The number one single today in 1964 was performed by the oldest number one artist to date:
The number one single today in 1970:
The number one British single today in 1981:
No comments on Presty the DJ for May 9
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The Wisconsin football team is known for its running backs and offensive linemen.
The Badgers are not known for their quarterbacks, perhaps because of what they are known for instead. (Nor are they known for their wide receivers, even though their pass-catchers include such NFL players as Al Toon, Nick Toon, Tony Simmons, Lee Evans, Chris Chambers and Brandon Williams, plus tight end Owen Daniels.)The other thing the Badgers are known for is players that come out of nowhere to become star players, such as walk-on J.J. Watt. In fact, the Badgers have produced far more players on Watt’s level than they have succeeded with recruits highly rated by self-proclaimed recruiting experts.
24/7 Sports decided to spend time …
Looking back at how the top 10 highest-rated quarterbacks in program history fared during their careers at the University of Wisconsin.
Going over the list, there were three big outliers among the group. John Stocco (2002), Scott Tolzien (2006), and Alex Hornibrook (2015) were definite misses by recruiting industry standards.
Stocco checked in as the 22nd highest-rated quarterback in UW history. A low three-star prospect, Stocco was the No. 26 ranked pro-style quarterback in the class of 2002, per the 247sports composite. Stocco was a three-year starter for the Badgers and went 29-7 during his career, which saw him throw for 7,227 yards and 44 touchdowns.
Tolzien spent seven seasons in the NFL. A two-year starter, Tolzien went 21-5 and led Wisconsin to a Big Ten Championship and a Rose Bowl berth in 2010. That year, Tolzien had the most efficient season in school history, completing 72.9 percent of his passes for 2,459 yards and 16 touchdowns to just six interceptions.
Tolzien barely made the cut as a three-star prospect and was the No. 49 ranked pro-style quarterback in the 2006 class.
Hornibrook was a mid-three-star prospect and the No. 34 ranked pro-style quarterback in the 2015 class. His career didn’t finish at the way it started, but he could have been rated higher.
As a redshirt freshman, Hornibrook won the starting job by the start of Big Ten play in 2016. During his three seasons as a starter for the Badgers, Hornibrook went 26-6, including a 2-0 mark in bowl games, which includes the Orange Bowl win over Miami (FL). He threw for 5,438 yards and 47 touchdowns, but did have 33 interceptions.
Here’s how the top 10 quarterback recruits for Wisconsin in the 247sports composite era performed during their careers…
10. TYLER DONOVAN
Tyler Donovan is the only Wisconsin native to land a full scholarship from the Badgers as a quarterback in 247sports composite history.
The Arrowhead grad earned the starting job in 2007 and threw for 2,607 yards and 17 touchdowns. A dual-threat, Donovan also ran for 277 yards and five scores on the ground. That season, Donovan led UW to a 9-4 record and a berth in the Outback Bowl.
Donovan was the ninth-ranked dual-threat quarterback in the class of 2003.
9. DEACON HILL
Deacon Hill won’t arrive at Wisconsin until 2021. The Badgers got a very early commitment from the three-star quarterback last June. Hill had offers from Kansas State and Nevada before giving his pledge to Paul Chryst.
Like Graham Mertz before him, UW offered Hill before he was ever a full-time starter at the varsity level. Hill got the nod at Santa Barbara High School in 2019 and all he did was throw for 3,102 yards and 33 touchdowns to just seven interceptions.
8. JACK COAN
The story is still being written on Jack Coan, but his first season as a full-time starter was a successful one.
Coan completed 69.6 percent of his passes as a junior for 2,727 yards and 18 touchdowns to just five interceptions. Statistically, you could argue Coan had the third-best season in school history behind Russell Wilson in 2011 and Scott Tolzien in 2010. Coan led the Badgers to a 10-4 record, a Big Ten West title, and a Rose Bowl berth.
Coming out of Sayville High School in New York, Coan was the nation’s No. 16 ranked pro-style quarterback per 247sports. He had other offers from Michigan, Miami (FL), Nebraska, and West Virginia among others.
Not on this list are two transfers — Russell Wilson, the best UW quarterback based on his single season after transferring from North Carolina State (his UW quarterback rating: 191.8), and Randy Wright, whose transfer from Notre Dame prompted coach Dave McClain to change his offense from the option to a pro-style offense. The result in Wright’s case was four winning seasons (which had never before happened in Badger history), three bowl games and the program’s first bowl win. The Badgers spent the next decade trying to replace Wright. Also not on this list is Darrell Bevell, who transferred from Northern Arizona to UW, quarterbacking the Badgers to their first Rose Bowl win and their third bowl win in team history.
What is interesting is that three quarterbacks on this list will be on this team by the 2021 season. (Which might be “next season’ depending on what further havoc the coronavirus does to this country.) The Badgers usually (including most of the quarterbacks on this list) have had what is derisively called a “game manager” on this list — someone told to hand off the ball without fumbling and complete safe, short passes.
