% rate the availability of a vaccine as very important.”
CNN’s headline said 68 percent feel a vaccine is "needed" to return to normal life. But the study said that 68 percent feel a vaccine is “very important,” as opposed to “needed.” The Gallup poll also refers to “normal activities,” as opposed to normal life.
“The data doesn’t match CNN’s headline or tweet, which is all many people will see in the age of social media,” Grossman added.
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“Well, sure. If there was a COVID vaccine, who wouldn’t return to their normal activities? But the question, unlike CNN’s article, doesn’t say anything about what’s ‘needed,’” Grossman wrote. “'Thinking about your willingness’ is much less restrictive than ‘needed.’ Of course people are thinking about it. That doesn’t mean they’re unwilling to resume normal activities without it.”
Grossman wrote, “Claiming that this survey shows that ‘68% of Americans say a vaccine is needed before returning to normal life’ is an egregious misreading of the data.”
Grossman wasn’t alone in his thinking. Reason senior editor Robby Soave also accused CNN of misusing the data.
“It turns out that the headline, ‘68% of Americans say a vaccine is needed before returning to normal life, new survey finds,’ is fake news,” Soave wrote, nothing that Grossman first noticed CNN’s “misinterpretation" of the poll.
“The CNN article cites a Gallup poll as its source. But Gallup did not poll respondents on the question of whether a vaccine was ‘needed before returning to normal life,’ which was CNN's wording of the question in the headline,” Soave wrote.
“CNN should delete the tweet, fix the article, issue a correction, and be a lot more careful to accurately represent survey data in the future,” Grossman wrote.
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By Tuesday night, the site added a “clarification,” which read: “The headline on this post was updated to clarify that the survey found 68% of Americans say an available vaccine is very important before returning to normal life. The post was also clarified to emphasize that respondents were rating the importance of each benchmark to their willingness to return to regular activities.”
The new headline, which dropped the word “needed,” read: “68% of Americans say an available vaccine is very important before returning to normal life, new survey finds.”