Fake News: Being Informed in an Age of Propaganda August 2, 2020
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.” ~Will Rogers
I have never been one to wear a hat. I never thought they looked good on me, so I had all but dismissed the topic when I started to get some bad spots on my face that made my doctor insist that I start wearing a hat when I am in the sun. But you can’t really wear a straw hat in the winter time, and you can’t wear an Indian Jones fedora when you are wearing a clergy collar to a protest. So, the collection grew. But then came the pandemic, with lots of hours of looking into a computer screen, a computer screen that knows that you ordered one hat a year or two ago, and has never given up on suggesting others. You spend a lot of time alone during a pandemic.
I don’t want to be too specific about just how many hats I have ordered during these past few months but it ended with this one. . . which both sort of rounded out the collection and made a bold statement regarding the complete irrationality that I would ever have an occasion to wear a steam punk top hat. . . unless it was right now?
This little hat buying jag I have been on is the result of both targeted advertising and the fact that, for reasons that are not clear even to me, I wanted to be persuaded to buy several hats. In my own defense, I have spent most of the past four months almost entirely unsupervised. Pandemic isolation starts to work on you after a while.
That’s the real secret sauce in advertising. Commercials can make a product look glamorous, or tasty, or convince you that it is a sign of status, success, or sex appeal but they can’t make you buy it. They can just feed into the appetite that you already have and give you a clear glidepath to the cash register.
The spyware on our computers, the customer information profile that Amazon and Sams builds on us and, possibly even the ever-listening home assistant devices that many insist will hear them mention products they might want, certainly helps to target advertisements to us. My FaceBook page knows to show me ads for scuba diving vacations, fountain pens, hats, and even though I have an SUV and a pickup truck, my page knows that I used to own a convertible and that I never fail to stop and look at ads for what might be my next one.
Still, no matter how they may try, they cannot sell things to me that I do not want. It doesn’t matter how much they discount Arby’s, Taco Bell, tattoos, or feminine hygiene products, I’m not buying.
So, when we talk about “fake news” in our day, a lot of what passes for news is fake, some of it pathetically obviously fake, and yet, what makes it believable to people is that they already want to believe it. As Fran Lebowitz so succinctly summed up the motivation of the Trump supporter:
Trump’s very public bigotry and racism gives people permission to say and to believe things that, even five years ago, they would have been embarrassed to say out loud; but they harbored bigoted and racist feelings and now, in the time of Trump and their enablers at Fox News, they are given license to elevate Archie Bunker to the role of messiah.
Objectively, for all of the public bloviating about it, during the entire time that
Trump has been in office, his administration has managed to construct only 194 miles of wall between the USA and Mexico’s 2000 mile long shared border but even that amount is inflated because all but 16 miles of it was replacement wall. And yet, Trump has recently credited his “big beautiful wall” with keeping Mexicans out of the USA and by keeping them out, he has prevented the spread of Covid 19. This is clearly not true. The addition of 16 miles of fence on a 2000-mile border is very nearly inconsequential. So, who believes this propaganda? Obviously, the only people who believe it are people who desperately want to believe it and virtually no amount of evidence could convince them otherwise.
Religious people have known how this works for thousands of years, from a talking snake to a talking burning bush, to virgin births, walking on water, and miraculous healings we have been limbered up to believe the impossible because we want to believe it, not because it is true. There are 50,000 people right here in Springfield who would be willing to fight you over the claim that Jesus physically walked on the Sea of Galilee, which, sadly, is about the same number of people who in Springfield who believe that Trump has built hundreds of miles of wall along our border with Mexico and that somehow, Mexico paid for it, which, if it were true, would have been more of a miracle than walking on water, but it comes from the same kind of thinking.
Chris Wallace recently interviewed President Trump for Fox News and I don’t know if this was just a fig leaf for Fox or if Chris Wallace was sincerely going after Trump, but there were dozens of points at which Wallace confronted Trump’s misstatements of facts. Things that are objective facts, like claiming that the USA had the lowest death rate in the world from Covid-19 infections when we are, in fact, on a per capita basis, somewhere between number 7 and number 10 in the world. And even when confronted about the facts, Trump defends himself by claiming that Fox is fake news, one of the only things I would normally agree with Trump about, but, in this interview, Wallace came armed with the facts and he was not afraid to produce them.
It was still a bit of a softball interview, no questions about the use of secret police in American cities or the Russian policy of paying bounties for every American soldier killed in Afghanistan. . . it wasn’t like Trump had agreed to let me ask him some questions, but, for Fox, it wasn’t a puff piece.
But the current pandemic presents us with life or death issues in discerning what is reliable information and what is fake news. Right now, we are still fighting the ne mask requirements in most cities. This fight probably won’t last much longer because it is increasingly difficult to deny the obvious fact that wearing a mask slows the spread of infection . . . it doesn’t stop it entirely but it may reduce the threat of infection by more than 90% and half of that would make it worth mandating. But there are still any number of people who don’t want to wear one and, sadly, many people have turned it into a partisan issue.