Matt Zemek of USA Today thinks the Badgers should modify their approach:
If you have followed the past few months of Badgers Wire analysis of Wisconsin football, you know that Super Bowl LIV conveyed a very important message to Paul Chryst and the program at large.
We have discussed all the merits of UW football — the consistency, the dependability, the steadiness, the toughness, the time-tested approach cultivated and sustained by Barry Alvarez for decades. The coaches change, but Wisconsin keeps winning. The Badgers continue to be the best of the Big Ten West. They continue to play in important January bowl games. The program is in a good place. It has remained in a good place for quite some time. The program is doing well.
Yet, if Wisconsin ever does want to make the jump from very good to great — from the upper reaches of college football’s second tier to the very top tier in the sport — we know what has to happen: The Badgers have to be able to throw, and hit, the deep ball with regularity. It is the one true gap (or absence, or deficiency, whichever word you prefer) in the larger identity and profile of Wisconsin football in this golden era for the program, which is now almost 30 years old, dating back to the 1994 Rose Bowl win over UCLA, which got the party started.
This is why the use of Jack Coan and Graham Mertz in 2020 is such an interesting and important point of focus. We wrote about this point when explaining how Steve Spurrier used to juggle quarterbacks at Florida. We also wrote on a broader level about Wisconsin needing to have a Plan B when Plan A wasn’t entirely sufficient, chiefly against opponents such as Ohio State. Wisconsin could not hit the deep ball in second halves against the Buckeyes. The UW offense bogged down and wasn’t able to rescue itself with quick strikes against Ohio State.
How fitting it was, then, that in Super Bowl LIV, the Kansas City Chiefs — stymied by Ohio State’s Nick Bosa and the rest of the San Francisco 49ers — broke free from Bosa’s physical prowess by hitting the long pass. The Chiefs’ ability to finally hit deep balls ignited their fourth-quarter surge and led them to victory.
The 49ers had the most physically imposing team in the NFL this season. Green Bay Packer fans don’t need an explanation of that point. Much like the Nick Saban Alabama teams of the early 2010s, the 49ers were the team opponents simply couldn’t beat with smashmouth ball. The 49ers were the best embodiment of it, so opponents would not win by playing the same style. This is why Gus Malzahn of Auburn has had so much success against Saban: He hasn’t tried to beat Saban at his own game. One could say the same for Hugh Freeze when he coached at Ole Miss and beat Saban multiple times. They didn’t try to beat an opponent at that opponent’s foremost point of strength. They knew they had to use speed to counter Alabama’s brute strength. They knew they had to throw downfield to change the equation.
Yes, the Badgers do not have a Patrick Mahomes on their team. They once had Russell Wilson, but Russell Wilsons don’t grow on trees. To be sure, UW doesn’t have the superstar QB who makes it a lot easier to throw down the field. Nevertheless, against Nick Bosa of Ohio State and the rest of a fire-breathing defense, the Kansas City Chiefs changed the equation by hitting long passes.
Super Bowl LIV reminded Paul Chryst that if he really wants to beat Ohio State and take the next step as a program, completing deep passes has to be part of the picture.
The Badgers need to dig the long ball.
One wonders if, contrary to his claim, Zemek has ever watched UW football. At what point have the Badgers ever been a throwing team, let alone a team that dials long distance on a regular basis?
Why? Because the current approach has worked for sustained success. Since the 1993 season, the Badgers have had two losing seasons. The last time UW didn’t play in a bowl game was the 2001 season. They also have played in more Big Ten championship games than any other team, including even Ohio State. (UW’s six championship games are six more than Michigan, which must be making Bo Schembechler roll over in his grave.)
Being able to run the ball keeps the ball away from the other team’s offense. This more often than not works unless you’re facing a team that can score from anywhere (say, Ohio State), or stops the Badgers from running as they want (i.e. the four Big Ten championship losses), or if UW puts the ball on the ground or in the wrong hands too often (which is a formula for nearly team to lose).
Until the Badgers get a head coach from outside the current program, they will be a run-first and run-second program.
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Robert E. Wright starts with a classic pop culture reference:
The phrase “to jump the shark” at first referenced the point at which a television program started to lose its moorings, and its audience. Specifically, it referred to the episode of Happy Days (1974-84, ABC) when “the Fonz” (played by Henry Winkler, now better known for his role as an acting teacher on HBO’s Barry) jumped over a shark tank on water skis. Ratings for the show did stay up after the episode because there were only 3 or 4 channels available back then. Many fans, including this then eight-year-old, however, became mere viewers after that episode.
Today, though, the phrase has expanded to include any turning point eventually ending in disaster.
Lots of folks, from politicians to used car salesmen, are trying to calm fears associated with the COVID-19 pandemic by harkening back to America’s glorious past. “We” can get through this, they say, because “we” successfully traversed worse travails. The problem with that analysis is the “we” has changed. Yes, America suffered invasion and the destruction of the national capital in 1814, a long, bloody Civil War, and so forth. But the Americans who preserved or prevailed then are all long gone, as are many of the nation’s most important institutions.
