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Tis the holiday season and the heroes of Fox News are valiantly arraying their forces in the War On Christmas, even as ICU beds are filling up and a new strain of COVID has arrived.

In the spirit of the season I am making a special plea to Rupert Murdoch to deliver a Christmas miracle: stop killing us.

Thats it, thats the tweet.

Wait, this is an article? I have to write more. OK then.

Republicans have been more reluctant to get vaccinated and more likely to die as a result. This trend was obfuscated initially because COVID emerged in blue states on the coasts, and because conservatives had at least some stake in dampening the pandemic when Trump was still president. As those conditions have disappeared, the partisan divide has become undeniable.

If you want to follow the evolution of these trends, health analyst Charles Gaba @charles_gaba has been tracking the partisan divide. The differences are very clear. Fewer vaccines and more deaths as a county becomes Trumpier. The most recent data complied by Gaba shows that the death rate in the reddest counties is 5.54 times that of the bluest counties.

As illustrated by Philip Bump, this pattern is not static, but has become worse over time. At one point, there were similar amounts of deaths in blue and red counties, but a very large gap has now emerged.

The partisan divide has hardened as vaccines have become more available, and even as other groups who initially showed hesitancy or faced access issues have increased vaccination rates. The gap between whites and Blacks has declined, and all but disappeared for Latinos. (The Asian-and-everyone-else gap is the only one which has grown!)

In other words, the remaining block of people who are refusing to get vaccinated are Republicans. At this point, knowing someones political identity is the best way of knowing their approach to vaccines. See this graph from NPR: Republicans are 60% of the unvaccinated population.

Why are Republicans so resistant? There is variation even within Republicans that offers insights. Unvaccinated Republicans tend to be younger (which makes sense, since they are least at risk of death), but also less educated and more conservative in their views. They are also more likely to believe that the threats are exaggerated and less likely to believe that COVID is something to worry about.

The most extraordinary difference may be that just 3% of unvaccinated Republicans believe that getting vaccinated is a collective responsibility (compared to 26% of vaxxed Republicans and 81% of vaxxed Dems). The inherent nature of COVID is that it transfers from one person to another. By definition, the choices we make as individuals affect those around us. But almost no unvaccinated Republicans agree that they have some responsibility to their community in this domain. We cant defeat a pandemic as long as so many people refuse to acknowledge their obligations to others.

Republicans are also more likely to believe in conspiracy theories about vaccinations, for example, that they cause impotence, give you COVID, or include microchips. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, almost half of Republicans compared to just 14% of Democrats believe or are unsure about four or more false statements about COVID-19.

So who is to blame for this? Another way of asking this question is: Why do Republicans believe what they believe?

Maybe there is something in the conservative DNA that makes them reflexively opposed to public health measures. Indeed, if we compare attitudes toward COVID across countries we see that political ideology matters. But it matters much more in the U.S. Across other countries there is a 10-20 percentage point difference between the left and right according to one Pew poll.

In the U.S. it is 45 points.

COVID is a novel public health challenge. Therefore it represented a relatively blank slate where people did not have clear prior beliefs. This makes it more likely that people adopted their beliefs based on the cues provided by elites, such as politicians and media.

Which brings us to Fox News.

I could show you a series of screenshots of Fox News talking heads encouraging COVID complacency and vaccine hesitancy. Such content has become a central feature of their programming. Or I could point out that Fox News itself, as an organization, was one of the early adopters of a workplace vaccine mandates that its editorial policy so fiercely opposes.

Instead, I am going to show you causal evidence that Fox News has made things worse. In other words, Fox News is not just catering to its audiences taste for public health misinformation, it is actively cultivating it.

Social scientists obsess about questions of causality, how to show that X (Fox News content) caused Y (viewer public health beliefs), rather than Y caused X, or that other factors drove both X and Y. Ideally, an experimental design is used to sort out causality, identifying some sort of exogenous factor that shapes the outcome.

A standard technique at estimating the causal effect of Fox News is to look at channel positioning. The idea is that the placement of channels is random, but that people tend to watch more of channels placed earlier on the dial, all else equal. Researchers can then examine if that random source of variation is associated with changes in public health behaviors and outcomes, using indicators like local surveys, health measures like deaths, or GPS data to track whether people stayed at home. Researchers have used channel positioning to assess the effect of Fox News on other outcomes, such as estimating Republican vote share in elections, and the rise of the Tea Party.