Now that we are seeing members of the Trump administration wearing masks and, in fact, several members of the administration testing positive for the coronavirus, then it is becoming less partisan, but a lot of the crazy videos we have seen of people in grocery stores and Walmarts around the country who were throwing fits over being asked to wear a mask really boiled down to a conservative verses liberal divide.
Things like science, medicine, virology, should never become Republican vs Democrat, or conservative vs liberal, but they have; and my fear is that it will extend to the next big Coronavirus hurdle, which is vaccinations.
The case for wearing masks is pretty straight forward. You are less likely to spread the virus if we avoid spitting on each other. Something that people in Asia who have lived through other infections viral diseases in recent history, now instinctively accept. But a vaccine is less easily verified visually.
Look, folks, we all want for this to be over. Life may never be normal, if normal means life as it was lived before the pandemic. I don’t know if we will ever go to crowded concerts or even churches ever again, but as normal as life is going to be, it is going to be accomplished when we have herd immunity.
Now, let me drill down on this: The virus, as scary looking as it is, does not have legs, it does not have wings. The virus can only travel in the lungs of a host. Literally, you have to help to spread it or it will not spread. If everyone on earth socially isolated for 14 days in a row, it would virtually cease to exist.
The pandemic continues only because our attempts at stay at home orders and business closings have only been partial and, in most cases, halfhearted. We are still working for the virus, carrying it to thousands of new victims every day.
If this were a less lethal virus, we might reach herd immunity by just going on with our lives and letting virtually everyone become infected. When the infection rate got high enough, so that 80-90% of people had antibodies, then the spread of the virus would diminish to very low levels. But this novel virus keeps surprising us. Not only is it very lethal for certain parts of our society, but the antibodies don’t seem to hang on at any useful level very long.
Sweden made a courageous attempt at just martialing forward to achieve herd immunity through infection. They told the elderly and those with underlying conditions to shelter at home, but they let everyone else just go on with work, school, and retail life. The result has been that Sweden has arrived at one the highest death rates in the world and they never reached herd immunity. Estimates are that if the USA had followed the same path, rather than having lost over 140,000 Americans, we might have had as many as 2 million fatalities.
Herd immunity happens when nearly 90% of us can no longer be infected by the virus and, the only way that is going to happen is when there is an effective vaccine AND, AND, when 90% of us have been willing to get vaccinated, and that, my friends, is our next big moral hurdle. We’re probably at least 6 months away from a vaccine being available and it could easily be much longer but, in current polling, as many as 50% of Americans are already saying that they are not going to take it.
Just not going to take it. Mind you, with a virus like this, it isn’t just about me being protected, we need herd immunity and not just in America, we need herd immunity on all 7 continents because if we allow some poor nation to become the next hot spot, the virus will gather strength, mutate, and spread again. We need global compliance.
When someone tells you that they are not going to get the shingles vaccine because they don’t believe in vaccines, you might try to reason with them, but, in the end, if they are unconvinced, just tell them to enjoy their months long experience of searing nerve pain and hope they don’t lose vision in one or both eyes but, in the case of shingles, I have my vaccine and what she does will not affect me personally. Covid-19, however, won’t work that way.
So why do people say that they have decided not to take the vaccine? There are a few possible reasons.
The first is, as you know, some people are crazy. . . like this lady demonstrating in front of the White House earlier this spring. They think the vaccine is a way for Bill Gates to inject them with a GPS tracking device as if Bill Gates really really wants to know which bingo hall this senior citizen goes to on Friday night. The sign she carries says “chloroquine works” which, by my count, makes her approximately the third person in the world insane enough to believe that, right after Trump and Brazil’s Bolsonaro.
We could wish that this abuela was an outlier but when you consider that after all we have been through, 40% of American voters still plan to vote for Trump a second time, you see that there is a strain of irrationality within our society that, while not a majority, is a significantly large minority.
Secondly, there are what we call the “anti-vaxxers” who just don’t want to inject themselves and especially not their children with unknown foreign substances. Some faction of this “crunchy granola” crowd continues to pass around the myth that vaccines cause autism, a claim which has been proven to be totally wrong in multiple studies over three decades and yet, some people are more willing to trust a rumor they got from social media than they are hard scientific research. As our friend Paul Thomlinson has said here in the past, “What do children get from vaccines? – They get immunity to polio, chicken pox, measles, mumps, rubella, and whooping cough – but they don’t get autism from a vaccine.”
And thirdly, there are those who simply do not trust anything that comes from our government anymore. I have some sympathy with them. Many black Americans refuse to trust the government with any inoculation and that is not without reason.
Over a period of 40 years, lasting right up to when I was in high school in the 1970s, the government was secretly injecting poor black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, with syphilis to see how the disease affected them. More than 600 men were tricked into this study. This is not on some 19thcentury slave plantation, this went on until 1972, 20 years after the Civil Rights Movement, then years after schools were integrated in Alabama. Sure, it has been a minute, but I understand if there are a lot of black people who are not ready to let their guard down.