Yes, some people who lived through the Great Depression and World War II are still alive but they are hardly the same people they once were. And right now they should all be indoors wearing gloves and N95s, or those gas masks that we all bought after 9-11, a terrorist attack that most of those alive today survived. But did we really do a good job responding to 9-11? We lost a lot of civil liberties and treasure fighting unnecessary wars and still suffer through ridiculous rituals at airports that protect no one.
America’s currency and debt are in a similar position to post-shark Happy Days. Nobody really likes it anymore but decent alternatives hardly abound. Solid currencies like the Swiss franc are too small, leaving only the currencies of a deeply divided Europe or authoritarian China as serious competitors.
The level of the national debt in absolute, per capita, and percentage of GDP terms, which can be tracked here, frightens many. In round figures, the national debt is $24 trillion, or $72,000 per person (man, woman, child) or $192,000 per taxpayer. That is 110 percent of GDP, the highest since the World War II era. And that is just the money borrowed to fund operations. Other liabilities, like Social Security and Medicare, are estimated at $77 trillion.
But the real problem is the loss of what Bill White called America’s Fiscal Constitution, a set of borrowing and budget rules first developed by Alexander Hamilton, America’s first Treasury Secretary. The idea was that the federal government should keep a lot of “dry powder” so that it could borrow to fight wars, purchase territory, and respond to shocks. To do that, it had to run budget surpluses when peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice, and hence prosperity, prevailed. But basically since World War II, America has remained at war, some shooting, some cold, some necessary, but many, like the “wars” on drugs and poverty, concocted and counterproductive. Chronic deficits resulted.
Instead of imbibing the lessons of Richard Salsman’s The Political Economy of Public Debt, America’s policymakers and pundits ignore the national debt, or dismiss it with facile, and long since exploded, myths like “we owe it to ourselves” or “we can’t default on it because we can always print money to pay it.”
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, many held that America might muddle along for decades more, unloved but the only serious TV show left on air. But the only thing more disappointing than the irrational response of many American governments to the pandemic has been the way that Americans have acquiesced to the suspension of their civil and economic liberties on very flimsy grounds.
At 40:30 of this video, leading epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski puts it clearly: “I think, people in the United States … are more docile than they should be. People should talk with their politicians and ask them to explain” the rationale for business shutdowns, shelter-in-place orders, and other medieval responses to what he, and many other epidemiologists not on the government payroll, believe is just another annual “pandemic” that kills those with weak immune systems. The government’s response is actually making matters worse by slowing herd immunity.
As I recently argued elsewhere, America’s educational system has not prepared us for the government power grab because it does not create enough Emersonian independent thinkers or, frankly, even adult thinkers. Due to the extreme Left bias of higher education, many of America’s college graduates remain intellectually infantilized to the point that they can do little more than Tweet ignorant hate at any idea that does not accord with Progressive mantras.
While some older Democrats, like the aforementioned Bill White, and Peter Schuck, author of Why Government Fails So Often, are rational beings worthy of the attention and respect of all thinking beings, many young progressives appear completely rigid between the ears. They want less economic activity to “save the planet” but cannot cheer death or the pain that lockdowns inflict upon the poor. While fewer miles traveled by automobile must warm their hearts by presumably cooling the planet, the thought of all the extra hot water needed to wash hands a dozen times a day must sting a bit, along with the fact that plastic straws and grocery bags are far safer during pandemics than purportedly “green” alternatives.
Strangest of all have been progressive calls for their archenemy, President Trump, to behave in a more authoritarian manner! The statist assumption that “only government can save us” is so deeply ingrained on the Left and Right that rational calls to vitiate the economic crisis with voluntarism have not gained traction.
And don’t even get me started on the Right’s economic nationalism. Pure lunacy, like calls for AUTARKY (no international flows, like pre-Perry Japan!), now attracts serious attention. And why not? Didn’t we all “learn” in college that some French and German philosophers were right about there being no truth, just power and rhetoric? Strangely, though, the descendants of the apostles of postmodernism have no trouble seeing the truth in destroying the economic lives of most Americans because some unrealistic models claimed between 10,000 and 100 million people would otherwise die.
Is America about to jump the shark? Maybe it already has. Or maybe, unlike the Fonz, it won’t even clear the tank, the victim of the weight of its own inane policies. All that is clear is that somebody is going to have to pay for this fiasco, and that somebody is “us.”
Inequality is the price we pay for civilization. Property rights, inheritance customs and unequal gains from technological innovation have long divided us into haves and have-nots. Because stability favors such disparities, it usually took powerful shocks to flatten them. The collapse of states wiped out elites. The World Wars slashed returns on capital and imposed heavy-handed regulation and confiscatory taxation. Communist regimes equalized by force and fiat.