What did researchers find when researchers used this technique to understand the relationship between Fox News and COVID?

A series of sophisticated papers confirm the causal influence of Fox on health behaviors and outcomes. Exposure to Fox News made people less likely to stay at home, more likely to travel, less likely to use hand sanitizer or masks, and more vaccine hesitant.

One paper used a slightly different causal technique to look at variation within Fox News coverage. Hard to believe, but there was a time when Tucker Carlsons messaging was reasonably responsible compared to Sean Hannity. Researchers exploited this variation through a variety of techniques. They could not use channel placement as a source of exogenous variation in this case, since they were looking at variation within the Fox News channel, so they took a different ingenious approach: using variation in sunset times (with the idea that people watch more TV when its dark, and that in places where sunset is later, people will be exogenously more exposed to more Hannity, which runs later).

The results shows that greater exposure to the less responsible version of Fox messaging was associated with more COVID cases and more deaths.

To sum up, a series of sophisticated analyses show that Fox News is leading viewers to take the COVID less seriously, to skip basic public health measures, to avoid vaccines and to greater illnesses and deaths. Fox News talking heads are not just asking questions, they are leading their viewers to their demise. And because COVID is a virus, they risks they are persuading their viewers to undertake are shared, unwillingly, with the rest of us.

The studies Ive highlighted focus on Fox, but they should make you worry about a whole domain of conservative media and politics. Other Murdoch-owned operations, like the nominally high-brow Wall St. Journal and its embarrassing-but-influential cousin, the New York Post, are beating the same COVID-skeptic drum. So is the media Fox is now competing with, like Newsmax and OANN. Such messaging is also employed by many Republican politicians who have shaped coverage and promoted quack cures.

It is not the case that Fox and Co. are wholly responsible for partisan COVID gap. But elite messaging helps us to understand why the gap between left and right is so much wider in the U.S. than in other countries.

Did we really need some fancy analytical techniques with social scientists finding ingenious sources of exogenous variation to persuade us that elite messaging matters? Maybe not. As it is, we have a lot of evidence that conservative media and Republican politicians are encouraging deaths. Its sort of like we have found them over the corpse, bloody knife in their hand. What the analyses do is to remove any reasonable doubt by providing a recording of the crime. It moves the moral culpability for death beyond plausible deniability.

Why kill your own voters or your own viewers? My speculative answer is that there are three overlapping reasons: an addiction to culture wars, conspiracism and anti-science narratives.

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The omniscience of culture war framing on the right means that even basic public health issues are framed through that prism. As soon as CDC officials recommended masks for Americans, Trumps advisers spied an opportunity: In the months that followed, Trump was only seen wearing a mask on rare occasions, instead following the advice of Stephen Miller, Johnny McEntee, Derek Lyons and other trusted aides to think of masks as a cultural wedge issue.

Similarly, a media and party that has fed its followers conspiracies seemed unable to switch modes when it came to COVID: Things are never as they seem. Some shadowy puppeteers are in cahoots with the government or foreign powers to control you! This mode of thinking is also the populist mode, and the line between conservative populism and conspiracism has become increasingly hard to discern. It is not just anti-elitism in general. If you take your cues from Trump, Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, you have no problem with elites. It is directed rage against a certain type of elite.

Finally, there is the anti-science aspect of modern conservative thought. Science is an imperfect exercise. On the whole the scientific domain has provided the tools to get us out of a deadly pandemic. However, there has been plenty to criticize during COVID regulators moving too slowly, or sending mixed messages. But the nature of human progress depends upon a willingness to modify and update scientific beliefs to reflect new findings. When errors become a basis to punish or distrust science, we are in trouble.

Ultimately, governing depends upon rationality. The use of logic, and evidence about cause and effects, are especially necessary in domains like public health, where irrationality is mercilessly punished. In some fundamental way, U.S. governance is being held hostage by those who are not just unable to fulfill the basic requirements of the job, but also dedicated to salting the earth for anyone else who tries to do better. Thus, the same media that undermined public health guidance will shamelessly blame the Biden administration for not effectively corralling the pandemic.

