Trying not to fail media

I thought this week I would expand on the last link in last week's post; then new things happened. That is a common issue when I try and be topical.

I believe I am going to hold off on that link, combined with something else that came out, and for now just spend some time on trying to be responsible and informed.

Let's start off talking about podcasts!

You might think this is going to be about Joe Rogan and Neil Young and Spotify, but it's really not. I will say it is kind of refreshing that doing the wrong thing seems to be turning out to be financially costly, but I am ultimately not sure that even if Spotify de-platformed Rogan that it would make much difference, which will relate to one of our key problems that we probably won't get to this week.

Regardless, the inspiration is really this:

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/12/955873886/public-radio-stations-rebuke-times-for-ethical-lapses-related-to-caliphate-podca

A very popular, award-winning audio series on ISIS was based on an unreliable source. There were clues, but not only did the New York Times fail to follow the clues, there was intimidation against those who did.

The intimidation may have come from one person, and not generally be considered an action of the Times, but did the environment fostered by them -- where drama and engagement was more important than accuracy -- encourage that?

When my sisters and I discuss news, they often ask if a certain source is "good". There is a logic to that question. Yahoo! News, for example, is full of biased stories that focus on reactions instead of fact. 

However, last week's post had Fox News clarifying one thing and muddying another. Politico has had good pieces, but they were also the ones who had the irresponsible story where Chuck Schumer having dinner with his wife was framed as Democrats attempting to influence Sonia Sotomayor, who was never there.

There isn't a rule like that. Breitbart has doctored videos so often, it would be foolish to ever trust them, but they are unusually flagrant. Most news sources are not going to be that bad, but there are factors that influence what stories they tell and how they are told.

The question one is often advised to ask is Cui bono? Who benefits? However -- and we will get back to this -- people will sometimes act against their own self-interests, or at least what we would perceive to be their natural self-interests. That makes it necessary to also consider how they benefit, and to have some understanding of people.

For just understanding reporters and other media sources, one obvious factor is engagement. Are people tuning in? Do they talk about it with other people? There are financial rewards and ego boosts to that. Unfortunately, the truth is often not that dramatic or edgy. QAnon profits from knowing that, but they do a lot of damage.

So, the first thing that media consumers have to do is reconcile themselves to the most intriguing drama sometimes being fiction designed for entertainment, and not accepting that in their news. The click bait article on Republicans angrily criticizing something by a perceived liberal are not as valuable as an article analyzing a situation in a calm, factual manner.

Except sometimes that analysis is wrong as well. 

Sometimes there is bias. There is often good, measured reporting in the Wall Street Journal, but it is also based on certain assumptions about the importance of the stock market or perhaps the bad impact of a minimum wage increase. It's not the same as outright lying, because they believe it and they can point to experts who have said it, but it may still be wrong.

One bad development in recent years is a tearing down of respect for expertise. Yes, there are revered economists who are wrong, and scientists form hypotheses based on what they know and have to change them as they learn more... an advanced degree does not confer omniscience or omnipotence.

That does not mean there is no value in study. There can be real harm in listening to the uninformed who act with amazingly confident ignorance.

"I understand epidemiology, despite have never read a book on it or conducted any experiments or done anything to inculcate understanding. However, I do have things I can tell you based on my political leanings and the companies I have investments with or friends at."

I wish I was exaggerating.

And also please understand that existing bias may not be overcome by education. 

A professor at Wharton, Nina Strohminger recently tweeted out that she had asked her students what they thought the average American salary was; they were way off.

https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/wharton-students-think-six-figure-salaries-are-american-average

These are students studying business at a prestigious school. Many of them will end up in prominent positions where they may be making choices that affect prices, wages, and distribution. They may learn more with hard study, but they may also still never quite grasp that not everyone has the same opportunities, and that their own more comfortable position is not strictly a result of personal virtue and merit.

Frankly, people hate learning that one.

Therefore, it is often advisable not just to pay attention to "experts", but to pay attention to multiple experts from different backgrounds, so you can get different perspectives. If they disagree with each other, that can be great.