The greatest plagues also turned into levelers, by killing so many that labor became dear and land cheap. For a while, the rich became less rich and the poor less poor: Europe after the Black Death is the best-known example. Catastrophic pandemics joined systemic collapse, total war and transformative revolution — the four great horsemen of apocalyptic leveling.
Will the coronavirus crisis be such a leveler? It won’t act as a Malthusian check: mortality will mercifully be far too low to drive up wages. But progressives will seize on this crisis to push for redistributive reform, perhaps all the way to a Green New Deal. Failing that, misery and discontent might foment enough unrest to upend the status quo.
But not quite yet. Four great stabilizers stand in the way of democratic socialism or social collapse.
The most basic one is affluence: no society with a per capita GDP of more than a few thousand dollars has ever descended into breakdown or civil war. At some point, it seems, even the dispossessed have too much to lose, and well-endowed authorities are hard to dislodge.
The social safety net comes a close second. A century ago, shaken by the mobilizations and mutinies of World War One and the sudden threat of Bolshevism, European states ramped up investment in welfare schemes. America soon followed suit in order to survive the Great Depression. Revolution dropped off the menu. It turns out that welfare schemes don’t need to be Scandinavian-sized to keep the radicals at bay.
The torrent of seemingly free money created by central banks adds a third great stabilizer. By promising to bail out businesses and keep the unemployed afloat without reviving inflation, aggressive quantitative easing takes the shine off calls for punitive wealth taxes to foot the bill. This particular genie would seem hard to put back into the bottle: the Great Recession taught policymakers what was possible and at what low cost, just as the Great Depression had taught them what to avoid. We are now able to choose which bits of history to repeat.
Finally, science will act as a conservative force. This might seem odd, given our inclination to view it as a relentless driver of open-ended change. Yet technology is already widening existing inequalities, by separating the work-from-home crowd from exposed essential workers, and remotely taught students with reliable internet access from those without.
What is more, science has the potential to bail out the plutocracy even more reliably than any government or central bank could hope to do. The sooner labs and Big Pharma deliver effective treatments and vaccines, the sooner we can revert to some version of business as usual — with all the entrenched inequalities it entails. The odds are good. The SARS-CoV-2 genome was sequenced and made available just a month after the first reported cases in Wuhan. More than 1,000 drug trials are already underway. Nothing like this would have been possible even a decade ago.
This is not a coincidence. The great stabilizers have been creeping up on the great levelers. When pre-modern states fell, their elites were doomed. The United States is infinitely more resilient, and even if it wasn’t its richest would have other places to go. In the West, plausible revolutionary movements have gone the way of the dodo; and even if they hadn’t they would be blunted by mass affluence.
Nor are we in any meaningful way united against a shared threat. Notwithstanding the current surge in martial rhetoric — with Donald Trump posing as a ‘wartime president’ — our lived experiences are exactly the opposite of those fostered by total war. We are asked to stay home, not to venture out; we work less, not more; we are distancing, not thrown together in fox holes or armaments factories. The solidarity that shaped the Greatest Generation will remain a distant memory. And unlike in the aftermath of much more lethal pandemics, labor will be cheap: 30 million unemployment benefit claims will make sure of that. The four horsemen of leveling are set to continue their deep slumber.
In the past, the rich weathered a series of storms. The War of Independence was hard on wealthy loyalists. Slaveowners’ fortunes evaporated during the Civil War. The Great Depression delivered a double blow, first by wiping out investments and then through the ascent of unions and high taxes during the New Deal. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, capitalists were trapped, compelled to submit to unprecedented levels of regulation and taxation. Decades of relative equality followed.
Much has changed since. Deregulation, tax reform, financialization, globalization and automation have created potent means of both creating and concentrating wealth. As a result, the Great Recession failed to leave a lasting mark on the One Percent, and inequality stubbornly clung to the heights it had scaled. By acting in concert, the four great stabilizers promise more of the same.
The current crisis would have to spiral out of control to sap their strength — if, say the virus somehow foiled the efforts of the scientific community, or the economy slid into a drawn-out depression. If history is any guide, it would take a worst-case scenario for COVID-19 to bring about genuine leveling.
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Today in 1954, the BBC banned Johnny Ray’s “Such a Night” after complaints about its “suggestiveness.”
The Brits had yet to see Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis.
The number one British single today in 1955:
Today in 1965, what would now be called a “video” was shot in London:
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“We’re opening up our country again,” President Donald Trump told reporters [Tuesday] before departing for Arizona. He also helpfully clarified that operating without shutdowns doesn’t mean citizens do nothing to prevent the spread of infection. In response to a question on the latest virus mortality guess floated in the national media, the President said, “we’re doing a lot of mitigation. And, frankly, when the people report back, they’re going to be social distancing and they’re going to be washing their hands, and they’re going to be doing the things that you’re supposed to do.”