This article originally appeared in Can We Still Govern?. Published with permission of the author.

Original post:
Fox News is killing us: Here are the receipts - Wisconsin Examiner

The seven principles came about when Black people were fighting (and are still fighting) for their basic rights and equality. The principles were guides for how to live and become self-sufficient in an era in which most Americans, according to Gallop, thought the country was integrating too quickly and those efforts should be slowed down. In other words, White majorities still wanted to subjugate Black people, despite the passage by Congress of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964.

In that context, you can see how the principals spoke to the state of Black lives during that time period. Cooperative economics, for example, means to build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together. Sounds a lot like the American dream that had long been denied to people of color.

Remember, Black people were still lynched in the 1960s and killed for advocating for civil rights (so were white people). The principles were something that Black people could rally around, the ones available to White America but not them.

Along the way, Black and white people objected to Kwanzaa for various reasons. The Black Christmas trope is one of those disparaging dog whistles meant as a scare tactic to fuel the culture wars. Kwanzaa isnt a replacement for Christmas, but rather a secular celebration.

Then people criticized Kwanzaa because someone made it up. I hate to tell you folks, but historians believe the Roman Emperor Constantine created Christmas in 336 AD. He decreed it would be celebrated on December 25, but not because Jesus was born that day (theologians believe he was born in the spring). A celebration in late December would overlap and later replace other traditional solstice celebrations.

Over time, Christmas has turned into a more secular holiday, with Santa Claus, trees and mistletoe. Heck, it wasnt until 1870 that the U.S. government recognized Christmas as a federal holiday.

Thats a long way of saying: We make up lots of stuff. Kwanzaa was the brainchild of Dr. Maulana Karenga, a professor and chair of Black Studies at California State University with a controversial past. That past has, unfairly, weighed on Kwanzaa.

Born Ronald McKinley Everett, he and two others were convicted in 1971 on charges of torturing and falsely imprisoning two Black women while he was a member of a Black nationalist group. While he denied the charges, he served four years in prison. His involvement with the Black Power movement led to the myth that Kwanzaa is closely tied to Black nationalism.

Embracing the principles of Kwanza does not embrace the heinous acts of one man, much like taking your kids to see Paddington doesnt embrace the awful acts of Harvey Weinstein.

So, yes, Kwanzaas message of unity and faith resonates just like the togetherness and love shared on Christmas.

The principles, while born in a different time, are applicable today. While we are doing a better job learning to live together, we still have a long way to go. The principals remind everyone not just Black people of how we can become the best versions of ourselves while improving our communities.

Kwanzaa lasts until Jan. 1 and were still in the Christmas holiday season. Whether you are among the very large majority of Americans who celebrate(d) Christmas or the very small who celebrate Kwanzaa, try to live by the values as best you can, not only this time of the year but all of 2022. Wed all be better off.

Ray Marcano is a long-time journalist whose column appears on these pages each Sunday. He can be reached at raymarcanoddn@gmail.com.

Read the original post:
MARCANO: The important and complicated history of Kwanzaa - Dayton Daily News

A busy, busy year for audio. As in 2020, lockdown gave all audio a boost in status, as well as listeners. The lack of gigs, theatre, art shows or cinema from January to March meant that audio (radio, podcasts, music) jumped up the cultural ladder. Podcasts were also boosted by yet more celebrities deciding to fill their lonelier hours with a talking to my famous mates show. Listeners responded, and podcasts are now the fastest growing audio medium (though live radio still makes up most of what we listen to).

2021 saw some interesting big-name radio appointments. Emma Barnett and Anita Rani joined Womans Hour to great success, though the former started contentiously (Kelechi Okafor refused to appear when she overheard Barnett discussing with producers whether Okafor was antisemitic). Amol Rajan moved to Today, where he has brought a more conversational feel (when he remembers to slow down his natural gabble). In late spring, much-loved Radio 1 stalwarts Annie MacManus and Nick Grimshaw both announced their departures, with MacManuss final link achieving a life of its own on social media (Life is short. It thunders by. If you like the music, you have got to get up and dance. Just do it). And 6 Musics afternoon dafty Shaun Keaveny also left, but sadly not of his own accord: his funky replacement, Craig Charles, is upbeat but less of a natural fit. Graham Norton quit his Radio 2 Saturday morning show to do the same on Saturdays and Sundays for Virgin Radio (no effect on Virgins Rajars thus far). On 5 live breakfast, Rick Edwards joined Rachel Burden, replacing Nicky Campbell without fuss or trouble.

