This Is a Good Time to Stop Getting Your Information from Ideological Zealots
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All humans are political and ideological. We’re political in the sense that we have beliefs about the groups we’re part of—what those groups ought to have done in the past, ought to do now, ought to do in the future, and what sort of people should lead them. And we certainly have strong views about the groups we’re not part of.
We’re also ideological. Even the most down-to-earth among us hold to some big ideas, reject some big ideas, and look at the world through an ideological set of lenses. People’s worldviews range from highly rational, systematic, and coherent to highly random, chaotic, and contradictory, but we all have them.
And we’ve all got narratives we believe in that both flow out of, and sustain, our political and ideological commitments.
But something’s wrong if we let group identities, dogmas, and stories dominate our thinking to the point that we’re no longer able to recognize bunk (as in balderdash, hooey, flimflam) when it’s being sold to us by those we see as “our own.”
From where I sit, this seems to be a growing problem on “the right” these days. It’s probably an equal or greater problem on “the left,” but we’re primarily responsible for ourselves, and we’re supposed to be better than that.
Zealots and COVID-19
The latest example is the assortment of ill-informed attitudes and claims about COVID-19 I’m seeing echoed by fundamentalists, conservative evangelicals, and not-at-all-Christian folks on the right. I say “echoed,” because they seem to originate from two often-overlapping flavors of political-right media: partisan-right media and conspiracy-right media. I don’t want to get into a tiff about what sources belong under which heading, but the partisan-right media are the ones who are in lock-step with the GOP talking points—which means in lockstep with President Trump’s talking points.
These are the media personalities who were sure COVID-19 was a big politically motivated hoax … until they were sure it wasn’t … until they were sure it was “just overhyped, and we should all get back to work by Easter” … until they were sure that “nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won.” Their messaging is perfectly synchronous with the White House.
By conspiracy-right sources I mean media personalities who occasionally or constantly trot out a range of anti-mainstream suggestions and claims, usually with bad data and sloppy reasoning for support—if there’s any effort to support it at all. Sometimes its theories of sinister secret machinations, sometimes just dumb (and misleading) comparisons of supposed death rates (COVID-19 vs. flu, COVID-19 vs. lightning, etc.), and the like.
In both cases, what we’re getting is not very good information. One is just GOP propaganda—thoughtless cheerleading for the administration. The other is a weird mix of paranoia, reflexive nonconformity, and cynicism.
Either way, what you get from these sources is advocacy for a group, a leader, a movement, or a mood—not advocacy for truth and solutions to problems. Zealots are loyal to their agenda and truth is only one tool in the box to use, or abuse, in service of that agenda.
Toward Better Sources
It may come as a shock to some, but the majority view isn’t always wrong. There’s a really strong consensus that sunshine is warm, that birds are generally poor swimmers, and that horses don’t have feathers. Contrarianism has gotten so mindless on the right lately, I wonder if I could start a movement and get famous on the claim that horses really do have feathers, because “the left and the mainstream media say they don’t … and it’s all a plot to make Trump look bad.”
Here’s the point: for many matters in life, political and ideological zealots are the worst sources of information. COVID-19 is one of them.
It’s true that nobody is really “objective.” It doesn’t follow, though, that nobody is rational, rigorous, and committed to good information. Thankfully, some are much more interested in being accurate than they are in advancing a party, ideology, or conspiracy theory!
At the top of many organizations, you’re going to find some very political people. Because these leaders interface with national figures, some of whom are elected officials, that’s to be expected. But the CDC and WHO and countless other public and private organizations working on COVID-19 are full of professionals in biochemistry, virology, epidemiology, and related fields, who really aren’t very interested in what political party is dominant at the moment or what the current U.S. President’s popularity numbers are—or even who wins the next election.
We can get COVID-19 information straight from these sources as well as other more local ones.
We can also get information from media sources that aren’t dominated by political or ideological zealots. Although MSNBC on the left and Fox News on the right aren’t always delivering heavily spun information (or outright misinformation), there’s little need to go there—or turn on the TV at all—when you can read National Review, or better yet, The Dispatch. Though fallen humans like the rest of us, these folks are willing to look critically at the political “us,” and not just the political “them”—a key characteristic of any source’s commitment to truth. The Dispatch has even been known to argue that, as a nation and culture, we need to stop this madness of trying to politicize everything.
