Shady Data and Misinformation

My thoughts on how bad data and bad actors shape some bad public narratives

Photo of Nicole Shanahan and RFK, Jr., courtesy of Fox

Two related stories caught my attention today.

First, the Washington Post ran a quick fact-check on Nicole Shanahan, the new VP pick of RFK, Jr. Shanahan is a vaccine skeptic. In a recent speech in Oakland, CA, she linked vaccinations to autism. “One shot on top of another shot on top of another shot,” she warned, before falsely correlating this to a rise in childhood autism.

How did both a presidential candidate and his VP both succumb to the vaccines-lead-to-autism false narrative? Don’t they know about the origins of this particular hoax? I wondered.

I wasn’t done shaking my head before I read an interview in the New York Times of one of my favorite Democratic cheerleaders, Simon Rosenberg. He had accurately predicted “no red wave” in 2022 based on the data he was seeing and against the consensus of the polls. The interview was mostly fine, but then the Times had to bring up a Wall Street Journal poll out yesterday showing Biden losing to Trump in the swing states. The Times even ran a smug story about how the results “echo other recent surveys, including a series of New York Times/Siena College polls in six battleground states last October.”

Now, I happen to know some things about that WSJ poll, and specifically about one of the pollsters involved, that others including those at the New York Times either don’t know or don’t care to mention when they bring it up. The Times seems determined, I thought resignedly, to amplify bad polls and data in order to keep this election a horserace. Anxious readers means more anxious clicks, right?

Today I’ll take a closer look at these two stories and delve into the suspect operatives and data that lie behind them. The two stories form twin points on a cautionary line, and there are some important takeaways.

The birth of the false autism vaccine scare

The Lancet is one of the most respected publications in medical science and is one of the world’s highest impact medical journals. It’s been around some 170 years. 

So in 1998 when it published a peer-reviewed study by Andrew Wakefield suggesting a link between childhood vaccinations and autism, it rocked the medical and the ASD communities. Specifically, Wakefield drew a false connection between the Measles Mumps Rubella vaccine, given to millions of children nationwide, and childhood autism. 

As the Washington Post, which took apart Shanahan’s false claims in her speech, summarized:

Based on a supposedly random sample of 12 children, now-discredited anti-vaccine activist and former physician Andrew Wakefield suggested that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine led to gastrointestinal symptoms, which in turn put harmful proteins in the bloodstream that resulted in autism.

But here’s the thing: The entire study was bogus. Wakefield had secretly been paid by a lawyer who was hoping to sue vaccine manufacturers, who had applied for his own measles vaccine patent, and who had supplied bad data and altered patient records. 

Small wonder that every major study that followed that publication in the Lancet found no link at all. This included a massive one involving 1.8 million children tracked over 14 years.

When word got out about the bogus study, the Lancet retracted the piece, and Wakefield lost his medical license. But that took 12 years, and the damage was already done. Many dangerous weeds grew from this initial seed, including Shanahan’s current regurgitation of a fully discredited false connection between vaccines and autism.

That a major presidential candidate and his chosen VP both spout conspiratorial narratives about vaccines is worrisome, and the media needs to work overtime to fact-check and push back against it. The consequences of these false claims were evident in the anti-vax hysteria during the Covid-19 pandemic, with terrible consequences for those who fell victim to the misinformation.

Another poll, another media failure

It was disheartening to watch cable news networks and major news media cite the WSJ swing state poll as if it were an indictment of Joe Biden. It came up directly in the Rosenberg interview by the New York Times with a handy link to the poll results:

“But poll after poll shows Americans have unfavorable views of Biden and are distressed about the direction of the country. A Wall Street Journal poll released this week found Mr. Biden trailing Mr. Trump in six of seven swing states. That seems like rocket fuel for the worrying class,” the interviewer stated.

Rocket fuel indeed, certainly if the Times is willing to ignite it like this so uncritically. 

But even a quick look at the numbers behind the WSJ poll revealed some problems. For example, the poll included Hispanic and Latino respondents in large numbers in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, as would be expected. Such respondents comprised 22 percent and 19 percent of the total respectively in those states.

And yet a full 99 percent of the polls were conducted in English, not Spanish. That disclaimer appears on page 1 of the breakdowns, for any reporters willing to take the time to read it.

