Coronavirus Information...who do you trust?

[Dill]

(07-13-2020, 10:10 AM)GMDino Wrote: A friend of ours posted some information about someone who thought they had the virus (all the symptoms and treatments) but ended up testing negative for the antibodies.  During our online conversation about why why it matters that in the end he did not have it when obviously other  do and did she said she doesn't trust the FDA, CDC or WHO about almost anything.  I asked who she DOES trust and didn't really get a good answer but it's not "the media" either.

In response to this and your second post about the game show host whose distrustful tweet Trump re-tweeted--I have a developing hypothesis about the breakdown of social authority in the U.S.

During my adolescence in the '60s, the country was more divided than today, but more trusting in secular authority. In 1963, when I first became aware of political divisions, people had greater trust of institutions like the government (especially the Exec and military), major news organizations (ABC, CBS, NBC), scientists, and the universities who produced the latter. Locally, people grew up trusting parents, teachers, and ministers.

People got their news at 12 pm, 5 pm, and 10 pm, with rather little difference between sources. And from daily papers. "The Left" was a memory of something McCarthy had attacked.

There were conspiracy theorists and crackpots who believed "the Left," called "Communists," were infiltrating schools/universities and water supplies, destroying our faith in God, and inciting "the negro" to rebel, but these were plainly fringe voices with little social authority. The "liberal press" with its higher journalistic standards gave them no platform. Nor did universities.  Goldwater was soundly defeated in '64.

By 1969, trust in the government had taken a terrible hit over Vietnam, then much exacerbated by the US retreat from Vietnam--the first time the US had "lost" a war, supposedly. Universities were in turmoil, criticized from within for their complicity with the government and Vietnam. The Civil Rights movement birthed a more hostile (to the establishment) black power movement, alongside a youth counterculture that questioned all forms of authority, beginning with parental. The Watergate scandal then really put a cap on all this, as the guy who promised to oppose all these insidious new trends by standing for "the silent majority," calling broad swaths of young voters "the left," and hating on the free press, turned out to be a nasty devious crook. For adults who came of age in the '30s, '40s, and '50s, the US seemed to be imploding from within as all forms of traditional authority were undermined.

Out of this turmoil the second New Right was born, coalescing around the core of Goldwater/Nixon voters, who began blaming "the liberal press" and universities for the crisis in authority, and set about consciously funding/creating alternative authority, first with think tanks to compete with universities and then, by the 1980s, with new talk radio outlets hammering "the left" and rewriting the history of Vietnam and Civil Rights. (B-zona had a great post about this moment a couple years back, and changing FCC rulings which enabled it.) Phyllis Schlafly and her Eagle Forum managed to stop the ERA, and Jerry Falwell created a "Moral Majority" organization courted by Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, who won two terms as president, in part by mainstreaming fringe talking points about Vietnam and the Panama Canal, and in part by embracing Nixon's "Southern Strategy," standing up to liberals.

Cable news began with CNN in 1980, but had relatively few viewers until the Gulf War of 1991, when millions were suddenly watching round the clock news. 1996 saw the entry of cable Fox News into direct competition with "the liberal press," during the decade the internet began to establish itself as an alternative source of news and other information. This coincided with the Clinton scandals and the sharp downward turn in civil discourse associated with Gingrich's ascent to the Speakership. And the EXXON assault on Climate science, taking their lead from the Tobacco industry and funding Alt-climate science so the public could see that "scientists disagreed" over global warming. "The Left," as a broad designation for whomever "hated America" by opposing right wing policies, was again frequently heard in public discourse. The Republican party lurched increasingly rightward as the Gingrich generation was itself ousted by ever more radical Republican Congressmen. Dem conservatives continued to join the Republicans, laying the groundwork of the "party of no" and Congressional paralysis.

I.e., from 1996 on, "the fringe" moved from the fringe of US politics to the center, where it has remained since, strongly backing Bush's invasion of Iraq and his War on Terror--until it became Obama's war. And actively disinforming the public about a range of issues from voter fraud to climate change to US history to foreign policy. With 8 years of Obama came non stop frontal attack, mostly faux scandals about the "worst president in history" propped up by a supposedly lying, openly partisan liberal press. During this period the Ailes (Nixon's tv producer) technique of reversing the charges leveled at Right Wing politicians was perfected by news commentators like Sean Hannity* ("the Left" is debasing political discourse with their personal attacks!) Other players advanced in this space as well, like Alex Jones Info Wars, along with internet forums where, unlike this one, personal attack was given free reign.

Trump works the space created by this vacuum of authority, attacking the most reliable sectors of the press, the intel community, the courts, science, and voting policy (recognizing these are most dangerous to him), and he is successful with a significant mass of voters, who have difficulty sorting out competing truth claims, especially via "faith-based" vetting. Corollary to the latter is a very unscientific way of assessing "errors" in scientific authority, visible now in Trump's attack on the medical establishment, national and international.

*Hannity, who back in 2003 frequently called those who opposed the Iraq war "traitors," now opines that the "deep state" likely led us into that war, not Bush and a clique of Neocons.