Name: Unmasking Certainty
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Unmasking Certainty

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n early March I was wondering, as many people were, if I should get a face mask. I remember standing in my kitchen watching cable news when a medical expert declared that there was little evidence a mask could prevent our catching , the disease caused by the new coronavirus. People should not wear one, the expert said, unless they were medical workers, were displaying -like symptoms, or were caring for someone who was sick. I relayed that advice to friends and family and repeated some variant of it in The Media Today, the daily newsletter I write for the Columbia Journalism Review.News organizations repeated these claims. In late February, Forbes ran a piece with the headline “No, You DO NOT Need Face Masks For Coronavirus—They Might Increase Your Infection Risk.” The story has since been viewed more than 4.5 million times; it was also updated (including the headline) to reflect changing mask guidance. Jerome Adams, the surgeon general, tweeted to implore Americans to “STOP BUYING MASKS,” which drove a further round of coverage. On March 2, Adams appeared on Fox &amp; Friends to hammer home the point; masks, he said, had “not been proven to be effective in preventing the spread of coronavirus amongst the general public.”Then,&nbsp;in early April, officials reversed themselves: everyone, the CDC said, should have face coverings and wear them in enclosed spaces. Health officials explained that compelling new evidence had come to light regarding asymptomatic transmission of the virus, and that wider usage of masks could prevent unknowing carriers from spreading infection. Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, said the new guidance was the fruit of a “science-based approach.” On April 3, Adams appeared in a video in which he showed viewers how to fashion a mask from an old T-shirt. Fact-based media outlets, striving to follow the latest findings, scrambled to keep up as infectious-disease debates, normally consigned to journals and conferences, played out in public in real time.The usual shortcuts to writing authoritative-sounding articles were not available on this story. People picked up on that, filling the air of uncertainty with political conviction. Conservatives adopted masks as symbols of fearmongering government overreach; liberals counter-adopted them as icons of Enlightenment values. Political reporters lapped it up, mindful that the pandemic had arrived in an election year. President Trump played the lightning rod; he declined repeatedly to wear a mask, even after the White House made them mandatory in the West Wing. (In May, Trump briefly wore one during a visit to a Ford factory in Michigan, but took it off before addressing reporters. “I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it,” he said.) On Fox News, Laura Ingraham suggested that masks were tools of “fear and intimidation,” designed to assert “social control over large populations.” Elsewhere, masks were described as a new “tribal totem”in the all-encompassing culture war. In late May, after a white police officer killed George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis, and protests convulsed the country, some right-wing commentators accused the mainstream media of a double standard, since journalists didn’t chastise demonstrators who violated mask rules. (Reporters covering the protests typically wore masks, of both the medical and anti-tear-gas varieties.)Masks were described as a new “tribal totem.”&nbsp;Distrust of centralized authority is a foundational theme in the history of the United States, going back to its Constitution. In 1831, when Alexis de Tocqueville, a French nobleman, arrived to scope the country out, he observed that people seemed wary of experts: “The intellectual superiority which any man whatsoever may acquire in relation to the rest of the community is soon overshadowed,” he writes in Democracy in America. People in democracies “are naturally strongly persuaded of the certainty of their opinions, or are unwavering in belief; they frequently entertain doubts which no one, in their eyes, can remove.” As the years went by, others noticed the same thing. Anti-intellectualism was a key tenet of McCarthyism, and hardened amid the political and cultural battles of the sixties and seventies. “The citizen cannot cease to need or to be at the mercy of experts,” Richard Hofstadter, a historian at Columbia, wrote in 1963. “But he can achieve a kind of revenge by ridiculing the wild-eyed professor, the irresponsible brain truster, or the mad scientist.” Lately, anti-expert rage has appeared in the Tea Party and the rejection of climate science and the anti-vaccination movement; it helped elevate Trump, and vice versa. Tom Nichols, a professor at the US Naval War College and the author of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (2017), writes that, thanks in part to the balkanization of American media, “A significant number of lay people now believe, for no reason but self-affirmation, that they know better than experts in almost every field.”And so, with masks, much of the coverage parroted whatever the official guidance was at the time, with scant scrutiny. Expertise, many news organizations felt, was to be defended against bad-faith attacks. (See: Fauci, Dr. Anthony.) Though many good articles acknowledged that science is a process, not a ready-made consensus, plenty of others fixated on batting down whatever the right-wing position was—and, in doing so, accepted the premise that there are two “sides” in competition for truth.for reporters to accept that story line.Expertise, many news organizations felt, was to be defended against bad-faith attacks.&nbsp;he press has got to slow down. Reporters need to accept ambiguity and uncertainty. Rather than rush toward facile answers or simplistic assertions, our stories must reveal the profound complexity of the problems at hand. We must be humble.That may feel counterintuitive, given the immediacy of the pandemic, its centrality in all our lives, and our need to know much more about it before we can get back to normal. It’s the press’s job, in part, to bring a responsible sense of urgency to our collective quest for greater knowledge—including when and whether masks should be worn. But that work cannot be done responsibly if we don’t take the time to ask essential questions and open every possible window into understanding. Our coverage of vital public health information will not be truthful unless it’s patient. As Ed Yong, the Atlantic science writer (and master of authorial humility), put it in April, science is “less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty.” The more we can convey that reality to readers, the more we will have earned their trust.The same thinking should apply to coverage of the campaign. Political reporters and pundits ought to acknowledge that we don’t know what the result will be ahead of time, rather than foreclose certain outcomes based on hunches, anecdotes, and biases. Discard sound bites and embrace the messiness of things. Submit candidates’ policy proposals to rigorous, evidence-driven interrogation, as if their plans held our lives in the balance. After all, they do.Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by .Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter .TOP IMAGE: Claire Merchlinsky&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

n early March I was wondering, as many people were, if I should get a face mask. I remember standing in my kitchen watching cable news when a medical expert declared that there was little evidence a mask could prevent our catching , the disease caused by the new coronavirus. People should not wear one, the expert said, unless they were medical workers, were displaying -like symptoms, or were caring for someone who was sick. I relayed that advice to friends and family and repeated some variant of it in The Media Today, the daily newsletter I write for the Columbia Journalism Review.News...

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Unmasking Certainty

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