Fewer Journalists + More PR = Stupid Emails; Trump Replaces COVID Info With Propaganda–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: April 21, 2025

Indy Digest: April 21, 2025

I could not believe the email I received from a large, multinational PR firm this morning.

Check that: I could believe it, because it’s certainly not the first dumb email I’ve received from a PR person. But it did literally make me shake my head and sigh.

Before I get into the content of the email, let me set the scene: I woke up this morning already tired. I was out of town last week unexpectedly due to a family emergency, and got back late Friday after an overlong travel day. (Note to Southwest Airlines: Why are you scheduling so many connecting flights to come in from Denver, in the winter? Because, you know, it’s Denver. In the WINTER.) Also last week, we were on deadline for the Independent’s May print edition. Over the weekend, I had a lot of extra copy thanks to Coachella and a couple of theater reviews, while also being on deadline for the May print edition for our sister paper in Reno.

I mention all of this not to garner sympathy, but to express why I was perhaps feeling a little extra … curmudgeonly when this email arrived in my inbox.

The subject line was: “Correction needed for story: ‘(headline of story redacted).'”

I should point out here that, after giving it a lot of thought, I’ve decided to omit the primary identifying specifics of the correction request. On one hand, the agency very much deserves to be slammed, because of how utterly insane the correction request is—but on the other hand, the rep who sent it may have simply been doing what they were told as part of their job, and too many specifics could lead back to that PR rep. So I am being nice here—too nice, probably. And it’s a shame, because the specifics are REALLY funny.

Anyway, because the subject line said the correction was NEEDED rather than simply REQUESTED, I immediately opened the email. After all, we do make mistakes sometimes, and if we’d truly made an error, I wanted to get it corrected as soon as possible.

The email said: “Do you mind making a quick update to include the official, correct name of the (REDACTED) activation in the below sentence? The updates needed are reflected below in blue for easy reference.”

(“Activation”? What the hell is an “activation”!?)

As for that correction: The rep “needed” us to remove the informal name our writer used for a venue, and replace it with the HEAVILY branded “official” name of the venue—a name that no sane person would ever, ever actually say.

It took a lot of will power to put aside my … curmudgeonly impulses, but I did, and simply replied: “Thank you, but we will let the story stand as-is.”

I have been in journalism for a long time. Back in the day (insert gif of old man yelling at clouds), we didn’t get such loony requests from PR people. Most people in public relations understood that journalists have a duty to readers, not to the brands PR people were being paid to publicize, and that such “correction needed” requests would at best go ignored, and at worst garner a response from an editor filled with decidedly curmudgeonly turns of phrase.

But today … there are far fewer actual journalists doing actual journalism. A lot of the people PR agencies are dealing with now are more than happy to make such stupid “corrections,” because these people are not actual journalists, but rather people working in some form of PR themselves.

To use a local example: The Independent has now been around for more than a dozen years, yet I am still commonly asked how much we charge for a news story. True journalists—like the editors and writers who work at The Desert Sun, the Palm Springs Post, the Independent, etc.—don’t sell editorial coverage. Period—we just don’t. Yet some other local media outlets are more than happy to do a story (including, in the case of one local outlet, COVER stories) in exchange for a check. Because those media outlets don’t disclose that those stories are actually advertising, not only are readers being confused (and deceived); some local ad agency/PR reps assume they can purchase stories in The Desert Sun, The Palm Springs Post and the Independent, too.

When you take deceptive ad/editorial practices like these, add in the phenomenon of social-media “influencers” who are more than happy to do whatever an advertiser wants for a buck, and decrease the number of actual journalists doing good work … you get more and more dumb emails like the one I received this morning.

AND THIS MAKES ME FEEL VERY CURMUDGEONLY.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• The big news of the day, of course, is the death of Pope Francis, at the age of 88. Per usual, the academics/journalists at The Conversation have done a fantastic job, breaking down certain aspects of Pope Francis’ legacy, and explaining what happens next. Here’s a piece by Mathew Schmalz, a professor of religious studies at College of the Holy Cross, that details what will happen at the upcoming conclave: “Members of the College of Cardinals will cast their votes behind the closed and locked doors of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, famous for its ceiling frescoes painted by Michelangelo. Distinguished by their scarlet robes, cardinals are chosen by each pope to elect future popes. A cardinal must be under the age of 80 to be eligible to vote in the conclave. Of the 252 members of the College of Cardinals, 138 are currently eligible to elect the new pope. As a scholar of global Catholicism, I am especially interested in how this will be the most diverse conclave in the history of the Catholic Church.”