In March, the BBC announced a gradual but compulsory move to the regions. Much of this Big Shift About meant changes for radio production teams: Newsbeat journalists are off to Birmingham, technology hacks to Glasgow, and more of Radio 3 and 6 Musics output must come from outside the capital (Charless show is based in Salford). Several old-timers, including the brilliant technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, chose to retire rather than move.

In commercial radio, niche is still king, with Boom Radio, which launched in February, aiming for the sixtysomethings, and Greatest Hits for the uncool Gen X-ers (the likes of Alex Lester and Mark Goodier were joined by Simon Mayo in March). Times Radio has done well in its first year (around 640,000 weekly listeners), offering a sparky alternative to Radio 4 and 5 live.

Outside radio, big corporations are getting serious about our ears. Spotify gave us podcasts from genuine midlife superstars Barack and Bruce (Renegades), the UKs greatest YouTubers, the Sidemen (The Fellas, Whats Good With Miniminter and Randolph) and the most popular podcaster in the world (Joe Rogan). Its reward was to overtake Apple and BBC Sounds as the most popular podcast platform for younger audiences. Audible, known for audiobooks, has quietly been making some gripping UK podcasts, including investigative shows Finding Q, Death at Deepcut, and inventive dramas such as the Jed Mercurio-execd Zoetrope. Wondery, reliable banger-out of US true crime, added some UK shows this year, such as the excellent Harsh Reality.

With big corporations comes big money: in June, US-celebrities-interviewing-their-mates show Smartless was bought for a reputed $80m by Amazon Music, which also snapped up Wondery. But amid all these dollar signs, the question is whether theres enough advertising revenue to support the independent podcast sector. Some excellent shows are finding it harder to secure those all-important mattress/ bush-trimmer/ website design ads, as theyre all being hoovered up by, you guessed it, new celebrity shows. Still, there is no doubt that since lockdown 2020, audio has boomed. Expect even more next year.

1. Things Fell Apart (Radio 4)Jon Ronson traces the often surprising origin stories of todays raging culture wars.

2. Welcome to Your Fantasy (Pineapple Street Studios/Gimlet)Brilliant in-depth telling of the true crime story you never knew you wanted: the history of the Chippendales. Host Natalia Petrzela is excellent throughout.

3. Finding Q: My Journey Into QAnon (Audible)Journalist Nicky Woolf shows the wreckage that QAnon leaves in its trail, and gets a face-to-face interview with the man most likely to be Q.

4. Harsh Reality (Wondery)Wondery uses its long-established true crime techniques to examine the life of trans woman Miriam Rivera, and how a UK reality show exploited her and others.

5. Uncanny/The Battersea Poltergeist (Radio 4)Danny Robinss two brilliant Radio 4 series about the paranormal: The Battersea Poltergeist, a documentary (with drama sections) about the 12-year haunting of an ordinary family; and Uncanny, which examines 10 spooky real-life stories.

6. Coming in from the Cold (TalkSport/Unedited StoriesThis excellent six-part series traces the history of black players in English football, and includes testimony from Cyrille Regis, John Barnes and Raheem Sterling.

7. Windrush Stories (National Prison Radio) Full-length stories from the Windrush generation and their children, produced and presented by DJ Flight. NPR is nurturing some serious talent (see also Brenda Birungi, winner of best host: speech audio at this years Audio Production awards)

8. Comfort Eating (The Guardian)Famous people as varied as Scarlett Moffatt and Bernardine Evaristo discuss their past through the medium of their favourite comfort food with Guardian restaurant critic Grace Dent.

9. We Didnt Start the Fire (Crowd Network)A witty and fascinating modern history lesson from Katie Puckrik and Tom Fordyce, through the lyrics of Billy Joels hit.