I follow many people that I sometimes disagree with, but the guiding rule is that they must have some regard for the value of people.

Disagreeing on pizza toppings? Fine. Disagreeing on how to accomplish a shared goal and what would be most effective? Usually fine. Disagreeing on whether keeping Black people from voting is wrong or transgender people deserve rights? Even when you say things that are correct I will be suspicious.

That leads to another issue that is really important, but also easy to overlook: the importance of listening to people of color, especially women of color, and especially Black women.

So often when there are those click bait articles about Republican criticism, that criticism is directed toward a woman of color, like Sotomayor or Harris. That is not a coincidence. The power structure that it is so easy to not even think about reinforces them as targets.

Women of color have to think about it. That is the perspective that so often we are missing when we are white and male or otherwise relatively privileged, despite it not making life automatically easy.

That's not a fail-safe either. If you start off by following Candace Owens, Nina Turner, and Briahna Joy Gray, you will see some very different slants, and none of them will necessarily be helpful.

It's not easy. It is important.

Look for verification. What are other people saying? What are reasons they would have for saying it? How does listening to them affect your heart?

Does it keep your love for others alive?

Those are all things to think about as we try and move forward.

The media is failing us

It took a week longer than I anticipated, but let's write about media failure!

A good jumping off point is a reference I made in the last post to a quote from CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. Shortly after I posted, there was an update:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/abc-news-edited-out-cdc-directors-answer-vaccine-confusion

The update is not particularly exonerating. The extra 20 seconds gives a more specific context to the answer, and shows that the word "encouraging" was initially used by the interviewer. It does not change the overly easy dismissal of death in people with comorbidities, that in turn works with a tendency to dismiss others too easily as having brought trouble on themselves. The disability community still has a right to be angry.

That is an issue that could take several posts. I believe we will get back to that and the effects of capitalism on government policy. For now I want to focus on media.

That particular edit was probably made for time, and not malicious. It should have been thought about more, perhaps, but a CDC director who was thinking about the value of disabled lives and so on would have fielded it differently. 

It is ironic that I am using an article on Fox News, because that is often where the misinformation with malice aforethought comes in. Allow me to refer you to this Washington Post piece from Dana Milbank:

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/21/fox-news-lie-school-board-domestic-terrorists/

Fox News, with lots of repetition, has taken a a reference to potential domestic terrorism at school board meetings (which given some of the things that were happening at school board meetings, was completely appropriate) and has tried to conflate it with the Biden administration considering all parents speaking out as domestic terrorists.

Sadly, as ridiculous as this is, there is a subset of the population with whom it works. 

It is not unreasonable to question how it works. For example, in this quote by Matt Walsh, “I’m glad that the Biden administration labeled us domestic terrorists, because that was a wake-up moment for a lot of parents."

I doubt that Matt Walsh really believes it, but I am sure that many of his listeners do.

Of course there is the question of the level of their belief: do they actually understand that some actions are crossing lines -- not just of courtesy and civility, but actually of legality -- or are they so sure that it is justified that they don't think of that? That part probably varies depending on the person.

(A good determining question may be whether in your mind you equate the prosecution of people who broke into the Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement and stole and defaced government property -- including with their own feces -- with a general persecution of conservatives.)

Are there people who hear the lie, do not do any additional research, and do not know that if they were to contact Fox News to try and get specific examples that back up the lie, Fox would not and in fact could not provide any examples? Absolutely.

That may be an example of us failing... not the media, but ourselves.

There is so much to explore, but I want to give two more examples of what happens and how it happens.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1466768909252575241

This is a tweet from Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) comparing two tweets from AP White House reporter Zeke Miller.

From February 2nd, 2018: "US added strong 200K jobs in January"

From December 3rd, 2021: "US employers added a sluggish 210,000 jobs as economy contends with inflation and shortages."

Rupar goes on to add that those time periods are with nearly identical unemployment rates. Certainly, context could be added about what kind of jobs and wages, but that sounds like a slant that was overly favorable toward Trump, or overly harsh on Biden. 

