Michael Socolow’s eye-popping and depressing post-election column at Nieman Lab—“What should journalists do when the facts don’t matter?”—should serve as a warning. He succinctly points to the reality that fact-based journalism has little impact on people’s beliefs, let alone outcomes of major political elections. It’s a longstanding problem, actually.
His piece essentially boils down to this: Despite readily available information, people will still choose to believe things that validate their own attitudes, values and beliefs even when valid, evidence-based information contradicts their beliefs. It’s called confirmation bias.
We vividly experienced this during the global pandemic. Despite the rocky start by local, state and federal health officials, much of the health information provided by experts was accurate, and even more surprisingly it held true well after the pandemic subsided. Masks work to blunt the spread of COVID. Social distancing also helps. The elderly and health compromise are most at risk. Vaccines save lives. And so on.
The pandemic’s deadliness—more than 7 million people died, with more than 1 million of these deaths in just the U.S.—was consistently minimized by anti-vaxxers, naysayers, anti-maskers and others, mostly on the right end of the political spectrum, who simply thought information from the news media and the government, gleaned from scientific research, should be tossed aside so they could “do their own research.”
We’re not sure how a truck driver from the deep South—or a former boxer and criminal defense lawyer from Reno—can come to opposite conclusions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention without the requisite funding to conduct double-blind trials, but that’s the kind of thinking that was happening all over the place.
It did not end well for some. There’s a morbid website—last updated in June 2023—devoted to documenting anti-vaxxers who died of COVID-19 or ended up intubated for refusing to get vaccinated.
Nevertheless, misinformation reigns in all manner of issues that ignite passion.
We saw this locally with the defeat of WC-1, which would have extended designated funding for local libraries. While some attribute its failure to the measure being poorly written, those who followed our reporting on the ballot question should have been aware of what was at stake.
Kelsey Penrose’s July article clearly outlined what would happen if WC-1 did not pass. Library Director Jeff Scott, true to his word, confirmed budget cuts are on the horizon after WC-1 was voted down.
Some are now gleefully propagating misinformation about the measure. “I really hated to but I voted against the bond because it would raise property taxes and affordable housing is our biggest problem right now,” Michael Watson wrote on Facebook. His comment is false, and a few people told him so. Did he bother to edit or remove it? No.
Another asserted his opinion of libraries as facts. Serial losing mayoral candidate Eddie Lorton exhibited dopey thinking when he wrote, “We don’t want any more drag queen story hours and we already pay enough.”
He too was informed his property tax bill will remain the same, regardless of WC-1’s defeat. And drag queen story hour at libraries had already ceased well before Election Day, despite Lorton’s implication that these events have continued.
So yes, facts do matter, but the impact of conveying facts has been severely diminished. Socolow’s column ends with this:
“Ultimately, the First Amendment protects the right of journalists to report, publish and broadcast, but it can’t force citizens to read, listen, absorb or learn. In that sense, journalism didn’t fail us—we failed journalism.”
We will continue to persevere with fact-based journalism, and we will correct our errors when we get our reporting wrong. But we’re under no illusions that doing so will make most Renoites enamored with us. It’s often the opposite.
That said, we’re grateful to our paying subscribers for helping us do what we’re doing and, we hope, finding value in local journalism that strives to get it right. Without you, we’d be finished.
– Bob Conrad & Kristen Hackbarth
