Kick COVID deniers out of public square
We don’t give regular coverage to flat earthers, birthers, UFO conspiracists, Holocaust deniers or people who think the moon landing was faked.
I am not a good enough journalist to tell my fellow journalists how to do their jobs, but just this once, I am going to.
And then I am going to violate my own advice.
Let’s stipulate that, for the foreseeable future, three or four dumpy guys with a flag and a bullhorn will show up at every Gov. Ned Lamont public appearance and heckle him.
A possible rule of thumb would be: if there are more reporters than “demonstrators” at a Lamont event, then it’s not really a demonstration of anything except the haplessness of the COVID-denying anti-mask movement.
A bullhorn is not automatically news especially if there’s bullbleep coming out of it. We also shouldn’t cover the sad little demonstrations in Hartford staged by the CT Liberty Rally, a Facebook page pretending to be a political movement.
I went to the most recent one, held outside the governor’s residence. Crowd counting is difficult, especially because this group lined both sides of the street, but there appeared to be fewer than 100 people.
These pseudo-events are staged to protest the public health measures that have bent Connecticut infection curve down into the very low numbers.
The protesters regularly bring up the 1 percent positivity rate as proof that we don’t need any restrictions.
They seem unable to grasp the idea that we have a low rate because we have been restrictive.
Also, the rate is up. As I write this on Thursday, the numbers have come out for the previous day, and there’s a 1.6 positivity rate and five new hospitalizations.
The New York Times recently removed Connecticut from its list of states where the new infections are “lower and staying low.” We are now in the less desirable category of states where “cases are lower but going up.”
The Times wrote, of Connecticut, “Over the past week, there have been an average of 185 cases per day, an increase of 46 percent from the average two weeks earlier.” Today’s number is 220, so our rolling average will be cresting higher.
To put it bluntly, this is no longer a state that has the pandemic firmly under control. This uptick has coincided closely with the attempt to reopen the public school system, which followed the attempt to get students back on our college campuses.
Ironically, Lamont’s attitude about the schools is pretty aggressive. He voiced his displeasure this week about schools that close after one case is detected, and he needled New Haven for continuing to ban inclassroom learning despite its low infection rate.
My guess is that the bullhorn people and — more relevantly — his Republican critics are starting to get in his head a little.
Meanwhile, two Republican legislators have, as lawyers, filed a lawsuit on behalf of five clients seeking to overturn Lamont’s emergency powers.
Their two-pronged argument is that the pandemic does not meet the statutory definition of a civil preparedness emergency and that the current rate of disease is too low to warrant emergency powers.
The first count might give them a leg to stand on. As for the second count, it’s a little bit like Mark Twain’s quip: “If you don’t like the weather in New England just wait a few minutes.”
The court case we have to cover. This other stuff? The group of people who believe the Earth is flat is growing and getting better organized, thanks to the internet. I covered them once just to make that point, but we don’t give regular coverage to flat earthers, birthers, UFO conspiracists, Holocaust deniers or people who think the moon landing was faked.
The people showing up at Lamont events are closer to those fringe groups than they are to any mainstream debate about public health.
It’s a little bit like a somewhat more radical argument made by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen about Trump administration officials such as the recently departed Kellyanne Conway.
Do they provide clarity about new stories or cloud the issues? Have their statements proven reliable or untrustworthy? If it’s the latter, why continue to interview them? Why put them on television on Sunday mornings or any other time?
The anti-maskers and social distance haters are in much the same category. Their statements are baseless attempts to refute the consensus science of actual virologists, epidemiologists and public health experts.
Pointing cameras at them feeds their need for attention and allows them to troll for new recruits.
I used to work for an editor named Mike Waller. We were very different people, but one thing he said stuck with me: “We are not in the business of knowing stuff and not telling people what we know.”
It’s a pretty good rule of thumb for those situations when we’re struggling with the question of whether to publish something controversial. But the “stuff” we know has to be true.
We’re about to head into a complex and thorny debate about the readiness of the first wave of vaccines. There will be legitimate differences in the scientific community about when to green light these new products.
Researchers who usually believe fervently in the benefits of well-run immunization programs will question whether the new vaccines fit that description. Their skepticism about the specifics will be twisted into much more generalized critiques by the anti-vaxxer movement.
Those of us who care about getting this kind of thing right will have a harder-than-usual job, even on the most level playing field.
The small knot of COVID deniers, whose idea of fun is to show up maskless at a supermarket and terrorize a clerk with an immune-suppressed kid at home, have no role to play. They’re the drunk at the end of the bar. The most honest thing we can do is call them a cab and drive them home from the public square.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.