Governors in places like New Jersey and New York are still locking down much of society, despite a flattened virus curve. But nationwide the lockdowners are losing public support. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports today via email:
Today’s Number of the Day presented by Ballotpedia shows that 49% of voters nationwide now fear the economic threat from the coronavirus more than the health threat. Forty-five percent (45%) take the opposite view and are more worried about the health threat. These numbers reflect a significant change over the past month. In late March, by a 55% to 38% margin, voters were more concerned about the health threat…
These results are consistent with other data showing that people are looking to loosen some of the restrictions. Voters nationwide are evenly divided as to whether the lockdowns should continue. And, they have come to recognize that it’s not simply a question of stay home to stay safe or go out and get sick. Voters recognize there are significant mental and physical health risks associated with ongoing lockdowns. Those who know the latest data are more likely to support easing lockdown restrictions.
Even in New Jersey the risks and costs are manifest. On Friday Tracey Tully reported in the New York Times on Jean Wickham and her family, who live in the country’s second-richest state:
The Wickhams’ minivan was one of thousands of vehicles that snaked as far as the eye could see one morning last week in Egg Harbor, N.J., 10 miles west of Atlantic City. The promise of fresh produce and a 30-pound box of canned food, pasta and rice from a food bank drew so many cars that traffic was snarled for nearly a mile in three directions, leading to five accidents, the police said.
“I’m just afraid I’m going to lose my house,” said Ms. Wickham, who lives in Egg Harbor. “I feel like a failure right now.”
… Lines at a food pantry in Summit, an affluent commuter town in northern New Jersey, stretch around the block every Tuesday evening. A food bank on the Jersey Shore has started a text service to give new users a discreet way to seek help.
Significantly west of the New York Times, the similarly-named York News-Times covers an area in eastern Nebraska. Melanie Wilkinson describes a similar phenomenon:
The Food Bank of Lincoln and members of the Nebraska National Guard distributed free food to York area residents last Friday…
The need was quite apparent as the line of cars stretched for blocks and blocks as more than 220 households received food…While the Food Bank provides this service in York on a monthly basis, this latest food event was met with much greater response than past distributions.
More news from Washington brings hope that a revival will soon be permitted nationwide. Andrew Restuccia reports in the Journal:
Vice President Mike Pence said the Trump administration is having internal conversations about phasing out the White House’s coronavirus task force…
The task force’s doctors will continue to advise President Trump on his handling of the pandemic, administration officials said.
Another optimistic note today comes via email from Dan Clifton of Strategas Research:
The political debate about whether states should re-open is blocking out the facts that states, run by governors of both parties, are opening up their economies gradually. This is not just a few Republican states, and it is happening faster than the consensus expects. Governors of both parties see declining cases, falling tax revenues, hospitals with spare capacity, and restless businesses and consumers. The addition of new therapeutics and the scaling up of testing have also helped build momentum for the re-opening.
Writing from Dallas this week, Don Luskin of Trend Macrolytics reports: “Joy and renewal are palpably in the air. We wish all our clients and friends the patience and good health to endure what we hope are the final throes of the Covid-19 crisis, and the resiliency to enjoy a speedy re-opening.”
He adds that as economies reopen, “The early adopters will be the healthy young, who have probably chafed the most under the boring and repressive rigors of lockdown, and who – it is now becoming known – are largely invulnerable to Covid-2019 anyway.” Mr. Luskin predicts:
FOCI (fear of Covid infection) will be replaced by FOMO (fear of missing out).
Readers have by now learned to be skeptical of predictions about the virus, but are no doubt hoping Mr. Luskin is right on target.
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The number one single today in 1966 was presumably played on the radio on days other than Mondays:
Today is the anniversary of the last Beatles U.S. single release, “Long and Winding Road” (the theme music of the Schenk Middle School eighth-grade Dessert Dance about this time in 1979):
The number one album today in 1977 was the Eagles’ “Hotel California”:
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Michael Smith:
This COVID-19 pandemic response is what happens when progressive policies collide with natural law, the natural law being that viruses exist, they mutate and they infect humans — all the time, every day.
“Stay at home” policies aren’t a medical procedure, they are behavioral controls that delay the inevitable — unless and until medical science catches up to the virus.
Think about this — these policies offer Americans a dichotomy — allegedly designed to quell fear while also inciting it. For a majority of Americans, these policies convert rational, reasonable fear into irrational and unreasonable fear … and do not dismiss that there are people who hold totally reasonable fears about contracting COVID-19 due to their own personal risk assessments. I do not deny that.
But it sure seems the policies to which we have been subjected have been based on many contradictions.
I’ve said it many times and am seeing it play out every day — reasonable fear plus bad logic equals crippling unease but starting from a basis of unreasonable, irrational fear plus bad logic equals disaster.
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Although both groups live in the same country, conservatives and liberals in the U.S. do not seem to be experiencing the same COVID-19 pandemic. Liberals are very concerned about the disease; conservatives are comparatively apathetic.
This fact is puzzling because a long history of research in social psychology suggests that conservatives ought to be more worried than liberals about threatening diseases. Indeed, decades of research ties conservatism to threat sensitivity more broadly, and meta-analyses of dozens of studies reveal that conservatism is higher in societies with greater levels of disease threat.
