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Numbing Numbers

August 31, 2021 By

In my blog last week about a career in sales, I wrote, “It’s in our DNA to want to help people.  Helping people gives our lives purpose, meaning and a sense of satisfaction.”

Yes, we want to help people, but media coverage of all of the concurrent disasters — leaving Afganastan, Covid-19 Delta variant deaths increasing, hurricane Ida, fires in the western U.S., vaccination and mask-wearing denial — is not helping us.

The editors in the news media who make decisions on what news to cover and how to cover it have an impossible dilemma: Which disaster to give front-page, lead-TV-news story most prominence and whether to give overall statistics and numbers or focus on humanizing the story by focusing on a single victim.

Editors know about the identifiable victim effect which indicates that if you want people to get involved emotionally and to give money, it is best to focus on one person such as showing a photo of a forlorn child rather than quoting statistics about a million people needing help. The child is a person, a million people is a just non-personal number. Or as Mother Teresa said, “Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you.”

Nevertheless, editors have news to cover: how many people died in the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport, how many people have been evacuated, how many people left behind in Kabul, by state what percent of people have been vaccinated, have been hospitalized, how many have died or how many acres have been ravaged by fires. All are non-relatable numbers, but they need to be reported.

But I can’t remember a time in our history (I was born in 1932) when there have been so many disasters happening concurrently. Too many disasters, and, thus, way too many numbers. All the disasters and numbers have numbed me. If the numbers have numbed me, what have they done to journalists? They have to report on the numbing numbers and not get involved emotionally in their stories. It must be really hard.

In the spring and summer of 2020, at the height of the pandemic crisis in New York City, residents our block on East 95th Street came out on our stoops to bang on pots and pans and applaud for essential workers — doctors, nurses, hospital workers, delivery people.

I’d like to find a way to do something to applaud the essential journalists who are hanging in there and covering the multiple disasters for us. Not Fox News, of course. They are making things worse.

Any ideas on how we can applaud these harried newspeople?

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The Media Are Killing Us

July 21, 2021 By

The first allusion to media and death that I remember was Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death. Postman’s thesis was that:

TV is turning all public life (education, religion, politics, journalism) into entertainment; how the image is undermining other forms of communication, particularly the written word; and how our bottomless appetite for TV will make content so abundantly available, context be damned, that we’ll be overwhelmed by “information glut” until what is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we’ve lost as long as we’re being amused.

Postman’s idea was that TV was killing our culture. On Friday, July 16, when President Joe Biden was asked by an NBC reporter what his message was to social media platforms, particularly Facebook, Biden replied, “They’re killing people,” then added, “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.”

Even though Biden backed off a little a few days later after Facebook complained and laid out all the things they were doing to promote vaccination, the President was essentially right. In fact, he should have included Fox News in his condemnation.

In an article titled “Facebook, Fox, and what ‘killing people’ means in a pandemic” in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), Jon Allsop wrote:

Biden’s intervention—along with rising cases and plummeting vaccination rates—have reignited urgent media conversations about vaccine hesitancy, whose fault it is, and to what extent. Facebook has been central to this conversation, with observers debating the proper balance between the good messaging it has instigated and the bad messaging it has allowed on its platform. Right-wing media outlets—and, given its huge reach, Fox News, in particular—have also been central, with some commentators arguing that they deserve a greater share of the blame for sowing mistrust of the vaccines and Biden’s efforts to distribute them. (“Who’s winning the war between Biden and Facebook?” a headline in Wired asked. “Fox News.”) On Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Murthy [Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general] whether Fox is also “killing people”; Murthy replied that the general cost of misinformation “can be measured in lives lost,” but declined to be more specific. Oliver Darcy, a CNN media reporter, called this a “dodge” that reflected poorly on the administration’s priorities: “misinformation on Fox is distributed intentionally, while Facebook is at least putting some effort to combatting it.” 

With the increase in COVID infections and deaths due to the Delta variant, there really is a pandemic among the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated are killing not only themselves but others as well. It seems they would rather die than admit they were wrong about believing in science and getting vaccinated.

