Pandemic Politics

 

Photo credit The Climate Reality Project

Tell Them Anything

Just make sure it's what they want to hear.

The pandemic doesn't care about our politics, but our political leanings are leading to misconceptions about how we perceive the deadly virus. David Leonhardt of the New York times reports that people on the right and the left are misrepresenting the facts.

The mistakes people make

More than one-third of Republican voters, for example, said that people without Covid symptoms could not spread the virus. Similar shares said that Covid was killing fewer people than either the seasonal flu or vehicle crashes. All of those beliefs are wrong, and badly so. Asymptomatic spread is a major source of transmission, and Covid has killed about 15 times more Americans than either the flu or vehicle crashes do in a typical year.

Democrats, on the other hand, are more likely to exaggerate the severity of Covid. When asked how often Covid patients had to be hospitalized, a very large share of Democratic voters said that at least 20 percent did. The actual hospitalization rate is about 1 percent.

By The New York Times | Source: Franklin Templeton-Gallup Economics of Recovery Study

Democrats are also more likely to exaggerate Covid’s toll on young people and to believe that children account for a meaningful share of deaths. In reality, Americans under 18 account for only 0.04 percent of Covid deaths.

What's The Point? 

Having the information in this article is helpful, but to make a real impact, to start changing minds, people have to receive the message. Think about the rule of seven which suggests consumers need to hear a message seven times before they will consider taking action. Then it might be another three repetitions before someone will actually act on that message.

We're going up against echo chambers and algorithms. People have become insulated from outside opinions. Algorithms reinforce the bubble by only feeding information that supports predispositions. Republicans and the Russians used this system well. They targeted information to groups based on algorithms to reinforce beliefs already in place. The divide, the partisanship, becomes deeper as politicians repeat the same lies over and over.

Repetition

Countering false information with fact based journalism, is it possible? According to the Gallup Poll, there is hope.

Perhaps the best news from the Gallup survey was that some people were willing to revisit their beliefs when given new information. Republicans took the pandemic more seriously after being told that the number of new cases was rising, and Democrats were more favorable to in-person schooling after hearing that the American Academy of Pediatrics supports it.

“That’s very encouraging,” Jonathan Rothwell told me. “It’s discouraging that people didn’t already know it.” Jonathan Rothwell, Gallup’s principal economist. Leonhardt/NY Times

Covering something once is not a guarantee that the issue is going to be heard. Since repetition is used so often and so well, covering the issue again from a fresh perspective should not be a problem for any news organization. Don't fall into the deep well of self congratulation, "We've already covered that." Your news consumers may not have heard you the first time.