A small fact salad
These links are a bit old now, since I was gathering them mostly last weekend, but they may be of some use in countering a tiny bit of the misinformation bouncing around in the zealot-fandom echo chamber. There are also some good sources here for more up to date information.
- Testing lag: due to the shortage of tests in the U.S., we don’t have reliable numbers on the infection rate or how many are infected now. (We’re catching up now, though.)
- Probability of death by COVID-19: many misleading comparisons are going around fueled by confusion on the difference between case fatality rate and infection fatality rate or by simple innumeracy.
- Probability of hospitalization: the focus on relatively low death rates often results in overlooking the larger problem of high hospitalization rates. Overwhelming the medical system with a surge of hospitalizations is a serious problem as well—one that could unnecessarily increase death rates (more on this here).
- Data on what’s happening: The interactive data map from Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering is a great source of visualized data, close to “real time.”
- Canada: Probably the best COVID-19 information in Canada.
- Scams: Keep an eye out as well for Coronavirus Scams. See also Coronavirus Rumor Control, and info on Coronavirus stimulus scams.
What if they’re wrong?
Maybe the people I trust are giving me bad info. Maybe the thousands of medical professionals at CDC and NIAID, the state health departments, the private and university researchers, and the many national health departments all over the world will somehow turn out to all be wrong about the severity of the disease and the need to flatten the curve. The economic analysts I’ve been reading have me convinced that COVID-19 was going to tank the economy with or without all the state and local efforts to flatten the curve, so crushing it on purpose to save lives was the right strategy. Maybe they’ll turn out to have been wrong, too.
But if my sources turn out to be wrong, it won’t be because they put their passion for a political agenda, or party, or leader ahead of their commitment to reason, research, and helping people. If they’re wrong, it will be because they did their best to get the facts right and the response right, but failed. I’ll take that over the distortions of ideological zealots any day.
Aaron Blumer 2016 Bio
Aaron Blumer is a Michigan native and graduate of Bob Jones University and Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). He and his family live in small-town western Wisconsin, not far from where he pastored for thirteen years. In his full time job, he is content manager for a law-enforcement digital library service. (Views expressed are the author's own and not his employer's, church's, etc.)
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Yes, he was not alone. … there is a gap of a few weeks between when the medical experts here got serious and when Trump started listening. He wasn’t alone then either, though.
As for Fox news… I don’t encourage people to get news from TV at all. There is too much of an “entertainment conflict of interest.” Other outlets suffer from this as well—each outlet competes with all the others to draw the attention of consumers, creating pressure to dramatize. People tend to go where the drama is, and that means exaggerating things and looking for fights to gawk at, and so forth. But TV is especially prone to this because of the medium.
So, I can’t speak for how accurate Fox’s news reporting is… I almost never see it.
In general, a step I’d recommend to everyone is to read more, view less.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I would have shut down the economy on January 2! Cuz I really care…
As far as I know, nobody thinks Jan 2 was time for launching widespread curve flattening, even in retrospect. WHO didn’t declare “global health emergency” until Jan 30. By Feb 21, there were major outbreaks in multiple countries. Trump declared national emergency on Mar 13, but by then, I’m pretty sure multiple states had bans on large gatherings, all kinds of events had been cancelled by private enterprises, and a few states were into the closing of non-essential businesses phase.
Almost all of the “shutting down of the economy” stuff has happened—and can only happen, constitutionally—at the state and local levels and private sector. Trump could not make it happen and can’t make it stop happening.
The main Executive Branch fail was 1) delays in ramping up testing, and 2) general denial and politicizing both directly and via the President’s many media personalities on the partisan political right and conspiracy political right. This was going on for a good six weeks before the President got serious in mid March. There were also delays at CDC that may have had nothing to do with Trump’s public posture toward the disease. It’s hard to tell for sure… and I haven’t done a deep dive on that. But when you run the exec branch, your desk is where the buck stops.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
[Aaron Blumer]As far as I know, nobody thinks Jan 2 was time for launching widespread curve flattening, even in retrospect. WHO didn’t declare “global health emergency” until Jan 30. By Feb 21, there were major outbreaks in multiple countries. Trump declared national emergency on Mar 13, but by then, I’m pretty sure multiple states had bans on large gatherings, all kinds of events had been cancelled by private enterprises, and a few states were into the closing of non-essential businesses phase.
Almost all of the “shutting down of the economy” stuff has happened—and can only happen, constitutionally—at the state and local levels and private sector. Trump could not make it happen and can’t make it stop happening.
