Rebekah Jones' firing the Covid clickbait the media dreams of but it’s all fake
tallahasseereports.com
tallahasseereports.com
> Well that’s a solid hit piece, considering she doesn’t actually have a criminal record; all of the cases that the author highlights were nolle prossed or no info’ed, and wouldn’t be admissible in any court, except the court of public opinion. This was 100% a character hit piece.
That said there isn’t enough information out there to understand why Jones was fired or removed from the project in the first place. Journalists have already requested internal memos under Florida’s Sunshine Law, the truth will come out over the next few weeks I assume.
Sounds like it might have been a workplace argument that led to a reassignment and then a firing because of her email letting her contacts know not to contact her re: the dashboard anymore was construed as suggesting a coverup.
The sexual harassment stuff or prior problems with the law seems totally unrelated and just something that was dragged up after this hit the news.
In 2020, of course, it's unfortunately quite relevant in the court of public opinion.
For us in the cheap seats, it's interesting data as we watch the story unfold, and wonder what actually might have happened here. Nothing we can do about it either way. It's a reminder, though, not to jump to conclusions at every headline. Most truth is never revealed, and even that that is is rarely revealed promptly.
You run a background check on Bill. It turns out that Bill has a criminal history including charges of assaulting an officer and cyber-stalking an ex. Is your opinion of Bill affected in any way? Of course it is. Bill has a history of making terrible decisions. You would be remiss if you didn't question his temperament and fitness for employment.
Point being, Rebecca has a history of making bad decisions. How does that not affect your take on whether on whether she is a credible accuser?
This isn't a '2020' thing, it's a 'having all the data' thing.
It would make far more sense to just get her and her supervisor on record and a copy of any emails between them before we need to jump to impugning anyone’s character because of dismissed criminal charges.
Edit: here is the only other detailed communication I’ve seen so far and it really just isn’t clear what’s happening here or why she was fired. https://mobile.twitter.com/FBSaunders/status/126286780574299...
The site is based on ArcGIS, and Jones' PhD is in geography.
The claim is that the "state's official epidemiologist" asked for data export to be disabled until they verified the dates in the data.
According to the administration, she was fired for "a repeated course of insubordination".
Perhaps most intriguingly, she was previously arrested for battery on a police officer and resisting arrest at LSU. She had also been previously charged with three felonies, including robbery, and a misdemeanor case of "sexual cyberstalking".
I hope other sources will chase down that last bit, but if it holds up, it would seem to support the idea that she decided to (figuratively) set everything on fire on her way out.
If I walked the earth looking for someone who really cared about the date field in some state's pandemic database, I think it would be a long walk.
Maybe, or maybe she knew it wouldn't be temporary and that the given reason was BS. We don't know, and we should therefore take this claim with the same grain of salt that we should take Rebekah's.
That said, merely disabling export (as opposed to shutting down the website entirely) sounds like an incredibly stupid way to try to censor something, even by the standards of bureaucratic ineptitude. If there were any real smoke there, one could just send a few dumps to interested journalists, etc.
And as we've been seeing, a lot of CV data has been pretty crappy, especially the initial cuts. The idea that they were trying to present valid statistics doesn't really seem that far-fetched.
That wouldn't help if the cover-up is meant to block the daily trickle of bad news.