The news cycle moves quickly these days. What is on everyone’s mind one day is often forgotten the next, as attention moves to the latest social media-inspired outrage. But a handful of stories have persisted in the public consciousness over the past several weeks.
The first is the war in Gaza, with Hamas and various foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations accusing Israel of either deliberately or inadvertently bringing about a humanitarian crisis by withholding food aid from Gaza. Many critics actually argue that Israel is deliberately starving Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Another story involves the government’s conduct related to investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Congress and the administration are releasing previously classified documents and other evidence that suggest high-level government officials knew there was no evidence of collusion or coordination between Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign but acted as though there was to discredit the incoming administration.
While seemingly unrelated, these stories are connected by the collapsed credibility of our mainstream institutions.
It is well known that Hamas inflates casualty numbers and just makes up from whole cloth stories of harm and depredation in Gaza. But too many media institutions often embellish those claims to help make them more believable. Recently, the New York Times published on its front page a large picture of an emaciated Palestinian child. The photo accompanied a story about Hamas’s claims that thousands in Gaza are starving to death. But the child in the photo had a number of maladies that caused him to look emaciated. Indeed, the New York Times has since admitted as much. But the New York Times actually cropped out of the photo the boy’s healthy, well-fed brother.
Along the same lines, we now know that senior officials in the intelligence community deliberately misled the public about Trump’s alleged coordination with Russia for purely partisan purposes.
These institutions, especially the media and permanent government, have brought this mistrust on themselves. Time and again over the past several years, lies and obfuscation have replaced straightforward facts, purportedly in furtherance of some more important goal. The most egregious example of this is related to COVID.
First, we were told that we should not wear masks. We were then told to wear masks to stop the spread of the disease. Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted he wanted to discourage the public to save masks for healthcare workers, and he then changed course even though there was no scientific basis for either recommendation. We were told that the virus having escaped from a lab was a baseless, racist conspiracy theory. Now, just a few years later, a lab leak is broadly viewed as the most likely cause of the pandemic. The public was told that there were zero side effects from taking the vaccine, that if you were vaccinated, you would not get COVID, and that if you were vaccinated, you could not spread COVID. All of this was false.
Or how about that time, just a little over a year ago, when the media and government officials were telling us that then-President Joe Biden was in complete control of his mental faculties. We were told that any audio or visual evidence to the contrary was just a “cheap fake.” This, too, was false.
Many Americans rightly suspect that institutions nominally dedicated to telling the truth or focusing exclusively on some nonpolitical goals are slanting their communications toward some political end. Sadly, this is also indistinguishable from incompetence. When so many of the published scientific findings cannot be replicated, one should ask: Is that because the data were intentionally skewed or fabricated, something that sadly is increasingly frequent, or just poor study design? It is impossible to tell.
Our lack of trust in institutions that are supposed to tell us the truth about the world makes it so we can’t even agree on what the facts are since we can’t agree on who is telling us the truth. Without that agreement, there can be no productive debate on how to move forward on any given issue.
If you think thousands of unarmed black men are being killed by the police every year — something that 44% of liberal respondents, and 33% overall, thought based on a 2019 study — your approach to policy questions about policing will be very different than if you know that the answer for that year was 29. If you know that there is no scientific basis to believe that masks and school closures do anything to stop the spread of COVID, your approach to dealing with those issues will be different than someone who thinks those are effective interventions. Because of these radically different understandings of reality, we have unbridgeable differences in what policy should be.
EX-BIDEN OFFICIALS SIT FOR SENATE INTERVIEWS ON APPARENT MENTAL DECLINE
People of goodwill should be able to agree that the first step we need to take is to rehabilitate our institutions to make them trustworthy. We need to be able to believe what they tell us without immediate reservation so that we can then discover a shared understanding of reality.
That’s just the start.