For all of the claims of a liberal media bias, Trump was not reported on responsibly. There has been a shift in the other direction under his successor. Is that because of a perception that this will be better received by readers, and get better hits and ratings and advertising? And is that perception overly focused on white male consumers of media? 

Perhaps, but corporate influence and ownership plays a role, as well as the increasing difficulty of being able to survive as a journalist without already coming from money. In addition, the Trump administration was likely to shut out reporters they didn't like, where that is less likely to be an issue with an administration with any sense of ethics.

We may not have much ability to influence what is reported and how. That is all the more reason to be aware of how those decisions are influenced.

If all goes well, I will try and write more about news consumption next week. For now, just for some more idea, here is some analysis on one thing that is being reported, which background on how that came about from Civil Rights Corp director Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec).

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1484966529531879425

It is worth pondering.

Recent media about Sonia Sotomayor

Let me start by saying that I have been planning on doing a post titled "The Media is failing us". 

There is a good chance that will take place next week, as a more general continuation of this entry. It may resonate more after this post.

The genesis of this much more specific post is that my sisters asked me about seeing that Sotomayor was being criticized. I don't hear about as much on my own, now that my job has become so consuming, but it was the weekend and I could do some research.

The criticism is for a remark on COVID, which is being criticized as being inaccurate.

Let me first state how hard it is to find the quote in any context. I suspect this is not a coincidence. This is what I could find:

"We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”

That sounds alarming, and is being widely decried as false, though critics are split on whether that is on account of her being incompetent or a liar. I think an appropriate context would be more information on where she got those figures, and what the actual figures are. I did dig around for numbers.

From https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/children-and-covid-19-state-level-data-report/

"COVID-19 cases among US children have reached the highest case count ever reported since the start of the pandemic. For the week ending December 30th, over 325,000 child COVID-19 cases were reported. This number is a 64% increase over the 199,000 added cases reported the week ending December 23rd and an almost doubling of case counts from the two weeks prior."

The article goes on to say that children now make up about 17% of the infected. We have, in fact, not had that before.

I have been noticing the increase in child infection anecdotally. Many of the children are too young to receive the vaccine, and some children have not been eligible long enough to be fully vaccinated and boosted. That increases the odds of the cases being serious. 

The question then becomes what percentage of these cases are serious? If it is about a third, then Sotomayor is correct. 

That number is harder to assess. This headline, "Record Number of Kids With Coronavirus are Hospitalized", seems supportive, but doesn't actually give an aggregate total. It merely says averaging 750 cases per day.

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2022-01-07/cdc-record-number-of-kids-with-coronavirus-are-hospitalized

Now, in a week where 350,000 child cases are reported, if only 5,250 are hospitalized, that is only about 1.6 % hospitalization rate, and certainly less than 100,000. However, people who were comfortable with the deaths of their grandparents and people of color may have a harder time justifying the deaths of children. At least, if they did, it would seem like some glimmer of reason one could hope for humanity, though the willingness to sacrifice grandparents and people of color does not show a lot of hope.

However, one can see the attempts to downplay these child hospitalizations as well, because they are mainly not for COVID, but involve COVID plus something else, as if that something else is completely unrelated to the COVID and not because of it.

For example, in one of the articles I saw something saying that most of the pediatric patients were there for diabetes, except as a throwaway it was also included that COVID seems to attack the pancreas. Was the diabetes there before? Even if yes, would it have required hospitalization?

Probably worth reading: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news-other-healthcare/588857-covid-19-infections-in-children-may-increase

I should also refer to a recent pronouncement by CDC director Rochelle Walensky:

"The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron."

You might be surprised to find out how rapidly comorbidities accumulate, especially for the poor. 

One person with at least one comorbidity is Sonia Sotomayor, who developed Type 1 diabetes early in life. She was recently attending court sessions remotely due to that risk, especially given that the person seated next to her by order of appointment, Neil Gorsuch, has chosen not to wear a mask.

