Trigger warning for mentions of bigots being bigots.
TL;DR: The Tennessee AG has gotten medical records from VUMC of those who received gender-affirming care, and requested a lot more information, including all emails to and from the hospital’s general LGBTQ health email address (which would not be covered by HIPAA) all stemming from a series of embellished and sometimes completely wrong tweets. It is difficult to not see this as bullying and intimidation, which the news has at least passively enabled.
When you end up reading the news from a large number of sources, there are a few things that you begin to notice. Word choice and placement matter. Context matters. And there’s a lot of news reporting about things that simply are not "news."
Word choice matters.
Take this headline from The Tennessean:
Vanderbilt turns over transgender patient records to state in attorney general probe.
Now, let’s make one small change:
Vanderbilt turns over records of transgender patients to state in attorney general probe.
I only added one word — of — and moved one other — records. While the difference in "dictionary" meaning is pretty similar, the tone of the two headlines is different. It’s unclear from the coverage (from that outlet or any others that covered it) whether all medical records of those patients were handed over, or just those records related directly to gender-affirming care, but that small shift could hide a big difference in meaning.
Position And Context Matter
When I was studying journalism in college, one of the things we were told was that most people just read the headline. Fewer people read the first paragraph. Most people do not read the entire article. So the further down in a single article the information is contained, the less likely it is to be seen.
The context for that same story from The Tennessean is more than halfway through the article:
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said last fall his office planned to investigate VUMC’s practices after conservative advocates published allegations that VUMC punished those who objected to its gender-affirming treatment program for children and that some treatments were used as money-making schemes.
Vanderbilt denied the allegations, but the story sparked a major backlash among Tennessee conservatives. Skrmetti and Gov. Bill Lee vowed to investigate the clinic’s practices, though neither cited any current laws VUMC potentially ran afoul of at the time.
Now we have the context. The Tennessee AG’s "investigation into potential medical billing fraud" is the same thing as these allegations made by "conservative advocates" in the fall of 2022. This makes the AG’s investigation suddenly seem a lot less like "fighting fraud" and a lot more like "intimidating providers who provided gender-affirming care."
Remember that; we’re coming back to it in just a moment.
A Lot Of News Is Not Really News
This particular story is excellent for demonstrating that a lot of news reporting isn’t really "news."
If you look at the coverage of this story from ABC/the AP or from Forbes quite a lot of the information is the same. They even directly report that other outlets reported on the story.
This makes up a lot of news reporting. For example, here’s an (unrelated) news story that is literally just reporting that someone else wrote an op-ed!
The combination of these two trends — reporting based on someone else’s reporting and literally reporting that someone else reported a thing — can be co-opted in order to create a news story out of nothing.
That’s what seems to have happened here with Tennessee. A conservative contributor to the Daily Wire posted allegations about VUMC on Twitter, which, as we saw above, led directly to the Tennessee AG harassing VUMC.
What’s worse, is that the same series of exaggerated and outright untrue social media posts were directly cited by GOP bigots as a reason for pushing their ban on gender-affirming care in the state.
What Now?
That is a damn good question.
It’s tempting to say something like "journalists need to stop uncritically citing social media," especially given that at least one social media network will alter posts.
It’s tempting to tell journalists — and us as consumers of news — to focus on the hypocrisy. That one seems more fun, at least. And relatively easy to do.
For example, one of the videos Walsh posted was of a Nashville doctor saying that gender-affirming procedures are “huge money makers” for hospitals. Which is an accusation you can make about… well, a lot of medical procedures. Although it’s curious that the Tennessee AG is more concerned about gender-affirming care when there’s plenty of other issues with a much greater impact, such as the 340B prescription drug program. It’s almost like they’re pushing an agenda rather than caring about medical expenses…
Or if you look at more coverage of this same story, for example, it’s easy to point out that the AG said "this investigation is directed solely at VUMC and related providers and not at patients or their families," but yet they tried to get a hold of "any communications to and from the hospital’s generic LGBTQ health email address," which seems a lot more personal, especially since those emails would not be protected by HIPAA.
But to do that we have to acknowledge that this is not really about social media.
It’s not about journalism.
It’s not about hypocrisy.
It’s about bullying.
Even if the AG’s probe is shut down today, their message has been delivered.
"We will make your lives difficult if you support people who are different. We will find a reason — any reason, even something as flimsy as a blowhard’s tweets — to make your life difficult."
So how do you deal with a bully?
Do you stand up to them?
Or do you become them?