Some entertainers on Fox News seem to be developing a little conscience and adjusting their moral compass slightly. Jon Allsop in CJR reports:

Many media observers have this week noticed an apparent shift in Fox’s coverage of COVID vaccines. On Monday, the network ran on-screen banners advertising official vaccine resources, and Sean Hannity urged his viewers to take the pandemic seriously; on Tuesday, Steve Doocy, of Fox & Friends, said that the vaccine “will save your life.” These efforts have met, in more liberal quarters, with relief, and even some praise. It’s not clear, however, that they really represent any sea change. Hannity and Doocy have both endorsed vaccines before; in February, the latter appeared, alongside several other Fox hosts, in a vaccine PSA. And, more pertinently, hosts who have consistently cast doubt on the vaccines have continued to do so: following Hannity on Monday, for instance, Laura Ingraham accused Democrats of trying to cancel “inconvenient opinions regarding their Covid response,” and brought on a guest who called the idea that there is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” a “lie.” Some of this week’s Fox-has-changed commentary reminded me of the post-election period, when supposed instances of hosts turning on Trump belied a more sordid reality. With vaccines, as with Trump’s election lies, low expectations can dilute our standards of accountability.

So, some entertainers on Fox News seem to be accountable, but not all of them. Facebook? No. Facebook is still defensive and will not take down vaccination disinformation. If some people would rather die than believe in science, Facebook would rather make more money than be accountable by removing vaccination lies that are killing people.

In 1985 Neil Postman was right: in the media, people are amusing themselves to death, and some of the media could care less. Money before morality.

Filed Under: Covid-19 Tagged With: , , ,

What If Women Were in Charge?

May 25, 2020 By

When I was listening to The New York Times podcast “The Argument” that was critical of New York mayor Bill De Blasio’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I asked myself, “I wonder if the decisions would have been different if a woman had been in charge?”

I had supported Christine Quinn to replace Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York, but she lost to De Blasio. I had supported Zephyr Teachout when she ran against New York governor Andrew Cuomo in 2014 and lost. I had supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. At the beginning of the current Democratic presidential nomination process I supported Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, much to the horror of my conservative friends. I supported all of these women because I have long felt that old, white men have screwed up our cities, states, countries and the world long enough and that we needed women in charge in order to build a more compassionate, empathetic and equal world.

Therefore, I created several spreadsheets to see if countries, U.S. states and cities were safer during the pandemic with women in charge. The metric I used to assess safety were COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people because this is a much better metric than total COVID-19 deaths, which of course depend on population.

In the United States, the average number of deaths per 100,000 people as of May 22 in the 50 states was 22.5. The average number of deaths in the nine states with female governors was 18.3, or 24 percent better. Therefore, my initial reaction was that my hypothesis that we’re safer with women in charge was correct.

However, I realized that correlation does not mean causation, and that there was also a strong correlation between low deaths per 100,000 and a state’s population — the lower a state’s population, generally the lower the COVID-19 deaths per 100.000. Therefore, it’s probably OK to say that’s it’s safer to live in a state with a small population and with a female governor. In other words, it’s safer to live anywhere in the U.S.A. other than in New York City, the world’s most dangerous city where the deaths-per-100,000 (193.71) are so awful that they skew averages and make America look worse than other countries. You can check out my spreadsheets in the Publications section of my website.

I looked at the top 25 American cities to see if having a female mayor made cities safer. I saw the same pattern as in states. The average deaths per 100,000 people in the top 25 cities as of May 22 was 77.4, and the average deaths per 100,000 people in the six cities with female mayors was 44.3, or a big 75 percent advantage. But, again as in states, the six cities with female mayors were not New York and were in smaller cities, with one exception, Chicago.

In six Asian countries — China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Taiwan — the average deaths per 100,000 people was a mere .38, which means that these Asian countries did an infinitely better job of managing COVID-19 than America did. We may not be certain that the numbers from China or India are real, but they are generally in line with numbers of the other Asian countries. Of the six Asian countries I looked at, the only one that had a female head of state was Taiwan, the smallest of the six by far. Taiwan had only seven deaths, or an incredibly low 0.03 deaths per 100,000.