Many people in the Latinx community are distrustful of government vaccination programs because, for them, the pharmaceutical testing done on women in Puerto Rico is still not a matter lost only to history and even after the tragic mishaps of testing in the 1950’s on unsuspecting women, many pharmaceutical labs have continued testing on paid “volunteers” in Puerto Rico until recently. . . because it is still legal to exploit the poor.
But, hey, I’m not black and I’m not Latino but I have my trust issues when it comes to the government and not just ours. Boris Johnson told people in the United Kingdom that the Covid virus was nothing to be afraid of, until, of course, he got it. Boslonaro in Brazil told his citizens that it was just like getting a cold and chloroquine would cure it . . . I don’t wish anything bad on Brazil’s “Bozo” but if he is injured by chloroquine, I am not likely to go into mourning.
But, of course, no one can raise “stupid” to a higher standard than our own president who not only tried to dismiss the severity of the infection, and tried to sell people on taking chloroquine, but even went so far as to suggest ingesting or injecting disinfectants or trying to get intense UV light into your lungs. . . prompting many disinfectant companies to quickly put out public service announcements to tell people that following the president’s advice could cause serious illness or death.
So, in a way, I get it, black people, brown people, women, even white men, we all can find a very plausible reason to be suspicious of anything our government tells us that they are doing to help us because we know that they have a long history of actually coming to do something to us.
In these days of seriously incompetent government, and rampant fake news, when even the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization are so mired in politics that you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt, we have to find a way to research, give critical analysis to what we are told, to find credible sources of medical information, and find the vaccine that you will take, if not only for yourself but for everyone else, who would like, one day, to be able to go to a movie, to a concert, to church, or a family vacation.
I’ve known plenty of people who have turned wallowing in conspiracy theories into a form of entertainment. I’ve known people who believed that the government was seeding the atmosphere with mind control drugs in the chem-trail vapors left behind jets, that George W. Bush planned the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and anxiety about genetically altered foods and the motivations behind their development has turned Momma Jeans from a quirky little hippy health food store in the low rent district into a multi-location, fabulously successful exploitation of the irrational paranoia of people who didn’t do well in high school science. . . OK, OK, I’ll grant that there is reason for concern about how corporations are tampering with our food supply but since they have been putting preservatives and sugar into almost everything we eat for a hundred years, I’m just saying that your GMO concerns might not deserve to be your primary focus.
Still, just like listeners to talk radio learned to find being angry to be a form of entertainment 30 years ago, people who share conspiracy theories these days do so for cheap thrills and attention on social media. Knock yourselves out when it comes to “who really shot John Kennedy,” and, I’ll admit, I really don’t think that
Jeffery Epstein committed suicide . . . what malignant narcissist every does?
But don’t play that game with Covid-19. Don’t repeat stupid myths about how wearing a mask is the same thing as wearing a yellow star in Nazi Germany, and don’t gin up crazy reasons to endanger everyone else by refusing to take the vaccine as soon as it is available.
Look into it. You have reason to be cynical about the profit motivations of big pharma, the political motivations of our government, and the sloppy science behind a lot of media hype . . . I’ll admit, I would rather get my first vaccine from the labs at Oxford University in England that will not try to profit from it, than from any American laboratory that will. Still, I’ll take the first vaccine that is available to me that Dr. Fauci says is reliable. And yes, I know that he has not always been right and that historically, he really missed the mark on some issues, but on the whole, I believe that he and a number of other very sincere scientists are trying their best to save us from a lethal pandemic and we all need to do our part to make them successful.
We like to say that we are all in the same boat, but we are not. We are in the same storm, but we are in different boats. People who have the same income today that they had in January are not in the same boat with the 40 million people who have become unemployed. People who are comfortably living in the same house that you were living in when the pandemic began, are not in the same boat with the anticipated 15 million families who will have their home foreclosed on before the end of this year. And if you are a couple living, just the two of you, in a three or four bedroom home where you get bored and antsy waiting out the pandemic, you are not in the same boat as most immigrant families, living with three generations in a two bedroom, one bath home with a dozen people in it. Try to properly distance in that boat! And if you have health insurance and an established relationship with a trusted healthcare provider, you are not in the same boat at all as the people who are facing this coronavirus without access to medical care.
For the insured, comfortably housed, who have a secure income and good healthcare to wallow in conspiracy theories or to be obstinate about either wearing a mask or getting the vaccine is a luxury that the poor and minorities cannot afford for you to claim.
Besides, right now, because we have screwed up this first part of the pandemic so badly, we are not welcome to travel to Bonaire, Belize, the Bahamas, or any of the other places where my daughter and I plan to go scuba diving.
So, I’ll listen to your theory about how the mafia orchestrated the assassination of JFK, just take the vaccine and so that Uncle Sam can let my people go!