Spanish-speaking Latino households vote far more solidly Democratic than English-speaking ones. When the NYT ran a poll that had 97 percent of its Latino households interviewed in English, resulting in a majority of Latino respondents favoring Trump, many concluded something was amiss. NBC News’s Adrian Carrasquillo took strong issue with that approach:

I’m a broken record on this but the problem with these numbers is the lack of interviewing Spanish-speaking Latinos. Univision had a poll of 1400 Latinos in the fall that showed Biden doubling Trump with Spanish-speakers but up only 46%-43% with English-speakers.

The 46%-40% Trump lead below makes a lot more sense if a confusing 97% of interviews were in English.

As I noted with that NYT poll,

Older Latino voters, whose native language is often Spanish, are some of the most reliable Democratic voters out there. To ignore them in the poll and focus nearly only on English speakers understandably delivers wacky results. The Univision poll, by the way, had Biden over Trump 58 to 31 once you included Spanish speakers, who skewed 62-26 for Biden.

The lack of any Spanish-speaking Latino households in Arizona and Nevada in the WSJ poll is enough to throw the entire result off for those states.

The media has also failed to note that one of the WSJ pollsters is Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s 2020 campaign pollster. Now, in fairness, the presence of Fabrizio as one of the leads on the poll isn’t by itself enough to discredit the entire effort, given that there is also the GBAO firm on the masthead, and that outfit regularly polls for Democratic candidates and organizations.

But we don’t really know what is going on behind the scenes among the Murdoch-owned WSJ, the Trump-aligned Fabrizio and GBAO. In a more perfect world, polls would be completely non-partisan and beyond reproach, especially if they’re going to get top headline billing like the NYT gave the WSJ poll. Or at the very least, there ought to be an asterisk or a disclaimer somewhere.

The presence of a highly partisan polling outfit, all while the cost for the poll itself is footed by a conservative, extremist billionaire, should give us all pause. This is especially true given the odd timing of the release of the poll, which coincided with Fabrizio announcing he has rejoined the Trump campaign as a senior adviser. How is the public supposed to have any faith in the poll results, given that conflict? News stories about the WSJ poll might also mention that it was Fabrizio’s firm that gave polling data to the Russians at the request of Paul Manafort, and that Fabrizio himself was questioned directly by Robert Mueller as a result.

The public has a right to know whether there is the possibility of strong bias in the polling results.

Fabrizio’s firm also has a recent record of polling incorrectly in favor of Trump by large numbers. In late January, it released a poll showing support for Nikki Haley at just 31 percent. That was more than eight points off where she wound up, with 39.5 percent.

When the gatekeepers fail

Trusted sources like The Lancet and the New York Times have a special role to play in keeping misinformation, distorted data and bad actors from infecting our civic discourse. When the stakes are particularly high—from the anguish of parents, including Shanahan who has a child with ASD, wondering what may have caused their child’s condition, to the preservation of our very democracy—these gatekeepers’ roles grow even more crucial.

While the Lancet wound up retracting its very damaging publication on ASD and childhood vaccines, the media rarely has admitted that it has a problem when it comes to polling, even when it knows polls are problematic and possibly compromised or being weaponized by partisan outfits. There is a sort of polling / media complex at work, where the polls drive clicks and shares, and the media can’t or won’t admit that the whole thing is deeply flawed because pollsters need to keep up a facade of accuracy and relevance.

It therefore falls to consumers of information to be smarter about the “data” we ingest. This isn’t to say that people should “do their own research”—we all know how fraught and algorithmically twisted that can get. But neither should we jump to quick conclusions based on limited data. One study with 12 children in it isn’t enough to determine something as big as “vaccines cause autism,” and one methodologically flawed poll isn’t enough to claim that Biden is losing the swing states. 

We need to stay open-minded about the possibility of imperfect data and skeptical of possibly corrupted sources. And we should listen to what other experts in the field are saying to balance things out, perhaps even those 16 other polls showing Biden is in the lead nationally. We should give greater credence to those who don’t have a glaring conflict of interest or a vested interest in keeping us wanting things like more polling to feed and then exploit our continuing anxiety over the election.