In 21 counties in Western Europe, the average deaths per 100,000 people was 22.35. In the eight countries with female heads of state, the average deaths per 100,000 was a comparatively miniscule 4.16. This low 4.16 average included Belgium which has a female head of state and which led Western Europe in deaths per 100,000 with 83.25. I could find no clues as why Belgium was such an outlier, but what it means is that the Belgium numbers bring up the others, which, in turn, shows what a great job the other female heads of state did, especially Angela Merkel of Germany, Western Europe’s largest country with just 9.96 deaths per 100,000.

Scandinavian countries provide another example of places being safer with women in charge. Of the four Scandinavia countries, three — Denmark, Norway and Finland — have female heads of state. The average deaths per 100,000 for the four countries as of May 22 was 14.9. The average of the three headed by women was 4.95, a whopping 300 percent advantage.

Of course I have to admit that the three Scandinavian countries with women in charge are half as big as Sweden, the one with man in charge. So, consistent with U.S. states and cities, and the six Asian countries, women tend to be in charge of smaller places. Therefore, it probably makes sense to say that it’s safer to live where there are fewer people and where a woman is in charge.

The other thing I realized in doing this analysis is that the media I am most familiar with — The New York Times, the Washington Post, the podcasts I listen to and the “PBS NewHour” — focus on trashing Trump’s historic incompetence and complete lack of empathy in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. They also seem to focus on praising male governors such as New York’s media center darling, Andrew Cuomo, California’s Gavin Newsom, Ohio’s Mike DeWine, and Washington’s Jay Islee, but ignore the story of women who are doing a fabulous job of keeping us safe: London Breed, Mayor of San Francisco; Jenny Durkan, Mayor of Seattle; Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany; Zuzana Caputova, President of Slovakia; and Katerina Sakellaropoulou, President of Greece.

As usual, the media are controlled mostly by white men, thus women don’t seem to get the credit they deserve. We’ll never know the counterfactual, or what would have happened when the COVID-19 virus hit if Hillary Clinton had been president, or Zephyr Teachout had been governor of New York or Christine Quinn had been mayor of New York City. However, we do know this: it couldn’t have possibly been any worse.

Let’s put more women in charge. We’ll get more compassion, more empathy and more equality.

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Blue Birds

April 27, 2020 By

Following is a post from guest blogger Bill Grimes.

April 16, 1966: Three months into my first job out of college, my boss called me into his office.  I was selling advertising space in a low circulation trade magazine.

“Take a seat, William,” he said.  “You know what a blue bird is?

He wasn’t a guy with much sense of humor.  Nor did he seem like a bird watcher. 

I said, “No, I don’t think so other than a bird, Mister Baker.”

“I’ve told you, have I not, to call me Bob.”

I nodded nervously, trying to think what I’d done wrong.

“And, no, I’m not talking about a bird.”

I sat at attention waiting the hear what a bluebird is in business lingo.  Bob wasn’t known to converse in matters not related to sales quotas and performance.

“You’re lucky.   got a blue bird today.”

Lucky.  Sounded good.

“A blue bird is what we call it when a dormant, near- forgotten one-time customer calls in a sales order.  Completely unexpected.  Out of the blue.  No sales contact in ages.”

He paused, piercing my eyes, seeking the level of my sentience. “Today a bluebird flew in over the phone. The company’s location happens to be in your territory, William.  So you got a bluebird.  A commisionable bluebird.” 

I got the drift.  It was better than blue skies.  “Thank you, Bob.”

“Very fortunate for you, William.  Now go out and make a sale to one of the many companies in your territory who are not doing business with us.

April 16, 2020: Every day the same routine. Sleep.  Eat.  Read.  Write.   Walk.  Sleep.

Like all Americans, and much of the world, I’m a prisoner of social distancing.  My community in lock-down.  In times of national stress new words and terms enter the patois.  Like social distancing, Covid-19, flatten the curve, asymptomatic, and hand hygiene.

The thing about this is it isn’t much of a change for me.  I live alone in a small cottage.  Kids grown and gone.  Friends out of touch or dead.  No wife or boss to grumble in my ear.  What has changed is the bars and restaurants are closed.

It was noon and 87 degrees when I set out upon my walk.  I had developed two different routes, each about two miles, to insure moderately different topography. Today I decided on the one which took me to the town post office where I stopped to pick up my mail.  The recent sign on the open door read: Only Five People Admitted At One Time. There was only one other person in the space where the individual mini mailboxes were located.  She was wearing the popular C-19 mask.  I was mask-less and did not reciprocate the strained glare in her eyes.  I was pleased not see her mouth and nose.

