The title of the piece is "How Do You Respond When an Anti-Vaxxer Dies of Covid?" James Martin, a Jesuit priest, is the author, and the article was published January 30 by the New York Times. This will be a brief and focused analysis of Father Martin's piece. His essay attempts to do good and addresses what he feels are stressful questions and emotions all too common to the pandemic.
I have issues with certain aspects of Father Martin's essay. While I don't question the good faith of this man of faith, I feel that his informational inclusions and exclusions follow many of the patterns of the previous pieces listed in "The Propaganda Files." My first three critiques have now featured analyses of opinion pieces from Newsweek, CNN, and the New York Times. All three have access to the best writers and editors on the planet. Yet I see problematic writing and editing patterns that scream groupthink.
Headlines often set the framework for these patterns, and I have issues with Father Martin's title. The interesting thing about titles is that they are usually suggested or imposed from above. That is, the writer often doesn't choose the title. To the extent that a title establishes expectations not really representative of the piece, or to the extent that the title misinforms, those effects are often purposefully massaged into place from above.
Precise Language
I think that the importance of using language with precision has been overlooked during this pandemic. When words come to represent much more than what they actually mean, we have entered the arena of influence communication and propaganda.
I'm going to quote the beginning of the seventh paragraph of this piece, then examine it. The paragraph in question starts, "The welter of strong feelings can be disorienting: We see someone resisting vaccines or masking (which frustrates us); thus endangering others (which angers us); perhaps even endangering ourselves (which frightens us); and then dying -- which should sadden us but, some of us are horrified to discover, doesn't."
Father Martin's presumed good intentions aside, this paragraph is laced with misinformation. Can you spot it? It's obvious, but American culture's red/blue auto-dichotomization has trained us to miss it.
The problem is simply this. The author labels two very different things together as if they were two sides of the same coin. It's because Americans see and experience almost all aspects of the pandemic through the lens of us/them politics that these things get categorized together. Political meanings provide overwhelming labels, neat categories that have nothing to do with reality.
Resisting vaccines is one thing. Resisting masking is something entirely different. Vaccines carry a real element of both immediate self-risk and long-term currently unknowable self-risk. People's various biological idiosyncrasies can elevate vaccines into the realm of significant self-risk. Masking, however, has no such self-risk attached. Masking protects self and others with no biological risk, known or unknown. Taking vaccines entails measurable risk, even if the culture prefers to not report specifics, and taking vaccines has an unknown long-term risk component, however small.
As such, wearing masks and taking vaccines are two disparate behaviors. There's not much suggesting they should be tied at the hip, yet here they are, presented by the author as if they are two atoms of the same element.
With Delta and Omicron viral loads, infected vaccinated spread the disease as effectively as infected unvaccinated. This does not get repeated very often by major news networks. With these current variants, the infected unvaccinated are no more "endangering others" or "endangering ourselves" than infected vaccinated are "endangering others" or "endangering ourselves." Why does the author not state this? Is he unaware? Does it make for a better narrative if he ignores this?
If I try to answer the whys of what the author chooses to not mention, I begin with a couple simple, minimally conspiratorial ideas. I don't really think these are the crux of the problem, but I'll start here anyway. First, perhaps cognitive dissonance makes it easier to label people into discrete good and bad categories -- the responsible and caring versus the irresponsible and uncaring. Maybe it's easier for people to stereotype and process fewer variables during this time of high stress and social rules outside the experience of most Americans.
Or perhaps it's a variation of this, an inability to tolerate ambiguity. Categorize a bunch of behaviors as appropriate because they somehow "go together" even if they're very different. Reduce variables and processing of information. Condense decision-making into black/white reflexes. It makes life easier.
Or Maybe It's Propaganda
Here's what frightens me. Father Martin may have tied resisting masking and resisting vaccines together because he's aware that resisting masking "endangers others," and he's aware that the resisting of vaccines does not do that against current variants. Resisting vaccines puts the resistor at increased risk. Someone resisting vaccines with the current variants is not, once they are infected, a greater risk to others or us than a vaccine lover.
Perhaps Father Martin or the New York Times editors understood that for the seventh paragraph to pass a fact check, "resisting vaccines or masking" had to include the "or masking." If you extract the "or masking," the paragraph is pure speculation and arguably false.
I would, in normal times, attribute this phrasing to an accident of editing. But really, in writing, there are very few accidents. And I am running into this kind of subtle manipulation quite often these days. Things are implied that are not true, but they make particular Covid-19 narratives hum, and editors go with them.
Back to the Title
Curling back to the title's use of the word "Anti-Vaxxer," I wonder why "Anti-Vaxxer" has been chosen as the word to cover (1) not masking, (2) not social distancing, and (3) not getting vaccinated, which are three very disparate behaviors. Father Martin and the New York Times editors also had a word choice to make regarding "Anti-Vaxxer" in that headline. They could have chosen "Non-vaccinated" or "Vaccine Hesitant," or something else, but they went with the sexiest, most dynamic, most attention-grabbing label, which happens to be a political label. Michael Shermer in contrast, in this month's Skeptic cover headline, went with "Vaccine Hesitant."
Despite our possible preferences to internalize and adopt homogeneous propaganda when under pandemic stress, we need to shake ourselves free from kneejerk categorizations. We need to recognize imprecise, garbled language and categories that serve primarily as political shorthand. Glossing over reality by using foggy language loaded with political dog whistles is not the key to actually seeing that reality or coping with it.
Bob Dietz
February 4, 2022
