I have developed a rather deep-seated reflex to certain types of reporters

Robert W Malone MD, MS

May 08, 2025

Yesterday afternoon, I was going about my daily business, in the middle of recording yet another podcast (Tom Woods), when the cell rang. As usual when broadcasting, I reached over and clicked the text message button, “Sorry, I can’t talk right now”. Once Tom and I were through, I returned to that text message.

Apparently, the call came from an unknown reporter with the usual sense of urgency and entitlement. I had received no recent email inquiry from the press, so this could be yet another phishing operation. Lately, I have been getting a lot more of these. Usually, some variant of “Hi there, how are you, did you forget about me?” and when I write back “who is this” I get a bizarre response demonstrating that this is just some random bot trying to get me to engage. But this particular inquiry had the veiled threat frequently used by junior journalists- translated from the journalese, it reads, “call me back and answer my questions or we will publish a hit piece on you anyhow.” So I punched the call-back button.

A chirpy female voice self-identifies, “This is Lauren Weber with the Washington Post”. I respond - “Hello Lauren, this is Robert Malone, I assume you are preparing some sort of hit piece on me?” She responds “Well, not from my point of view.”

Uh, yeah. Sure. Here we go, just as I anticipated. Lesson learned over the last four years: when a corporate news reporter engages like this, what is going on is that their editor has told them that before they publish a smear article, they are supposed to get a comment from the target.

At this point, the smear is essentially already written, and this is their lip service effort at “fair and balanced”. You are going to get smeared, whether you answer their questions or not. If you don’t, they will publish that they attempted to get a response, but that you did not reply. If they do get you to reply, they will selectively edit whatever you say to help make their point. These are the rules of today’s “gotcha” version of journalism.

I then asked Lauren Weber to what email address she had sent her “questions” for me to answer. Response - “your substack email”. Which I check pretty much never. I have many email accounts and was not really aware that this included a “substack” email address. With about 360,000 subscribers to this substack, I can hardly imagine how much email traffic that address generates. I can hardly keep up with my (historic) GMail and (current) Protonmail accounts!

I asked her to send her questions to my GMail address. This is what I received-

Now, this is a tell. This reporter is indeed fishing (or phishing). Because the answers to each of these questions were clearly stated in the previously published article that triggered Lauren Weber to contact me. She began her questioning by asserting that these two young girls were measles deaths. Right then I knew what I was dealing with - a corporate news narrative reinforcer.

So, who is Lauren Weber?