I felt hunger coming on and had a new idea.  If I could hold up for about another half mile, I would reach the food market in the next town.  It was there I could have my favorite sandwich: sliced turkey, usually off the bone, on mixed grain bread with lettuce, tomatoes and plenty of Dijon mustard, and grab a Diet Coke.

A twenty-minute walk along Kent Street and I was there.

Mission accomplished.  Every employee masked-up and two-thirds of the few customers too.

Outside the market adjacent to the sparsely populated parking lot is a sitting area with fifteen metal mesh tables and chairs for customers to sit and enjoy their sandwiches and snacks.  It was also a good spot to watch the now occasional traffic on Kent Street that consists mostly of tradesmen trucks, a few automobiles, and threesomes and foursomes of bicyclists gliding by. Because of the beautiful blue sky and the emergence of a gentle breeze, I looked forward to having my lunch there.

Not today.  Not in this reign of Corvid-19.  On each table was a polyethylene sign, about the size of the menus at Mel’s Diner. No Sitting Until Further Notice.  No need to tell why.

And so, sack in hand with lunch and drink I began walking in the same direction I had come.  About thirty yards ahead I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.  A few feet off the sidewalk partially hidden by bushes was an unoccupied limestone settee with room for two.

Most pleased with my good fortune, I sat down and began enjoying lunch.  As good as the sandwich was, the bread was a little thicker than I’d remembered and the crusts a little larger and chewier. I began removing small pieces and tossing them side arm across the sidewalk to a three feet wide island of grass separating the sidewalk from the street on which stood a tall thin deciduous tree with a few leafless limbs along its bottom.  I was able to land at least a dozen thumbnail sized pieces of bread between ten and fifteen feet from where I sat. 

I was hoping a bird might find a nice meal.  Any bird except the large, loud, overfed ravens who seemed, like pigeons in the city, to be everywhere here bullying their smaller feathered creatures. 

My thoughts turned to the unfinished story I was writing and the bottle of Pinot Grigio I’d have with the baked salmon tonight.  The pandemic had honed my mostly neglected cooking competence. 

In a moment of no pedestrian or vehicular traffic I heard a rustling sound above me and looked up to see a blue bird perched on a branch of the tree looking down at me or his meal. 

I didn’t move nor remove my eyes from the bird.  I thought was a Blue Jay and not a Blue Bird because it was larger, more sleek than plump. 

After a long moment it fluttered down from the branch and skipped over to a a piece of bread, actually a hunk of crust, a piece farthest from me.  The bird seemed to take a good look before snatching it in its beak and flying up to the same branch where it took a bite and then placing the other half on the branch.

He repeated this activity, moving each time to grasp the bread nearer me.  Finally, it was no more than five or six feet away, pausing to examine me more closely.  I had a good look at its plumage, its cobalt blue feathers with a spot of gray on its back, the skinny, pronged cows of its feet near its tail, its near purple beak, and its BB sized slate eyes.  I sat as still as I could fascinated by the beautiful bird as it bent down and grabbed the last bit of crust, devouring it this time. 

In an instant it was gone, flying into an opening in the tree line, soaring into the blue yonder.

As I sat there wanting to capture the moment, a picture a picture came to my mind.

How long had it been since I thought about feeding birds?

Was my semi-consciousness to do so today driven by thoughts of my mortality?  Was my sense of humanity in an early stage of long-time dystopia?  Had I forgotten that we share this planet with animals and plants?  We primates who are one chromosome away from a chimpanzee.  That they, too, have a life, and were we helping them as we help ourselves through this pandemic?  Through this life which ends sooner or later in death for all living things?

Today, at this moment, I consciously felt connected with this bird.  What a world it would be if we could learn birds’ language, their tweets, and they understood a modicum of ours.

In this time when human activity is quelled, when we homo sapiens with our large brains don’t know what tomorrow will bring, here was the Blue Jay, a fellow living animal, one who never exploited nor took Nature for granted, siding up to me and enjoying a meal I had fixed for it.

I was happy.

The presence of the Blue Jay was a blue bird. 

Kind of like what Bob Baker described more than fifty years ago.

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