Two New Yorker pieces today.
I mentioned an article a couple weeks ago about whether violence is a disease (or actually, whether MAGA is a disease like violence is taken to be). Here’s another perspective.
The New Yorker, Michael Luo, 17 Oct 2024: Should Political Violence Be Addressed Like a Threat to Public Health?, subtitled “Treating political violence as a contagion could help safeguard the future of American democracy.”
The essay begins by recalling the filth in mid-19th century New York City streets, and the rash of deaths in car crashes in the 1950s. Both were treated as matters of public health and largely fixed.
The principal aim of public health is prevention. It takes its scientific cues primarily from epidemiology, which studies the prevalence of diseases and their determinants to shape control strategies. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, public-health practitioners began to incorporate these methods into a nascent discipline known as injury science, taking on problems such as children falling from windows, residential fires, childhood drug poisonings, and, beginning in earnest in the nineteen-nineties, gun violence. The premise is tantalizingly straightforward: utilize scientific data to identify risk factors and the most vulnerable populations, and adopt multipronged solutions to stop problems before they arise. When it comes to gun deaths, for instance, public-health interventions might include pediatricians inquiring about safe storage at home, and the government establishing waiting periods for the purchase of firearms and raising the legal age for gun ownership. The challenge comes in marshalling consensus for the kind of community-wide solutions that public health demands. This is where public-health initiatives have often floundered, including with guns.
Yes, the challenge is when large numbers of people don’t believe in science or don’t believe the government should interfere in anything that limits individual freedoms in any way (e.g. freedoms to drive cars without seat belts or to buy as many guns as they like or to not wear masks to stop spreading diseases to others), no matter the benefits to the common good, i.e. public health.
In recent years, public-health researchers have begun to consider whether a new societal threat deserves their scrutiny: political violence. One of the researchers leading this effort is Garen Wintemute, the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis, who has spent more than four decades studying firearm violence.
…
As with any public-health problem, the first task was to collect reliable data. Wintemute’s team conducted their first broad-based survey in 2022 and found that nearly a third of the population believed that violence was usually or always justified to advance at least one of seventeen political objectives—a list that included curbing voter fraud, stopping illegal immigration, and returning Donald Trump to the Presidency. Nearly one in five agreed strongly or very strongly with the statement that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy.” The willingness to justify violence was greater among people who identified as “strong Republicans” than those who identified as “strong Democrats.” Another study by Wintemute’s team found that nearly half of a cohort that they labelled “MAGA Republicans”—self-identified Republicans who voted for Trump in 2020 and believed the election was stolen—strongly or very strongly agreed with the statement “Our American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Wintemute also examined the threat posed by right-wing extremists who endorse racist beliefs and the use of violence to effect social change, and who express approval of certain militia groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Within this small subset—Wintemute estimates it to be less than two per cent of the population—he found strong association with support for political violence and the willingness to engage in such violence.
That these numbers are so small is cause for optimism. (Again, any kind of news media highlights the exceptions, i.e. the minority items, because that’s what’s news. If the population were to grow tenfold, or if the rates of crime were to dramatically drop, we would still see the same number of exceptional stories in the news. Because the news always has a certain amount of time to highlight stories to alarm their readers or viewers.)
What this article doesn’t mention is how Republicans have deliberately stifled the collection of empirical data on matters of gun safety. They don’t want the information to exist, lest it lead to further measures subduing the gun nuts. The essay ends:
The promise of public health is that it rests on scientific data and offers pragmatic solutions. Treating political violence like a contagion could help safeguard the future of American democracy. And yet the same fractures that potentially drive political violence can imperil the collaboration needed to address public-health crises. They can also lead to the most dangerous symptom of all: a sense of helplessness. But, if we simply wait for the disease to strike, it may already be too late.
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Another from the same magazine, also about two weeks ago.
The New Yorker, Jay Caspian King, 18 Oct 2024: How Biased Is the Media, Really?, subtitled “It isn’t some tightly guarded secret that the press corps is mostly made up of liberals. But what does it mean for our coverage?”
Before reading, my standard take. The mainstream media has a liberal bias because 1) their journalists are better educated and informed than the people who criticize them for their bias, and 2) reality has a liberal bias. That is, reality is identified by evidence and reason, not by the ideology and denial of facts that are identified with conservatives.
This past week, Gallup released its annual report on “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media.” Readers of this column will know that I am skeptical of opinion polls, especially those that try to gauge something as subjective and conditional as trust in mass media, but Gallup has tracked this same question since 1972, and that, at the very least, should give a sense of how a portion of the population feels about the word “trust” in relation to the “mass media.” What Gallup found was that for the third straight year more American adults have “no trust at all” in the media than trust it a “great deal/fair amount.” In 1976, the percentage of Americans in the “great deal/fair amount” category topped seventy per cent. Today, that number sits at thirty-one per cent.
(I’m a bit curious about how those who don’t trust the media at all think those media are more-or-less all telling the same story. Are those media all colluding to lie in the same way? A giant conspiracy theory, conducted on a daily basis?) (Except for Fox and its ilk, who bring on people to say that Trump didn’t really mean what he said when he called for the military to take care of his political rivals, or whatever.)
Kang then goes through several accusations of bias and tries to counter each with his understanding. I will summarize these ruthlessly; the whole article is free at the link above.
- News organizations are slanted to the left. Sure; people who work at the big papers live in big cities and graduated from college. They are better informed than most people. My standard take.
- People who own the media companies are not liberal; they want Trump to win. Kang’s counter-argument, that this would require those owners to manipulate hundreds or thousands of journalists, hasn’t happened, but some of those owners *have* banished endorsements of Kamala Harris, just this past week.
- Both-sides coverage pretends the problems of Harris are comparable to those of Trump. Kang admits this is partly true, if not to the degree some critics charge.
- The press isn’t prepared to cover someone like Trump, falling back upon standard ideological differences between Republicans and Democrats. Kang admits this is true, that the press “gets exhausted with running the same stories about Trump over and over, especially when they seem to have no effect.”
And Kang ends with this pondering of the relationship between politics and media. (I.e. controversies are good for the media; Utopia would not be.) Note the last line in his conclusion:
I am sympathetic to the despair of voters like these, even if I believe that mainstream coverage inevitably tilts toward favoring mainstream Democratic candidates such as Harris. One of the contradictions of the social-media age is that we can follow the campaigns incredibly closely—tracking every movement in the polls, listening to every concerning Trump remark—but somehow this flood of content makes us feel even more distant from the process, and less empowered. This flattening of the world into small bits of information makes people believe that the journalists who they assume are producing these screenshots and video clips have great influence on how voters think. But the truth, of course, is that the proliferation of content has actually weakened the mainstream media’s influence on voters, many of whom have moved on to alternative outlets of news and commentary. This, ultimately, is a healthy change, and I would welcome an information ecosystem that wasn’t so dominated by a handful of print outlets and cable-news stations—one where local papers and community-interest news could find robust audiences. As it stands, I imagine that, if Harris loses the election, much of the liberal public’s ire will be laser-focussed on the media. The sense of emergency that would come with a second Trump Presidency would invariably be good for the news business—albeit at less of a scale than the first one—which will likely just lead to more consolidation. If Harris wins, that same public will likely ease off some of their criticism of Harris, but the news companies will face an even tougher question: With Trump out of the picture, what will we write about?