The main Executive Branch fail was 1) delays in ramping up testing, and 2) general denial and politicizing both directly and via the President’s many media personalities on the partisan political right and conspiracy political right. This was going on for a good six weeks before the President got serious in mid March. There were also delays at CDC that may have had nothing to do with Trump’s public posture toward the disease. It’s hard to tell for sure… and I haven’t done a deep dive on that. But when you run the exec branch, your desk is where the buck stops.
Aaron, you need to listen to more CNN and MSNBC. They all say that if Trump were a real leader he would have had a Pandemic Response Team in place that would have acted instantaneously to the potential of a threat and shut everything down early… The moment the first person died in China a real leader like Biden would have acted.
Does that make sense? No. It is standard fare in the main stream media and on blogs now though.
I dare you to go to any HuffPost article on Trump and the Coronavirus and read the comments.
The liberal media hates Trump in an irrational way.
I quite reading political stuff here at SI. If this was a call not to tune in the the liberal rubbish found at CNBC, CNN, NPR, etc., great.
I think it is still worth tuning in NPR from time to time - just to see what the liberal idiots are saying.
by reading those blogs and watching CNN and MSNBC you can see that a significant percentage, I don’t know the amount but it is significant, think Trump is a dictator who hates people, especially blacks and Latinos, and wants them all to die. That is no exaggeration. It is important to realize that when it comes to voting time.
[Mark_Smith]by reading those blogs and watching CNN and MSNBC you can see that a significant percentage, I don’t know the amount but it is significant, think Trump is a dictator who hates people, especially blacks and Latinos, and wants them all to die. That is no exaggeration. It is important to realize that when it comes to voting time.
It is my suspicion that some of them do not actually think Trump is a dictator, or that he is a racist. He is simply their ideological enemy, so they attack him with whatever it takes. The truth is simply irrelevant to them. In fact, I don’t believe most of the press would object to a dictator, as long as it is a socialist one.
I knew I could come to SI and find well reasoned cohesion and balance to an otherwise highly volatile situation…even amongst believers.
Thank you, Aaron, for bringing it, and thanks for the links too! (and great discussion as well…another reason I come here).
~Suzanne
[Mark_Smith]Aaron, you need to listen to more CNN and MSNBC. They all say that if Trump were a real leader he would have had a Pandemic Response Team in place that would have acted instantaneously to the potential of a threat and shut everything down early… The moment the first person died in China a real leader like Biden would have acted.
Does that make sense? No. It is standard fare in the main stream media and on blogs now though.
I dare you to go to any HuffPost article on Trump and the Coronavirus and read the comments.
Thanks for quoting what I actually said, but your response is to something I didn’t say. I didn’t say nobody was criticizing Trump for not acting soon enough. Many are. Some fairly, some not fairly.
What I said…
As far as I know, nobody thinks Jan 2 was time for launching widespread curve flattening, even in retrospect.
As I went on to explain, the curve flattening strategy depended then and now on private sector and state authorities, not President Trump.
But are there things Trump should have done sooner? I think a careful reading of what I already said on that answers that question also.
On the rest of it… Well, I expect leftists to be leftists. I expect very different things from conservatives. If my criticism of the right seems disproportionate it’s because (a) I believe willingness to be self-critical is one of the surest ways a person/group expresses the genuineness of its commitment to truth, and (b) I believe the way responsibility works is that it starts with myself, expands to those I’m most closely connected with, and spirals outward from there. The mainstream media are not even on my radar of responsibility. Conservatives are because I am one.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I wasn’t trying to quote you at all. Jan 2 was pure hyperbole to illustrate how absurd the media is, including conservative anti-Trump media. And yes, the MSM and much of the anti-Trump media blame Trump 100% for the coronavirus situation. If you fail to see that then you are being deliberately blind. They aren’t looking to pawn anything off to the private sector. It is all Trump’s fault…
Any honest evaluation of Trump’s reaction to the coronavirus is he is performing at least as good as any other recent president would have done. The truth is, our system is not prepared for a problem of this magnitude. It simply is not. There is not real stockpile of almost any good, forget PPE or ventilators. Witness the TP problem for that. But the Democrats and the MSM, including the anti-Trump conservatives, couldn’t care less. Blame the man with the orange face and weird hair because that is all the better for getting rid of him.
You seem to pretend you can ignore the MSM. They influence millions of people. That is why they have to be opposed vigorously.
