A new addition to my morning reading routine is the New York Times Morning Briefing. I subscribe to the Kindle edition of the Times, so all I needed to do was supply my email to receive this weekday newsletter. I'm not sure why I didn't do this some time ago.
I was reminded today of how reality often can be found somewhere between extreme positions. The lead article in the Morning Briefing highlighted the fact that Republicans tend to underestimate how dangerous Covid is while Democrats often overestimate the danger.
For instance, the actual percentage of Covid sufferers who are hospitalized is about one percent, but 41 percent of Democrats thought the percentage was 50 percent or higher, according to a New York Times poll.
On the other hand, one third of Republicans thought that the seasonal flu and car crashes killed more Americans than Covid. The truth is that Covid has killed about 15 time MORE people this past year than either flu or auto crashes.
There were more examples of being ill-informed on both sides, but the some effects of all this "fog" are that Republicans are more reluctant to wear masks or even be vaccinated, while Democratic states have the highest numbers of remote learning students (despite the American Academy of Pediatrics favoring reopening schools ASAP).
The good news is that both sides are willing to moderate their views when they see the actual data.
The bad news is that Americans don't already know the truth.
It occurs to me that most of us intuitively understand that the truth about some trend or problem or challenge or triumph is rarely found in the extremes. But I also know that notoriety is found in those extremes, and social media and cable TV love those controversies.
A thought experiment: What if social media and cable news were shut down for a week? For a month? What if people were forced to rely on their own observations and relationships with family and neighbors?
I suspect that the good would far outweigh the bad.
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