• The latest step in Harvard University’s push-back against Trump’s demands: a lawsuit. The New York Times reports: “Harvard, the world’s wealthiest university, sued the Trump administration on Monday, fighting back against its threats to slash billions of dollars from the school’s research funding as part of a crusade against the nation’s top colleges. The lawsuit signaled a major escalation of the ongoing fight between higher education and President Trump, who has vowed to ‘reclaim’ elite universities. The administration has cast its campaign as a fight against antisemitism, but has also targeted programs and teaching related to racial diversity and gender issues. … (Harvard President Alan M.) Garber, in his statement, said that ‘as a Jew and as an American, I know very well that there are valid concerns about rising antisemitism.’ But he said that the government was legally required to engage with the university about the ways it was fighting antisemitism. Instead, he said, the government has sought to control ‘whom we hire and what we teach.’”

• The Los Angeles Times reports on a growing number of immigrants in the United States who are choosing to “self-deport”: “Trump came into his second term promising the largest deportation effort in U.S. history. During the campaign, he focused his rhetoric on undocumented immigrants who had committed violent crimes. But shortly after he took office, his administration made clear that they considered anyone in the country without authorization to be a criminal. In the months since, the new administration has used a variety of tactics—explicit and subtle—to urge immigrants to depart the country of their own accord. The day he was inaugurated, Trump disabled the CBP One mobile app that the Biden administration had utilized since 2023 to create a more orderly process of applying for asylum from the U.S.-Mexico border. … Instead, the Trump administration launched a replacement app, CBP Home, that allows immigrants to notify the government of their intent to leave the country.”

• Meanwhile, the feds continue to push propaganda—articles that push Trumpian views rather than science. NPR reports on one of the latest examples: “The White House has taken down some government websites providing COVID-19 information and replaced them with a new boldly styled page dedicated to the controversial theory that the pandemic was caused by the virus leaking from a Chinese government laboratory. The original federal websites, covid.gov and covidtests.gov, had provided the public with basic information about COVID-19, such as vaccines, treatment and testing. But those sites now redirect people to a new page, titled: ‘Lab Leak. The True Origins of COVID-19.’ … Federal agencies have issued conflicting reports about the origins of the pandemic and a House investigation that concluded last December found that a lab leak is the most likely scenario. But many scientists think it’s more likely the virus originated naturally in a wild animal and then spilled over into people in a wildlife market located in Wuhan. The new page, which features a full-color image of President Trump superimposed over giant text of the words ‘Lab Leak,’ criticizes the Biden administration’s response to the pandemic, including promoting masks, lockdowns and social distancing.”

• Speaking of the federal government’s war on health: This piece, also from NPR, is headlined: “In the middle of a hepatitis outbreak, U.S. shutters the one CDC lab that could help.” Details: “After people started testing positive for hepatitis C in a coastal Florida town in December, state officials collected blood from patients, wrapped their specimens in dry ice and mailed them straight to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Ga. The hepatitis C virus, which is spread through contact with infected blood and can lead to deadly liver cancer, is notoriously hard to identify. But if anyone could understand what was happening in Florida, it would be the Division of Viral Hepatitis in the CDC’s headquarters. … It was later discovered that a doctor was improperly reusing injection vials. By March, officials in Florida had restricted the doctor’s medical license to limit the spread of the virus and packaged new patient samples to send to the CDC for testing, CDC employees told NPR. But on April 1, the outbreak investigation was brought to a halt. All 27 of the lab’s scientists received an email from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services informing them that they were losing their jobs.”

• And finally … today’s recall news involves … mushrooms! Fox News, because why not, reports: “A New York company is recalling some packages of its mushrooms because of possible listeria contamination. Harvest NYC Inc. issued a recall of 200-gram packages of the Enoki Mushroom on Wednesday and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the recall on Friday. The mushroom packages are being recalled ‘because they may be contaminated with listeria monocytogenes, an organism which can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people and others with weakened immune systems,’ according to the FDA notice. The recalled mushrooms were distributed by Hofood99 Inc. to retail stores nationwide, the FDA said.”

• And … Aldi pork carnitas! NBC Chicago says: “A pork product sold at Aldi stores nationwide is being recalled because it may contain pieces of metal, according to a public health alert from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The alert, issued Saturday, warned that pork carnitas products shipped to Aldi stores nationwide ‘may be contaminated with foreign material, specifically pieces of metal.’ ‘The problem was discovered when the establishment notified FSIS that during routine process checks they found equipment damage that may have contaminated the carnitas products with pieces of metal,’ the alert stated. According to the USDA, the fully cooked products were produced April 1-2 and have an establishment number of ‘Est. 46049.’”

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