So why on earth don’t conservatives seem especially threatened by a worldwide pandemic? In a set of three studies, my colleagues and I investigated this question. We considered two possibilities. First, might conservatives actually be less threatened by the current pandemic? After all, the pandemic has thus far tended to hit more liberal regions, like New York, harder than more conservative regions. It is therefore possible that conservative and liberal differences are driven by a divergence in actual experiences with COVID-19. Perhaps the roles would have been reversed if the original U.S. epicenter had been Houston instead of New York City.
Two of the three counties that have the most cases in Wisconsin are Milwaukee and Dane counties. Perhaps instead of calling Milwaukee and Madison the Axis of Evil, I should call them the Axis of Disease.
Or, perhaps conservatives and liberals are viewing the pandemic through different ideological lenses – lenses that bias their perceptions of the pandemic’s potential threat. Decades of research indicate that people often see what they hope to see. It is possible, then, that liberals’ and conservatives’ political commitments have shaped their beliefs about the threat of COVID-19. For example, it could be that Trump’s initial casual attitude toward the virus created a motivation among Republicans to downplay the severity of the threat, or created a motivation among Democrats to amplify the seriousness of the threat. Thus, the ideological match between pre-existing political goals and perceptions of the pandemic’s effects on those goals, rather than differences in actual experiences and observations of the consequences of the virus, may explain the apparent disagreement about its severity.
To investigate, we created and factor analyzed measurements of how threatening people perceived COVID-19 to be, desired political outcomes related to COVID-19 (such as the degree to which they wanted the government to enforce social distancing), and the extent to which they had been affected by COVID-19. Participants also completed standard measurements of political ideology. Using modern mediational analyses, we examined whether the relationship between political ideology and perceived COVID-19 threat was better explained by participants’ political lens (how their pre-existing political beliefs interfaced with COVID-19) than by their actual experiences (how they have been affected directly by COVID-19).
The results were striking. We found little evidence that different experiences with COVID-19 account for liberals’ and conservatives’ different views of the pandemic. Instead, participants’ desired political outcomes more consistently accounted for ideological differences in disease threat perception. The figure below reports the indirect effects for both political beliefs and experiences across our three studies. These indirect effects are measurements of the degree to which the relationship between political ideology and perceived COVID-19 threat is accounted for by (a) desired political outcomes related to COVID-19 or (b) participants’ exposure to or experiences with the effects of the disease. As clearly indicated, it is participants’ political desires – and not their level of experience or exposure – that account for the different threats liberals and conservatives assign to COVID-19.
What kinds of ideological goals were most important in explaining conservatives’ relative apathy toward COVID-19? Out of six, the strongest effects emerged for goals that involved government-imposed social distancing rules. Conservatives oppose the government telling them when they can or cannot leave their homes; liberals support such policies. Because a threatening disease might validate government interventions that conservatives dislike, conservatives appear motivated to downplay the severity. Or conversely, because a threatening disease might validate government interventions that liberals do like, liberals seem motivated to magnify the threat. Note that our results cannot say which of these is happening in greater measure.
Thus, it is these ideological lenses – and not direct experiences – that appear to explain better liberals’ and conservatives’ different views of the pandemic. In a sense, the proverbial cart may be driving the proverbial horse: rather than the actual threat of the disease influencing political policy preferences, political policy preferences are influencing perceptions of disease threat.
Our findings suggest that this pandemic might drive an already-divided nation even further apart. However, our results also offer a path by which the pandemic could ultimately bring ideological groups closer together. We found that the general effect of ideology on perceived COVID-19 threat significantly decreased at higher levels of experience with COVID-19. Conservatives view the disease as less threatening than liberals, but this difference shrinks among participants who have been more impacted by the disease. Thus, although a lack of experience did not account for conservatives’ lower threat perceptions, the more experience they had, the less their own ideological goals mattered. As the effects of the disease grow, then, ideological groups’ attitudes toward the disease may start to merge.
Unless they don’t. Conservatives, not liberals, have been pointing out far more often that only one-fifth of Wisconsinites who have tested positive for COVID-19 have been ill enough to be hospitalized, and that the death rate of COVID-19 among those who have tested positive is 4 percent, and likely to drop as testing expands and more people who test positive for COVID-19 but haven’t had symptoms are found. A large number of conservatives seem to view COVID-19 as something we may have to learn to live with, while the prevailing liberal view seems to be that COVID-19 is something that must be fought at any price. (As in, according to one conservative, $890,560 per COVID-19 diagnoses, and $21.57 million per COVID-19 death.)
It shouldn’t be a surprise that political worldviews would affect people’s view of the pandemic. People who believe in an expansive (and expanding) role of government in people’s lives would naturally see this as the perfect opportunity to control people’s movements and behavior. There are some conservatives who believe this as well, but only from their own views of what government should control. The libertarian view is that government needs to stay out of our lives beyond a bare minimum, and certainly stay-at-home orders are not anyone’s idea of “the bare minimum.”