Those all seem like reasonable things to cover in a story about child COVID cases and Sonia Sotomayor, but of course, if the article focuses on the roasting, than it makes sense to quote Dinesh D'Souza, rather that track down case counts. Is it what is most important to know? I mean, it at least seems worth pointing out that many of those most critical of Sotomayor are also quite critical of masks and vaccines and treating the virus like an actual health threat, so there's that.

As long as the media -- regarding Sotomayor, yes, but certainly not exclusively -- is failing, let me point out two more things. 

Sonia Sotomayor is a well-spoken and outspoken force on the court. That has been demonstrated in multiple cases in just December. Even if all she is able to do in this current configuration is write a dissent that will contribute to future case law, that does make her a target of conservatives.

Probably related, there was recently a hot tip given to Politico about her dining with Democratic leadership while considering court cases they would be interested. That could certainly present ethical concerns. In fact, the woman dining with Senator Chuck Schumer was his wife, Iris Weinshall.

Iris Weinshall looks less like Sonia Sotomayor than John Lewis looked like Elijah Cummings. At some point, you have to question how hard they are trying... or perhaps the question is more what they are trying for.

Take shelter

I already said this in a Facebook status, but if you don't have any resolutions yet for the new year, you might consider hunkering down for two weeks. I say this because I know people have been doing many activities over the holidays where there has been the potential for spread, and it takes a few days for the extent to really show.

Does it really take the whole two weeks to incubate? Not usually. That doesn't mean that shortening the quarantine time was not economically motivated or that it's a good idea, but yes, a lot of the new cases will be showing up this week.

The thing that it is important to emphasize is that the rate of infection is so broad now that the chances of contracting it go up exponentially. We did slow the spread for that six weeks back in 2020, but people kept getting worse at preventing spread: more fed up, more skeptical, more ignorant, and really more psychopathic. 

It spreads.

And it is hard to go back. If you do give up on something too early, people resist going back to that earlier state. There is a cycle there. That is why, even though vaccines are widely available and the shortages of PPE seem to be resolved, the death rate keeps rising.

For the record, as of December 28th, 2021, the World Health Organization reports 281,808,270 cases world wide, and 5,411,759 deaths.

For the United States, that is 812,577 deaths and 52,543,602 cases, and -- perhaps most to the point -- 525,763 cases in the past 24 hours.

https://covid19.who.int/

Those deaths are changing. At the beginning of the pandemic, cases and deaths were disproportionately marginalized people, due to inequities in health and employment protections. That has switched to white people, the group least likely to wear masks and get the vaccine. 

I know, "not all white people". There is a strong correlation with Trump support there. If you want to delve into the numbers, there are some good links here:

https://acasignups.net/22/01/01/nchs-70-covid-deaths-june-have-been-among-white-people-wimportant-caveats-updated

Regardless, I don't want to get sick, and I do not want to get other people sick. I know that some people are higher risk, and there is no straight correlation between who deserves to die and will die, or who deserves and will get long COVID symptoms.

But I want good things for others (that does not correlate with Trump support), so I have to be responsible.

For me, this means that I am not socializing for the next two weeks. I have a milestone birthday coming up right about the end of that, and I am not planning anything fun. Maybe I can set up a list of Zoom calls. 

I am very fortunate to be able to telecommute. If you have to be at work, do what you can to protect yourself and others with masks, distancing, and supporting of sick leave.

I will probably go to the store twice over those two weeks, but absolutely will not dine in a restaurant, or go to a museum, or anything like that. 

Also -- here is where I have the most qualms -- I will not be going to church. I do not feel good about that, but speaking of Trump supporters! 

Even in the other, nearby, stake where they said that people not wearing masks would have to talk to the stake president, it needed to be said. Our stake has not been that forward, and I have to do what I think is right.

I hope that the pandemic will subside, and I will be seeing many of you before the end of 2022. I hope we will be hugging, laughing, and singing karaoke. 

Right now is the time to make that happen.

Bless us all, every one.