10. Sweet Bobby (Tortoise)A mad tale of the immensely complicated catfishing of a bright young UK woman, which starts off brilliantly but as is often the case with true crime falls away rapidly once the baddie is revealed.

Any podcast of a celeb interviewing another celebWith a few honourable exceptions, such podcasts are always too cosy to offer anything more than dull anecdotes and mutual stanning. We know you need the attention, famous people, but you can all stop now.

Read more here:
Miranda Sawyers best audio of 2021 - The Guardian

You wouldnt know it from the Hollywood buzz machine, but on the first weekend of the month, in a limited release, the film Christmas with the Chosen: The Messengers raked in 8.45 million viewers and came in fifth at the box office. Originally scheduled for a limited three-day release, it has now been extended through Christmas, even while being made available via streaming.

For those who dont know the work, the short film is an offshoot of one of the most successful crowdfunded streaming projects in history, The Chosen, a retelling of the Gospels that focuses on the backstories of many of the major characters. Projected for seven seasons, with two already available online and a third set to begin filming shortly, crowdfunding has supported the $10 million to $18 million cost for each season.

The success of the streaming series and the Christmas film demonstrates the ongoing market draw for shows that celebrate, rather than ignore or denigrate, traditional faith. Yet many films in this subgenre offer nothing beyond predictable, polemical plotlines.

The original Gods Not Dead, released in 2015, set the pattern, with predictable characters and story. The central conflict is between an overbearing atheist professor who is forcing students to sign a God is dead statement and a rebellious Christian student. The latest installment (Gods Not Dead: We The People) is even more polemical as it shifts, following a strain of contemporary evangelicalism, in the direction of putting faith in the service of direct political advocacy.

The Chosen is different. Accompanied by Bible study-guides and created by Dallas Jenkins, whose father penned the Left Behind book series, the series and the film might seem to be more of the same. Yet, Jenkins repudiates the notion that this is a stick-it-to-Hollywood thing, according to The Wall Street Journal. Inspired to become a film-maker after watching the Jack Nicholson film One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and who likens The Chosen to rich character-driven dramas like Friday Night Lights, Jenkins combines the best of Hollywood with the best traditional storytelling techniques.

The series and spinoff film pose the question what might it have been like to have encountered the person of Jesus in the course of ordinary daily life, to have lived, dined, traveled, laughed and mourned with him. And what might it have been like to begin to wonder about the strange capacities of knowing, healing and forgiving of this otherwise seemingly ordinary human being. The result is a captivating human drama invested with deep spiritual significance.

The Chosen series, whose episodes have been viewed more than 312 million times, is unique. It is sympathetic to faith in ways that Hollywood finds difficult. Yet in its openness to the best of Hollywood and in its avoidance of culture wars and political diatribes, it is atypical of faith-based films.

Its popularity is a good sign for our culture and for art. It reflects our exhaustion with politics and our longing for meaning that transcends ideological battles.

Especially in the faith-based audience, there is a hunger for depictions of faith that include, rather than rule out, doubt. In one episode, Peter here portrayed as a desperate fisherman with a gambling problem and mounting debts complains to God, on behalf of the Jewish people: You cant decide whether were chosen or not.

Viewers also want to see complex depictions of the struggle with evil in the depths of the human soul. While Hollywood continues with some regularity to produce fantastical and absurd stories of exorcism, the story of Mary Magdalene, in the inaugural episode of The Chosen, is a compelling and chilling account of what it might mean to be in the grip of evil. Her eventual encounter with Jesus fills her and the audience with surprise and awe.

The brilliance of The Chosen is to take the most influential story of all time and to make it fresh, not by altering it to suit contemporary fads, but by inviting us to inhabit the perspectives of Jesus contemporaries. In its use of indirection and in its focus on surprise and wonder, The Chosen adopts both the method of the Gospels and the tools of genuine art. It thus opens a fresh path, one with lessons for both faith-based and mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.

Thomas S. Hibbs is the J. Newton Rayzor Sr. professor of philosophy at Baylor University.

