The “Mile an Hour” Marathon
What Classic Plague Lit Tells Us About COVID — And About Its Aftermath
“The primary lesson of plague literature, from Thucydides onwards, is how predictably humans respond to such crises. Over millennia, there has been a consistent pattern to behaviour during epidemics: the hoarding, the panicking, the fear, the blaming, the superstition, the selfishness, the surprising heroism, the fixation with the numbers of the reported dead, the boredom during quarantine.” – The Guardian
Mysteries, Yes by Mary Oliver
Here is one thing I know: when my dog jumps on me and ruins my dress I am at once horrified at the paw prints but also secretly happy at this sudden display of love.
Here is another thing I know: when I put socks on my father before he goes to sleep I am telling him everything I can’t say because we are two people inept at tenderness even if we have never shied away from each other’s embrace.
Washington Post – Is President Trump guilty of a crime because he has his name on the coronavirus relief checks? “While some might excuse that as an example of Trump’s narcissism, a letter from three prominent lawyers, who represent disparate points on the political spectrum, says it is more serious than that. The administration’s action, they argue, warrants the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the improper use of government employees and property to promote the president’s reelection campaign. That would be a criminal violation of the Hatch Act. Checks to individuals and organizations from the $2 trillion relief effort are meant to combat the calamitous economic impact of the covid-19 pandemic. It is the first time a president’s name is on an IRS disbursement check, my colleague Lisa Rein reported
Truth-tellers in white coats
When
Brad Pitt played Dr.
Anthony Fauci on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, the “doctor” promised
that as long as he isn’t fired, he would “be out there puttin’ out the facts
for whoever’s listening.” The parody contained a biting truth: These days
medical professionals are often default fact-checkers to politicians.
Fauci
is in a class by himself, of course. The director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases has been called “America’s
Doctor.” When he’s not at the White House’s coronavirus task force
briefings, the hashtag #wheresfauci circulates on Twitter.
His
popularity reflects the public's desire to hear from health care professionals
right now, more than from politicians looking to spin their way through the
crisis. A recent Reuters Institute survey of consumption
of news about COVID-19 in six countries found that scientists, doctors and
health experts were more trusted than other sources, including politicians. In
the United States, 80 percent trusted these professionals, compared with 27
percent who trusted politicians.
This
may be one reason videos from doctors and nurses on social media have drawn so
much attention, or that photos of nurses counter-protesting
against “reopen” activists are so powerful. That now-viral
image of a nurse in scrubs and a face mask shows her quietly using her
authority as a medical professional to, in essence, fact-check protesters who
say it’s time to reopen.
People
have been looking to these doctors and nurses for the facts on the ground –
what they can do to prevent contracting the virus, who is most susceptible and
what treatments are working – and in real time.
Medical
professionals have become such a staple of truth-telling that the most
prominent ones – like Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House task
force on the pandemic – are criticized when they don’t intervene on behalf of the
truth.
“Birx,
a physician and diplomat, came under scrutiny Thursday when she failed, in real
time, to correct Trump's assertion at the White House briefing that injecting
disinfectant into the body might combat the virus,” Stephen Collinson and Maeve
Reston wrote
this week on CNN.com.
Birx
likely stayed quiet out of self-preservation, and even that might not have been
enough. Axios on Tuesday quoted a White House official as saying Fauci and Birx
will “take
a back seat to the forward-looking, 'what's next' message."
That
existing tension between political and medical messages will only become more
pronounced as the “reopen” debate continues. That’s because, ultimately,
society’s reopening will be driven by how comfortable people feel circulating
in public places again. Who they listen to will be key to deciding their
comfort level.
–
Susan Benkelman, API
. . . technology
·
The
IFCN and Facebook are distributing another $300,000 in Coronavirus
Fact-Checking Grants to support eight projects in Australia, France,
Indonesia, Canada, Jordan, Kenya, Taiwan and Ukraine.
·
YouTube
announced
Tuesday it is partnering with the IFCN to distribute $1 million in
Fact-Checking Development Grants. Applications with detailed eligibility
and selection criteria will be announced May 20, and the winners will be
announced in August.