I have nothing personal against you and your opposition to Trump. So be it. I just think you turn a blind eye to the deliberate wickedness of the MSM and Democrats that lie to oppose him. It is not ignorance, folly, or, as one person posted on another thread, incompetence. They deliberately manipulate the system to oppose him. And the thing that gets me is many Republicans are doing it as well! The perfect example is the first 2 years of Trump’s presidency when Republicans held all 2 houses of Congress. It turns out many Republicans legitimately thought there was something to the charges against him by Comey et al. So they opposed everything Trump proposed and little was done. Sad. A great opportunity lost.
Any honest evaluation of Trump’s reaction to the coronavirus is he is performing at least as good as any other recent president would have done. The truth is, our system is not prepared for a problem of this magnitude. It simply is not.
Agree with the last part of that. The first half is pretty debatable. Both former Pres. Bush and candidate Biden were taking the need to ramp up preparation seriously while Trump was still making a range of claims from no threat to the U.S., to we’ve already just about got it beat, to left wing media hoax (the latter mostly through surrogates).
It’s certainly possible no one else would have done better. I have to give that idea moderate probability at best.
As for MSM… they do not interest me at all. I don’t know why they should interest anyone who is conservative… other than as a distraction from our own severe internal problems. It’s always easier to point fingers at entities we have no control over than it is to face problems in our own camp.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
[Aaron Blumer]As for MSM… they do not interest me at all. I don’t know why they should interest anyone who is conservative… other than as a distraction from our own severe internal problems.
[Disclaimer: I am NOT saying all of the MSM is the enemy, but certainly some of it is.]
You surprise me, Aaron.
Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, said “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
And certainly the Bible teaches us much about our enemies as well.
The well-balanced debater should always be exposed to all sides of an issue. It is true that he must know his own side the best, but without seeing all sides he is unable to argue effectively. I completely agree that conservatives evangelicals have enough problems to keep us busy until we die. But we shouldn’t allow myopia to set in by limiting ourselves to the single, albeit important issues within.
Ashamed of Jesus! of that Friend On whom for heaven my hopes depend! It must not be! be this my shame, That I no more revere His name. -Joseph Grigg (1720-1768)
I have nothing personal against you and your opposition to Trump. So be it. I just think you turn a blind eye to the deliberate wickedness of the MSM and Democrats that lie to oppose him. It is not ignorance, folly, or, as one person posted on another thread, incompetence. They deliberately manipulate the system to oppose him. And the thing that gets me is many Republicans are doing it as well! The perfect example is the first 2 years of Trump’s presidency when Republicans held all 2 houses of Congress. It turns out many Republicans legitimately thought there was something to the charges against him by Comey et al. So they opposed everything Trump proposed and little was done. Sad. A great opportunity lost.
One of my high school friends used to work for one of the largest commercial radio stations in the country. He jumped on a Facebook post when a conservative conspiracist like yourself was posting similar things as you. Here is what he had to say:
“Here’s a secret I’ll let you in on - from a long-time but now former member of the “media.” There is no such thing as the “main stream media.” It’s an artificial label created to use as means of control for people who can’t think for themselves. People who chant “Lock her up” and people who call her “Killary” and people who refer to the “Main Stream Media” or the “Lamestream Media” or “DIMocrats” or “DEMONrats” or “LIBtards” have been indoctrinated. They’ve been taught to respond that WE’VE actually been indoctrinated, and WE’RE the cult members. “WE” don’t trust anyone media outlet. We read and watch many (yes, many of us even pay attention to Fox News). I actually understand journalism. I know that while some large media ownership may have a political leaning - and that political leaning can and sometimes does creep into the on-air product, that serious journalists care more about getting the story right than putting a spin on it. The problem is that what people think of as news outlets have also become entertainment outlets. Fox News and CNN have both journalists, and opinion people. People who don’t understand the difference (oddly enough) think CNN is nothing but politically motivated hacks and at the same time that Fox News is nothing but truth-telling saints. The truth is that there are good journalists at both news outlets. The reason there is no such thing as the “Main Stream Media” is that each journalist stands alone. Walter Cronkite COULD work at Fox. It wouldn’t automatically make him a “right-wing” propaganda artist. Hannity could work for NPR, and it wouldn’t make him liberal or any less of a Trump kiss-***. Sure, he’s not likely to work for NPR long, because they wouldn’t tolerate someone who doesn’t care about facts, but you get my point (well, let’s assume you might - but others will). The media is not the enemy of the people. This country was founded on the