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May 14, 2021

Understanding the media's role in the Rebekah Jones grift

By Andrea Widburg

Here's a rule of thumb: if the mainstream media are selling it, you shouldn't be buying it.  Nowhere is that made clearer than with the way the media shilled for Rebekah Jones, who claimed to be a data analyst who caught Florida governor Ron DeSantis faking his state's COVID statistics and was then fired for and harassed about her whistleblowing.  Because Jones managed to tar both a rising Republican star and Donald Trump (all bad COVID news in 2020 tarred Trump), the media couldn't get enough of her.

It turned out that Jones was a grifter and a felon.

Even though Jones mostly disappeared from conservative attention a year ago, neither leftists nor writer Charles C.W. Cooke forgot about her.  On Thursday, Cooke wrote a masterful exposé revealing that Jones is a con artist.  Everything she said was untrue, but, thanks to the media grabbing on to the story to prove that DeSantis's decision to protect the elderly and let everyone else live a normal life was disastrous, her lies had tremendous reach.

As you may recall, Jones claimed that her supervisors told her to alter Florida's COVID data to make the state look better.  When she refused, she said, she was fired, and then DeSantis and his "Gestapo" hounded her ruthlessly.  The media couldn't get enough of it.  Writes Cooke:

But it's not true. Indeed, it's nonsense from start to finish. Jones isn't a martyr; she's a myth-peddler. She isn't a scientist; she's a fabulist. She's not a whistleblower; she's a good old-fashioned confidence trickster. And, like any confidence trickster, she understands her marks better than they understand themselves. On Twitter, on cable news, in Cosmopolitan, and beyond, Jones knows exactly which buttons to push in order to rally the gullible and get out her message. Sober Democrats have tried to inform their party about her: "You may see a conspiracy theory and you want it to be true and you believe it to be true and you forward it to try to make it be true, but that doesn't make it true," warns Jared Moskowitz, the progressive Democrat who has led Florida's fight against COVID. But his warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Since she first made her claims a little under a year ago, Jones has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through multiple GoFundMe accounts (and, once she realized that she was losing a percentage to credit-card fees, through paper checks); she has become a darling of the online Left; and, by pointing to her own, privately run dashboard, which shows numbers that make Florida's COVID response look worse than it has been, she has caused millions of people to believe quite sincerely that the state's many successes during the pandemic have been built atop fraud. Stephen Glass, the famous writer-turned-liar who spent years inventing stories but got caught when he pushed it too far, could only have dreamed of such a result.

Cooke methodically reveals that Florida's Department of Health, rather than firing this grifter to protect a cover-up, tried to keep Jones on as an employee until it became impossible to do so.  The state should have known what it was getting itself into because it knew when it hired her that she had a criminal record for "battery of a police officer" and "criminal mischief."  Jones was the employee from Hell, who did a terrible job and then went public, portraying herself as a warrior against vice.  In other words, a garden-variety sociopath.

But oh, how the media loved her.  Drew Holden, who must have a photographic memory because he does extraordinary threads that reveal old headlines that tell a story, tracked that media fetish (hat tip: Twitchy):

Again, if the mainstream media are selling, you should not be buying.

Image: Cosmo fake news headline about Rebekah Jones.  Twitter screen grab.

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