There is another missing component here. Conservatives are more likely than liberals to be religious, and to have church (which has been mostly banned nationwide) as a central part of their lives. Religious people should believe that God is in charge regardless of what happens here on Earth, and that regardless of what happens to ourselves or our loved ones there is a better world after this irredeemably flawed one. Liberals (and, I hate to observe, church leadership) seem to lack faith.
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Daniel Greenfield starts with the perspective of skepticism about the media (which is a reasonable attitude) but then …
Even while the media is blaring stories about the abuse of the Payroll Protection Plan loans from the Small Business Administration, its own industry took millions in loans and wants billions more.
Unlike many small businesses which were forced to shut down because of the lockdown, the media has been wrongly listed as ‘essential’ and exempted from the shutdowns, but that hasn’t stopped it from taking money that should have been used to compensate small business owners who can’t stay open.
It should be noted that “the media has been wrongly listed as ‘essential’ and exempted from the shutdowns” is, in order, an opinion and a statement that varies depending on where you are.
Even when the media operations cashing in on the SBA loans aren’t anyone’s idea of a small business.
The Seattle Times maxed out its PPP loan with a $10 million payout. The Seattle Times is not only Washington State’s largest daily, but its parent company, the Seattle Times Company, owns two other papers, and had, as recently as 3 years ago, put out 7 papers. It also owned multiple newspapers in Maine which it sold off for over $200 million. It had two printing plants, one of which it sold. The Rotary Offset Press, which it still owns, continues to print a variety of magazines and newspapers.
But while the Seattle Times is, like the New York Times, a multi-generational family property, the McClatchy Company owns 49.5% of voting stock and 70.6% of voting stock in the Seattle Times Company. McClatchy has dozens of papers and had revenues of over $800 million in 2018.
While McClatchy has operated at a loss and filed for Chapter 11, it’s not a small business. Neither is the hedge fund likely to run it which is partially backed by, among others, CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest and most politically correct pension fund in the country.
Is this really a small business?
Despite the façade of family ownership, national chains have owned much of the Seattle paper business since the Great Depression with McClatchy taking over from Knight Ridder. Even if you ignore all the wizards behind the Emerald City paper’s curtain, the Seattle Times Company has 849 employees.
How was the Seattle Times able to max out the SBA’s PPP loan? Double and triple standards.If you deal in fresh fruit and have over 100 employees, according to the SBA, you’re not a small business. If you supply toys, you’re limited to 150 employees. But if you’re a newspaper publisher, you can have up to 1,000 employees and still be considered a small business.
That’s how a company that owns 3 papers, a printing plant, and its silent partner is one of the largest news publishers in America, was eligible to grab loans intended to keep small businesses afloat.
The Seattle Times wasn’t unique among the media in seizing loans meant for shuttered small businesses.
The Tampa Bay Times got an $8.5 million loan, close to the max. The Times Publishing Company also puts out 10 papers, a few magazines, and Politifact, a site which claims to ‘fact check’ politicians, but frequently makes false claims, puts out spam, and smears conservatives.
The Company is owned by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which is funded by leftist billionaires like George Soros and Pierre Omidyar.
And just to make matters worse, the Poynter Institute, which is officially a non-profit, also got a stimulus loan of $737,400 to cover its coronavirus “business losses”.
Poynter notes that as, “a nonprofit with under 60 employees, Poynter qualified for the loan.” But Poynter’s documents suggest that its newspaper business had $123 million in revenues with assets of $43 million.
That’s not a small business.
The Tampa Bay Times and its shady operations, the intermingling of non-profits and for-profits, is already suspect on its own. It should not have been taking money meant for small businesses.
But the media has been eager to pig out on small business loans even as it attacks public companies that took PPP loans. Axios, a media venture by Politico bigwigs, with around 200 employees, funded by venture capital and investment firms, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood tycoon with a net worth of $750 million, and NBCUniversal, scored a $5 million PPP loan.
But this obscene piggery isn’t enough for the media which wants a much bigger exemption.
Senator Maria Cantwell, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and Senator John Kennedy dispatched a letter urging a waiver on the affiliation rule “which restricts assistance to companies owned or controlled by larger entities.” This would potentially allow huge multi-billion-dollar conglomerates like Gannett to raid money intended for small businesses even as they lobby politicians to shut those businesses down.
The senators falsely claimed that keeping the media going was “essential to public health”.
Affiliation waivers would lift the 1,000-employee limit and allow newspapers owned by national chains to apply for loans as if they were small businesses. It’s the equivalent of having every Starbucks outlet claim that it’s just a small business serving the local community and won’t pass the money upward.
The media has been shaming other corporations that took PPP loans, yet it is entirely without shame.
There ought to be no more sanctimonious lectures about corporate bailouts from Democrats who want to bail out billion-dollar corporations while small business owners can’t get inside the front door. If affiliation rules are waived for the media, Gannett’s thousand plus newspapers would be ready to raid the SBA for loans that would likely never be repaid, while justifying the looting by arguing that the media is suffering because small businesses can’t afford to take out as many ads in local papers as before.
