A Sudden Emergence of Trustworthy Revisionism “Journalism”
“The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.” -George Orwell
Five years.
Sixty months.
Approximately 2,100 days…
… is a lot of time to reflect, to consider mistakes, to allow the light of context to shine on the dark corners of a dark global episode.
Depending on your frame of mind at any given moment, it might seem like it all happened last week, or it might seem like a distant, utterly remote epoch entirely. Confusion was the order of the day, followed by rushed policies, performative social rituals, and a sort of news media-predicated trench warfare between competing schools of thought.
We’re talking, of course, about the earliest hours of what would come to be known as the Covid-19 Pandemic. But we’re also talking about the way the realities of Covid were processed through the membrane of mass media, and the way different factions of the public – factions that didn’t know they were factions until they became factions – received, internalized, and eventually built pandemic-specific identities around perceived realities.
The result was a sort of petty, low-stakes civil war in which half the country (give or take) decided that authorities were to be indiscriminately trusted, regardless of any inconsistencies in their messaging, hypocrisies in their personal conduct, or the emergence of lockdown-negating revelations. The other half (again, give or take) took a more skeptical view of the authorities, with their curiosities being aroused when they began to take note of those aforementioned inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and lockdown-negating revelations.
In a culture that had started deifying nerdiness about a dozen years earlier, many millions among us found that aligning themselves with the “smart set” of sciencey scientists and their scientific science was an easy path to virtue. “We believe the science! Wear a mask, get six feet back, and stay indoors or else you’re selfish, irresponsible, and (by far worst of all) anti-science!”