NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week
Aug 25, 2023, 5:45 PM | Updated: 6:36 pm
FILE - A Transportation Security Administration agent signals for the next airline passenger in line at a security checkpoint in Chicago's O'Hare International Airport Friday, May 26, 2023. On Aug. 25, The Associated Press reported on stories circulating online incorrectly claiming TSA managers were told on Aug. 15 that by mid-September they, along with airport employees, will again be required to wear face masks and by mid-October the policy will apply to travelers as well. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)
(AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
Conspiracy theorist spreads false information about the return of COVID-19 mandates
CLAIM: Transportation Security Administration managers were told on Aug. 15 that by mid-September they, along with airport employees, will again be required to wear face masks and by mid-October the policy will apply to travelers as well. Further, the managers were told that COVID-19 lockdowns will return by December.
THE FACTS: No such announcement was made to TSA managers, an agency spokesperson told the AP. A spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which issued a struck down the mandate in April 2022, finding that the CDC failed to justify the order and that it did not follow proper rulemaking procedures.
Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University who also specializes in constitutional law, told the AP that the CDC could reissue the order, but he said it would likely be immediately challenged and struck down in a lower court, a decision which would probably then be upheld by the Supreme Court.
The CDC has authorization from Congress to issue certain orders if they are necessary to prevent infectious diseases from spreading between states, he said. It can also make recommendations. But the agency has no enforcement power, leaving implementation and enforcement to the states, which is why pandemic-related restrictions varied across the U.S.
“They don’t even have the power to do the kinds of things that are being suggested,” Gostin explained.
Similar limits apply to the president and to Congress. Gostin said that if the president or Congress tried to institute a nationwide lockdown, “they’d be slapped down by the courts in a minute” because of restrictions on federal police power. While COVID-19 hospital admissions are rising — there were 12,613 for the week ending Aug. 12 — they are far lower than than past peaks, like the 44,000 weekly hospital admissions in early January, the nearly 45,000 in late July 2022, or the 150,000 admissions during the omicron surge of January 2022. Still, some schools and businesses are reinstating mask mandates and other restrictions.
Leana Wen, a professor of public health at George Washington University, told the AP that the fact that COVID-19 has become an endemic virus is another reason future lockdowns or restrictions at any level of government are highly unlikely. An endemic virus is one that has a constant presence in a geographic area. “Eliminating it is not possible,” she said. “And so having measures that are aimed at a societal level, containment is not practical and won’t achieve the aim that we initially thought was possible in early 2020.”
— Associated Press writer Melissa Goldin in New York contributed this report.
Counties don’t decide presidential elections, contrary to misleading posts about 2020
CLAIM: Former President Donald Trump won 2,497 counties in 2020, far more than President Joe Biden’s 477 counties, suggesting Trump actually won the election.
THE FACTS: It is true that Trump won significantly more counties than Biden, but those numbers come from an analysis immediately following the election that was later slightly updated. Regardless, it doesn’t say anything about the outcome of the election.
County victories don’t play a role in deciding the president and county populations vary widely. Biden won the popular vote and the Electoral College. Still, some are resurfacing a claim that Trump’s win in many counties indicates he must have won.
“Biden won 477 counties Trump won 2,497 counties,” reads a popular post on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter, which had received more than 28,000 likes as of Friday.
“Who do you think won the election? Something isn’t adding up.” The numbers cited were shared in the days immediately following the election in November 2020 and attributed in media reports to the Brookings Institution. The figures were later updated after the vote count was finalized to put Biden at 551 counties and Trump at 2,588 counties, Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings, said in an email. But it’s worth noting that not every state has county governments and how those numbers are reported can vary.
AP Election Research team data shows Trump won 3,198 counties and New England townships, Biden won 1,380 and there were four ties. Moreover, “counties are an arbitrary geographic unit that has nothing to do with the number of votes that any person receives,” said Rachael Cobb, an associate professor of political science and legal studies at Suffolk University in Boston.
“Counties don’t vote, people vote.” In U.S. presidential elections, each state holds a certain number of electoral votes and a candidate must obtain at least 270 votes in the Electoral College to win. In most states, the winner of the statewide popular vote gets all of the state’s electoral votes. Cobb noted that one county may have 100 voters and another could have 1,000 voters, so it’s the votes that matter — “not the geographic boundaries.”
Indeed, counties range widely in terms of population size: Loving County, Texas, for example, has an estimated population of 52, according to the Census Bureau. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County, California, has an estimated population of about 9.7 million. “Biden won the nation’s most important big, dense, populous counties while Trump won hundreds of sparsely populated small-town and rural counties that contained few voters,” Muro said. Biden won the election with more than 81 million votes and 306 electoral votes.
— Associated Press writer Angelo Fichera in New Jersey contributed this report.
Carbon dioxide helps plants grow. That doesn’t mean more of it is good for the planet
CLAIM: Carbon dioxide is good for crop growth, so efforts to remove it from the atmosphere will destroy the planet.
THE FACTS: Excess carbon dioxide does increase growth in some crops, but it also decreases their nutritional value and has other negative impacts on the planet, such as increasing droughts and fires through climate change.
Overall, the negatives of more CO2 far outweigh any benefits, experts say. But a video circulating online is misrepresenting research around the issue in an attempt to discredit efforts to tackle rising carbon emissions.
In the video, a narrator points to a 2022 increasing amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases being released by humans into the atmosphere has led to climate change, which has all sorts of other negative impacts on the planet that vastly outweigh any benefits from higher crop yields.
“Heatwaves, droughts, forest fires as we see raging now, and all these other impacts associated with climate change would impact society much more than you would see benefits from slightly higher carbon now,” said Jonas Jagermeyr, an associate research scientist at Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research who also studies food security at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
— Associated Press writer Karena Phan in Los Angeles contributed this report.
No, a top FEMA official was not arrested for treason following the Maui fires. The claim is satire
CLAIM: Erik Hooks, the deputy director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been arrested in connection with the agency’s response to the Maui wildfires.
THE FACTS: A FEMA spokesperson told the AP that Hooks has not been arrested. The claim originated on a website that says it publishes “humor, parody, and satire” and has previously published similar false stories about supposed arrests of public officials.
Many on social media are nevertheless quoting directly from an item posted on the website, Real Raw News, that falsely purports Hooks, who ahead of Tropical Storm Hilary earlier this week. Real Raw News frequently publishes fabricated stories about made-up arrests without any supporting evidence.
The website’s “About Us” page even includes a disclaimer stating it’s content is for “informational and educational and entertainment” purposes and “contains humor, parody, and satire.”
The website’s post about Hook’s supposed arrest also does not provide any credible evidence, citing only an anonymous “source in General Eric M. Smith’s office.” The site has similarly cited unnamed sources in the acting commandant’s office in prior false stories. Real Raw News, the Marines and the Department of Defense didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment.
— Associated Press writer Philip Marcelo in New York contributed this report.
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