Maximum Carnage Week Game Thread

As WIRED’s Gilad Edelman reported at the time, none of these accounts held up to further scrutiny—yet each had been picked up from its original source and then amplified by larger publications that added little or no additional reporting. There’s good reason for these stories to be passed along, Edelman wrote. The hospital administrator who first went public with the story of the last-breath Covid-party confession is “trying desperately to get the American public to take the coronavirus seriously. If she hears a perfect cautionary tale, it isn’t necessarily her responsibility to investigate whether it’s too perfect before passing it along. It is, however, precisely the job of reporters.”

Doering’s account is similarly a perfect fit for a narrative that has already been written, and one that has been passed along by respected people and prestigious outlets with scarcely any diligence at all. Even just a small amount of additional reporting suggests that her experience of encountering deathbed denialism and fury at Joe Biden could be more of a disturbing anomaly than a window on our troubled times. Even Doering herself seemed to float this possibility at one point during her CNN interview. “We have a lot of patients who are very, very grateful for their care, and very thankful for what you do,” she said to the host. “But unfortunately that’s not what I’m remembering right now.”