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I tried, but I can’t write a lede that’s any better than these headlines:

“Lab monkeys ‘infected with herpes’ escape truck: One ‘aggressive’ primate that could also have Covid and hepatitis C remains on the loose” (The Telegraph).

“Truck hauling ‘aggressive’ monkeys carrying herpes and COVID overturns in Mississippi” (WBRC-TV, Birmingham, Alabama).

“‘Aggressive’ monkey infected with COVID and STIs running loose in Mississippi after transport truck overturns: sheriff” (New York Post).

That story has all the elements: Crazed primates. Horrifying diseases. And one more thing: unconfirmed rumors. What more could a clickbaiter want?

Our saga begins on October 28, about eighty-five miles east of Jackson, Mississippi, on Interstate 59. A truck overturned, and out popped around eight of the twenty-one rhesus monkeys caged inside. The animals were coming from Tulane University’s National Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, and while their intended destination is still not clear, it certainly wasn’t a grassy median near Heidelberg (human population: around seven hundred). 

So far, what we have here is your garden-variety monkey-doesn’t-bite-man story, but things went awry when Jasper County sheriff’s officials announced that the primates were carrying “hepatitis C, herpes, and COVID.” Not just that, but they were said to be “aggressive to humans and they require PPE to handle.” That information, which apparently came from the truck driver, went promptly onto the sheriff’s Facebook page, followed a few minutes later by an update warning that “if the monkeys leave the wreck site they need to be shot.”

A story like that will, erm, go viral, with headlines like the ones above. It also set off alarms at Tulane, which soon pushed out the message that these “non-human primates…belong to another entity & aren’t infectious.” 

Unfortunately, five of these monkeys were killed at the scene before they could be rescued. Another was shot by a Mississippi mom who saw it near her yard and was apparently unaware that the monkeys weren’t infectious: “I did what any other mother would do to protect her children,” she told the AP.

Typical of the breathless news reports was the New York Post story. The timestamp indicates that it was published a few hours after Tulane had issued its statement, and also after the sheriff’s office had updated its Facebook page to note that these monkeys weren’t diseased. But it took the Post writer seven paragraphs to mention that fact. Various other websites have yet to correct or rewrite their accounts.

We realize this started as a hot story, fueled by the sheriff’s initial, incorrect reading of the situation. But even after officials fixed it, the tale of aggressive, herpes-laden primates roaming the Deep South countryside was too tempting for many news orgs. 

It didn’t have to be that way. Take the example of Mississippi Free Press reporter Nick Judin, whose spot story made clear what risks did and didn’t come from the crash scene. Right from the headline—“Lab Monkeys Escape Overturned Truck Near Heidelberg, Mississippi, But Are Not Infected”—you could see a reporter who was doing his due diligence, not grubbing for clicks. 

I asked him about this, and I think that his response, lightly edited, is worth quoting at length: 

When I first came across the story, I thought the sheriff’s Facebook page had been hacked, because of how sensational a story it was. I reached out to dispatch, and the details were confirmed… 

We did want to get the story out quickly, especially if there was a genuine threat to the public, but the entire idea seemed alien to my admittedly surface knowledge of research science. Why would a study have a grab bag of random viruses in a handful of primates? What study necessitates infecting primates and then shipping them around the country? 

It just didn’t add up, so I called Tulane and made sure to leave a message with four separate contacts. That paid off, as I got in touch with a communications director who was able to confirm that the primates weren’t infected with anything before transit, and indeed were screened [before they were put on the truck].  

Still, I admit a certain sympathy for some of the local outlets that put out the wrong info. If the authorities tell you there’s an imminent threat to human health and safety, it can be difficult to second-guess. What I do not understand is how multiple national outlets ran prime-time coverage with sensational headlines about potential outbreaks well after the lab confirmed there were no diseases present, and well after the sheriff’s office admitted that the info they had came from the driver and not any other source. 

Like so much journalism, it simply took making phone calls early and often.

Well put, Nick.

Reporters in Chicago are doing heroic work, documenting the arrests and assaults by masked immigration agents who have spread fear and chaos throughout the city. I won’t name all the deserving journalists here, because I’d inevitably leave some out, but this excellent thread by Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune metro editor, will get you a long way there. 

We do want to highlight one small but telling section of one particularly wrenching story. In “​​Chicago woman dragged out of her car after colliding with ICE demands accountability,” Tribune reporters Laura Rodríguez Presa and Jonathan Bullington tell the story of Dayanne Figueroa, a US citizen who was driving to get a coffee on October 10 when an unmarked federal vehicle smashed into her car. Agents then pulled Figueroa out of her car, screaming, and took her to an ICE processing center, from which she was released that afternoon. DHS apologist spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin claimed that she “violently resisted, kicking two agents and causing injuries,” even though a video shows the violence coming only from the arresting officers. Figueroa later stated that “agents crashed into me. I was not involved in any protest or related activity.”

Figueroa has not been charged. With anything. Not even a traffic violation.

And this is where the laurel comes in. The reporters put Figueroa’s detention and release in context, showing how people in Chicago keep getting hauled in by immigration agents, only to be released without charges, or to see those charges get reduced and eventually dismissed:

While DHS says its operations are being impeded and that there will be consequences for interfering with federal agents, many individuals who are detained are released without charges. 

On Oct. 9, federal prosecutors…dismissed felony charges against an Oak Park man with intellectual disabilities accused of assaulting federal officers during a protest outside the Broadview immigration holding facility. A day earlier, a federal grand jury refused to indict a Chicago couple arrested during a violent protest outside the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview in September. And a WGN producer violently arrested by ICE in Lincoln Square on Oct. 10 was detained for seven hours by federal immigration authorities before being released without charges, according to her attorney.

It is understandable that, when confronted by the spigot of news, journalists can get so caught up reporting the facts of the day that they lose sight of the bigger picture. That didn’t happen in this case, and Chicago Tribune readers are better off for it.

Did you hear that New York City elected a new mayor Tuesday? Yes, this really happened, and the news might have escaped your attention, given that you have been living in a cave four hundred feet underground since 2022.

There were a bunch of other local elections on Tuesday, and many of those are consequential for people in Kansas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and a few dozen other states. For those who want to know what those elections were about, and what was at stake, there is one uniquely excellent place to turn: Bolts. The online magazine’s name comes from the fact that it “covers the nuts and bolts of power and political change, from the local up. We report on the local elections and obscure institutions that greatly shape public policies but are overlooked in the US.”

Bolts’ founder and editor in chief, Daniel Nichanian, put together a fantastic nationwide guide that was available more than a month before Election Day. From the two contested seats on Georgia’s public service commission to a property tax hike in Austin, the Bolts staff showed what local voters had to navigate Tuesday. The guide was updated Wednesday morning with many of the results, along with links to other outlets as well as its own coverage, such as this Alex Burness piece on the supreme-court election in swing-state Pennsylvania. 

And while we’re at it, check out these beautiful, user-friendly electoral maps from the New York Times and the City University of New York. Both present a ton of data in a remarkably accessible way.

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