See original here:
How The Chosen embraced the best of Hollywood and showed it what people really want - The Dallas Morning News

Back in the 1990s, when stand-up comedy was hailed as the new rock n roll, Robert Newman and David Baddiel used to perform a sketch entitled History Today. The two comedians played elderly historians, slumped in the chairs of a dull, late-night talk show. Each time they attempted to engage in scholarly debate their discussion descended into puerile, playground insults.

It worked because Newman and Baddiel are brilliant comic performers, but also because it was then possible to portray history as the musty domain of grey-haired, grey-suited men, trapped in personal feuds and obsessed with obscure historical controversies. That history and historians could be so lampooned was, in retrospect, a luxurious state of affairs.

Two decades later historians have become unwilling conscripts in toxic culture wars, the focus of online hate and tabloid misinformation, rather than TV satire. What is, and what is not, taught in schools and universities, what appears in our childrens textbooks, how heritage organisations research and present the houses and objects under their care, have all become front-page news.

We are where we are, in large part, because historians have been doing their job. Over recent decades that has led them to turn their analytical gaze towards aspects of Britains past that had long been purposefully marginalised in particular the histories of slavery and empire. The historians now being targeted by journalists and politicians are almost exclusively engaged in those fields of study. Given that politicians, this summer, were willing to pick fights with the star players of the England football team, it is hardly surprising that historians are considered soft targets.

[See also: The England team have exposed the lie of the governments culture war]

The gradual growth in the study of slavery and colonialism, which began in the 1960s, was a small component within a far bigger revolution in the study of history. Back then a generation of historians that included EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Dorothy Thompson and Christopher Hill expanded the fields of social history and working class history, which they very often examined from a Marxist standpoint. Their aim was to recover the lives of the poor from what EP Thompson called the enormous condescension of posterity.

Twenty-first-century historians seeking to rescue the millions who laboured on the plantations, or who resisted British imperialrule, from similar condescension find themselves in a radically different environment. The study of those specialisms is increasingly portrayed not as an expansion of our national history but as a politicised assault upon it.

Yet rather than challenge the history of the favoured culture-war topic, the tactic is to discredit the historians themselves, the intellectual equivalent to playing the player, not the ball. As the facts of phenomena such as the transatlantic slave trade cannot be refuted, the motives of those who study them are instead called into question. While the historians of the 1960s were denounced for their Marxism, the abuse levelled at todays historians is of a different order. The aim is not to engage in historical debate but to delegitimise opponents.

Corinne Fowler, a professor at the University of Leicester, who co-edited a report on the links between National Trust properties and historical slavery and colonialism, has rightly compared these campaigns against historians to the methods used by those who work to delegitimise the scholarship of climate scientists. Another tactic is to rebrand historians as activists, and claim that their scholarly detachment has been surrendered to woke ideology. I myself have been denounced as an ideological historian despite being, in truth, a rather old-fashioned empirical historian.

[See also: The Little Britain affair is a reminder of the UKs long and toxic love affair with blacking up]

Historians who regard the study of slavery and empire as valid now face a difficult task. They must stand up for the study and the public dissemination of history as it really is messy, contradictory and often far from glorious or heroic while at the same time standing up for one another. To do this they must accept that culture wars appeal to emotion they involve calculated distortions that aim to convince people their history and thus their identity is under attack, and cannot be defeated with mere facts.

Historians can and should point out that while culture wars are toxic they are also confected. The articles attacking historians and heritage organisations are often peppered with inaccuracies. There never was, for example, a mass cancelling of memberships at the National Trust, in response to the research into links between the Trusts properties and slavery. And the project in question was not a woke reaction to Black Lives Matter but a peer-reviewed work of scholarship conceived before both the murder of George Floyd and the protests of 2020.

[See also: Africas forgotten empires]

Historians should repeatedly point out that the rewriting of history is not some act of professional misconduct but literally the job of professional historians. The phoney arguments at the heart of this phoney war have too often been allowed to define the debate. Historians, so skilled at reframing discussions and problematising debates, need to bring those skills to bear on those who would reduce public history to what Donald Trumps infamous 1776 Commission termed patriotic education something as far away from history as an academic discipline as can be imagined.

David Olusogas books include Black and British: A Forgotten History (Pan Macmillan)

Read more from the original source:
Historians have become soft targets in the culture wars. We should fight back - The New Statesman