NYT and Vaping: How To Lie By Saying Only True Things · Gwern.net

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nicotine, epistemology, politics, scientific bias

An exercise in spotting agenda journalism: dissecting a 2022 New York Times article on teen vaping sentence by sentence to show how it pins an EVALI hospitalization on legal nicotine vapes while never quite saying so—since the actual cause was illegal THC products. Every misleading sentence is technically true.

2022-03-08–4y2026-05-14<br>finished<br>certainty: certain<br>importance: 4

Media Coverage

Rhetoric

Excerpts

Appendix

The NYT Article

Comments

The 2019 EVALI outbreak was caused by illicit THC vapes adulterated with vitamin E acetate, but it became a public justification for restrictions on legal nicotine vaping.

This essay looks at a 2022 New York Times article about teenage vaping which juxtaposes synthetic nicotine, flavored vapes, Lizzie Burgess’s hospitalization, and nicotine addiction without ever quite saying that legal flavored nicotine vapes caused her lung injury.

Sentence by sentence, the article’s misleading effect comes from technically true phrasing: “vaping”, “vaping THC and nicotine”, “vaping-related lung injury”, and post-hoc narrative order.

The case is a useful example because the ground truth is clear, the article was high-profile and edited, and the manipulation is grammatical and selection rather than simple falsehoods.

The 2019 nicotine vaping moral panic was one of the more striking ones of our era, where illegal black-market THC marijuana vapes poisoned with vitamin E acetate that caused severe “EVALI” lung injuries were a major justification for unprecedented bans on legal nicotine vaping products. Despite no lab-verified instance of a nicotine product with the vitamin E acetate adulteration (only THC products), and nicotine vapes produced by large businesses which had sold countless billions of doses to millions of people beforehand, with no EVALI epidemic before (or since), and the phenomenon subsiding after lawsuits and prosecutions of vitamin E acetate sellers, it somehow became common knowledge that nicotine vapes were deadly.

How did this happen?

Media Coverage

One way it happened was via a conflation of THC and nicotine vaping, driven in part by inaccurate reporting by victims and by the difficulty of proving a negative—after all, any given case could have been due to nicotine vaping, somehow, how would one prove it wasn’t? This was then amplified by activists and journalists working together to selectively report and describe true facts.

I was particularly struck by an instance in the New York Times in March 2022, which paints a compelling picture of legal nicotine vapes causing severe lung problems in one young woman, Lizzie Burgess:

[The Lizzie Burgess excerpt]

This article appears to have been successful in persuading readers. In the NYT comment section (mirrored below in full), most comments agreed with the article, often going as far as to claim that “addict and kill people—including children”/“here they are exploiting a legal loophole to addict millions more young adults to their lethal products” or “Young people especially become easily addicted to the nicotine…The damage to their lungs resembles the worst pneumonia you can get and still be alive.” or “The purveyors of these drug delivery systems are killing our children with intent. They should all be thrown in jail, and the import of these products should be banned.” (The import of THC vapes contaminated with vitamin E acetate is, of course, already banned or adult ID required etc.) Indeed, only a single NYT commenter (who no one responded to) appeared to get it right in their reply a quarter down the comment section:

The illness described in the article was clearly caused by using an adulterated, illegal, THC-containing vaping product, not the nicotine-based e-cigarettes being criticized here. That should have been made clearer.

The article might have convinced me too if I hadn’t already known better.

I was perplexed why the NYT would lie like that, as the article clearly said repeatedly that nicotine vaping was to blame. I had thought that it was now uncontroversial and consensus that the moral panic had framed nicotine vaping (albeit unpopular to acknowledge now that the ‘issue-attention cycle’ had moved on and the activists gotten what they wanted). Was it just wrong, or had I misunderstood something? Perhaps I had skimmed over a smoking gun, like finally finding fatal levels of vitamin E acetate in lab testing of a Juul pod?

Rhetoric

So I went back to excerpt the article—and while rereading, realized that in every case I thought might be a lie, rereading showed it had been so carefully worded as to be technically correct and to...