- A GIF of Joe Biden with his tongue out was widely circulated on social media recently as a deepfake, but it was not one – despite tweets to the contrary, Vice News reported. It was made with an animation app called Mug Life. “It's a video editing job that a six year old with an iPhone could do,” wrote Samantha Cole.
o
It
may not have been a deepfake, but it went viral. The GIF gained traction on
Twitter when President Trump retweeted it on Sunday.
. . . politics
- People who see headlines paired with alerts about their credibility from fact-checkers, the public, news media and even artificial intelligence can reduce users’ intention to share them, according to a new study by professors at New York University and Indiana University. However the alerts’ effectiveness varied according to political orientation and gender, Science Daily reported.
o
The
indicators had an impact on everyone regardless of political orientation, but
Democrats were less likely to share content flagged as false than were
independents or Republicans. The study surveyed 1,500 U.S. news consumers.
- The study had good news for fact-checkers. News items
with flags by fact-checkers were less likely to be shared than those
flagged by the news media, the public or by AI.
- The Fact-checkers Legal Support Initiative called attention to the increased threats fact-checking organizations around the world are facing in the midst of the COVID-19 infomedic.
o
Fact-checking
networks in Spain
and Greece
have faced harassment from political parties, and a network in Latvia
has been besieged by attacks from conspiracy theorists.
- The group, which is a collaboration among the IFCN, the Media Legal Defense Initiative and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, released a one-page document outlining its services connecting fact-checking networks to pro-bono legal defense.
science and health
·
Rohit
Khanna, executive editor of Indian fact-checking network The
Quint, released this
video with five lessons Indians can take away from the country’s experience
with COVID-19. It runs the gamut from India’s testing rate to inefficiencies in
the healthcare system to addressing how Indians have handled racism and
xenophobia.
·
Ugandan
pop star-turned opposition leader Bobi Wine has used his popularity to
circulate the message – in
a song – that the coronavirus needs to be taken seriously. The song
launched a larger #DontGoViral campaign aimed at mobilizing artists across
Africa to combat misinformation through their creativity, The
Christian Science Monitor reported.
Radio-Canada’s
Décrypteurs looked at a claim by European scientists that runners and
cyclists could potentially exacerbate the spread COVID-19.
Two
teams of engineering researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology in the
Netherlands and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium used
mathematical models to show that runners and cyclists could aid the spread
because of their speed.
The
researchers recommended runners and cyclists stay farther apart than the
recommended 6 feet to prevent exposure to potentially harmful
droplets.
What
the researchers didn’t take into account, and what Décrypteurs correctly
assessed, was how much virus would exist in these droplets. Décrypteurs spoke
with virologists who pointed out that runners and cyclists would produce
smaller aerosolized particles that would not contain enough of the virus to get
someone sick.
What we liked: This fact-check serves as a good example
of why it is important to consider a source’s expertise. The researchers in
this study are engineers who are qualified to tell us about the aerodynamics of
droplets, but not qualified to say whether those particles lead to increased
transmission. Décrypteurs’ fact-check reminds us to be mindful of a source’s
expertise when evaluating its quality.
—
Harrison Mantas, IFCN
1. The European Journalism Centre has
published a new Verification
Handbook for Disinformation and Media Manipulation. Its editor, BuzzFeed’s
Craig Silverman, walked through its chapters in this
tweet thread.
2. Also in the book department:
Disinformation experts Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner have released “You
Are Here. A Field Guide for Navigating Polluted Information.”
3. The Trump-aligned vloggers Diamond &
Silk are no longer associated with Fox News. The
Daily Beast reported that the network cut ties with them because they had
been spreading conspiracy theories about the coronavirus.
4. A Facebook page called Energy Therapy,
popular with alternative medicine adherents, has been identified as a misinformation
“superspreader,” BuzzFeed reported.
- Climate scientists and activists are calling a new documentary by Michael Moore about the “hypocrisy” of the environmental movement “dangerous, misleading and destructive” and are urging online platforms to take it down.