The media has already managed to loot at least $23.5 million meant for small businesses. Affiliation waivers would turn PPP loans into a bailout for media conglomerates that would be worth billions.
The media has already been allowed to operate while actual small businesses were shut down, even though there’s been a coronavirus infection spike in the media which, as far as we know, killed several people.
Evidence?
It’s used its megaphone to push for more shutdowns of local businesses as non-essential even as it demands the right to raid the money intended for those businesses to fund its massive operations.
Enough.
National media chains on the verge of bankruptcy want to exploit small business loans intended for coronavirus relief to keep their broken business model going for another few years before they fold.
The PPP loan program was not designed as a bailout for media giants and their pension fraud.
The Seattle Times, the Tampa Bay Times, Poynter, and Axios ought to be pressured into returning the money they took. And while that may never happen, any effort by politicians to apply affiliation waivers to the media ought to be fought as an obscene cash grab from small businesses to lefty corporations.
It is a good question to ask why businesses of five to 10 employees haven’t been able to give PPP loans while much larger “small” businesses have.
To say, though, that every media outlet is the same is false. To assert that no one needs reporters delving into what their local governments are doing with their tax dollars is ignorant and foolish.
On Giving Tuesday yesterday the Poynter Institute posted:
Today on #GivingTuesdayNow we humbly urge you to consider a gift to support the journalists in your community working tirelessly and at personal risk to help you navigate the COVID-19 health and economic crisis. We are grateful for their skill in providing useful, reliable information about all aspects of the pandemic in these times of confusion and social stress. We need them to continue to tell the stories of the sick, the dying, the health care heroes and those working to move us forward. The value of this journalism is immense.
Your dollars, if you can swing it, are deeply appreciated, particularly given the economic pressures faced by local news companies.
But how about something even better? Don’t just give. Engage.
Buy a subscription to your local news website or newspaper. Become a sustaining member of the local public radio or television station, or your favorite nonprofit news website. If you have the option to patronize an advertiser who spends money with a local news source, please consider. You know what’s better than journalism supporters? Customers.
When the audience has skin in the game, there is an implicit compact with the journalists that together we can help improve a community. Such engagement runs deeper than just the money. We’ve long said journalism helps us participate in democracy.
When the coronavirus hit, local news organizations were already at-risk with “underlying health conditions.” The fragmentation and even evaporation of advertising revenue long before the pandemic forced significant retrenchment and left the local news industry with an uncertain future.
With revenue in freefall, publishers were forced to significantly cut costs, including news coverage, while asking the audience to pay more for the product. That’s a hard balancing act, for sure.
A byproduct of the tension has been an unhealthy indifference. According to a study by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, 86% of Americans believe in the value of local news, yet only 20%paid for a subscription or membership to a local news organization. Even those who say they value journalism are becoming bystanders, and in the process settling for a weak sauce of coverage, at times, from their preferred local news source.
The Knight study found more than 60% of Americans believe their community news sources aren’t doing enough to keep an eye on local officials. They want more coverage of education, drug addiction and housing.
A report last year by the nonprofit education news site Chalkbeat said there were no full-time education beat writers in locales as big and complicated as Newark or throughout the communities of Silicon Valley. Might not more paying customers demand better?
Today’s newsroom leaders have a deeply difficult task in covering their communities with substantially fewer journalists than before. But how the remaining resources do get deployed is a choice.
Combine your patronage with engagement — write letters, leave comments, attend events, call in story tips — and you become part of the equation in making the choices mean the most for your community.
The coverage of coronavirus by local journalists has struck a blow against indifference. Today we recognize the exceptional energy, relevance and sophistication that journalists have brought to the crisis and its consequences. Every member of a local news company is serving their community. …
An enduring theme of American journalism is that it helps move us off the sidelines, get involved, demand action. In these confusing times of crisis, it’s useful to remember that journalism is part of the democracy toolkit, and we need not feel powerless.
I wish I could endorse 100 percent of that statement. But too many in the media refuse to admit that their previous work might not have been connecting with their readers. (Recall my list of reporter engagement, or lack thereof, where they work.) The problems of the media are not merely due to shrinking advertising base or corporate ownership, even though advertising has been shrinking thanks to the Internet, and the managers of big media companies don’t always make the right decisions.
There has, for one thing, been too much commentary (in print or online, particularly on Twitter) from reporters whose commentary brings into question their objectivity. The corollary is the arrogance of some reporters who bristle whenever they are questioned by their readers. (That may be more a personality flaw than a flaw in the profession. Everyone needs thicker skins, including reporters, who you’d think would be immune to the slings and arrows of contrary comment.)
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The number one British album today in 1972 was a Tyrannosaurus Rex double album, the complete title of which is “My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair … But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows”/”Prophets, Seers & Sages: The Angels of the Ages.” Really.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 