idea that no one particular person, party, or government entity should have too much power. There are checks, balances, and checks for the balances and balances for the checks. The media plays an important role - letting the public know what’s going on, so that bad stuff can’t happen in secret. The people attacking the media just wish they could do more stuff in secret. That should scare you regardless of who you voted for. I know I’m specifically addressing - most likely - a brick wall, but I know what I’m talking about. I was a journalist that got to work at a very interesting “slot” in the industry. I was in local media, but at a large enough group of stations, that we were tightly connected to national outlets. If you knew enough about our news team, you’d say they were liberal, but oddly enough people thought our station was conservative - because we carried Rush Limbaugh and some other right-leaning shows. In fact, we used to take complaint calls from conservative people who thought our news was too liberal. We also took calls - just as many - from progressive people who thought our news was too conservative. That’s one way we knew we were just telling the truth, and that the real problem was that people were just starting to mistrust the media - so they were LOOKING for reasons to complain. It’s actually similar to the change in the way we trust our scientists. People used to trust scientists because we trusted that they were smarter than us. Suddenly, the internet makes everyone an expert in everything, and we no longer trust scientists. Sure there can be a bad scientist. There can be a bad journalist or even a bad “media” outlet. But the profession of journalism was trusted because they played an important role. The killing of the fairness doctrine opened up the doors to many more crappy outlets, political leaning, and opinion being called “news.” The media is critically important to the America you love. You just happen to listen to political leaders and pundits who are great at telling you what to be afraid of and why. That group of people have been great at consolidating their messaging - making it consistent. When I hear those certain phrases being thrown around on Social Media, I always roll my eyes. I know that person is a faithful member of their “congregation” led by Hannity or Carlson or Limbaugh or Trump or whoever. Peace.”
We’ve been in contact with each other a lot throughout the past week. He calls himself an agnostic, but he grew up in a Baptist church. He told me that he has a sister (that stayed with the Baptist Church) that refuses to have anything to do with him and refuses to forgive him (over a disagreement about how to take care of his mother when she needed hospital care). Also, he does not understand why so many Christians have attached themselves to Trump, whose character is so different from Jesus and what the apostles taught in their letters to NT Christians. He and his live-in girlfriend may have COVID19, which has opened up so many recent spiritual conversations. I have on two different occasions, steered the conversation about Jesus, sin, judgment, the resurrection of Jesus but his mindset is about politics. Sadly, he sees politics as the real change-agent and is blind to Jesus and the gospel. And he believes that “right-wing” Christians are more influenced by Limbaugh and Hannity than Jesus or the pastor at their church, which is why he said his last sentence.
Now back to the conversation. Sorry Mark, but if I am going to believe someone about the media, it will be my friend because of his integrity (I’ve known him for 37 years) and his actual connections to national media outlets and the people who work for them. He is much closer to the actual people in the news than you are. His take is much closer to what Aaron has to say in that there are many newsmedia folks who are actually trying to get the story right than your conspiracy theory which automatically assumes motive. In my interactions with people, I’ve learned the hard way not to assume motives and evil intentions with people that I have strong disagreements with (many of which are unbelievers). Sometimes, by their actions, I’ve been proved right, but enough times, I’ve been proved wrong as I’ve got to know people at a deep level. It’s much easier to assume evil motives with people that we do not know and are in the media spotlight. When this happens we strip them of their humanity and are no better than those (including biased media folks and politicians) who assume evil motives about Trump.
Definition: Main Stream Media as I use it is not your friend at a small newspaper. I mean Chuck Todd. Wolf Blitzer. New York Times. LA Times. The reporters in the news room at the White House. Those people.
I am not a conspiracy theorist… I just watch the daily presidential and hear the ridiculous questions asked of the president. Yamiche Alcindor for example, constantly asks the President every chance she gets “gotcha” questions. That is what I mean.
If your friend is an honest reporter, great. I take your word for it. I am talking about the political machine of the national media.
I will say even locally there is a MSM attitude. When my state had a Republican governor, the reporting in my local paper was 95% about how bad his decisions were. Did I agree with him all the time? No. I think he made a lot of mistakes, but 95% of the time. Now we have a female Democrat governor, and SHAZAM… she is nearly perfect and hovers over the water as she glides into news conferences and makes decisions we cannot question.
That attitude is what I mean. It is completely political and not journalism.
Discussion