Eric Boehlert’s newsletter (sign up here) today takes on this new hectoring by the media about Joe Biden continuing to wear masks when he isn’t strictly required to do so. Apparently, many of them are quite offended that anyone would do that for some reason.
Anyway:
It’s slightly jarring that in the wake of the Trump presidency, when Americans were urged to inject bleach as a way to combat Covid-19, that Biden sometimes wearing a cloth facial covering is treated as a pressing news story by the Beltway media. And the recent emphasis isn’t just on Biden. More journalists are setting their judgmental sights on those vaccinated liberals who remain cautious and continue to wear masks, dubbing them “pandemic addicts,” “irrational” and “odd.”
The focus is absurd. I live in what’s considered to be a liberal community, and the idea that vaccinated residents here categorically refuse to part ways with their masks is preposterous. It’s simply not a thing, yet journalists seem obsessed with the idea that it’s a widespread phenomenon among stubborn progressives.
Also, wearing a mask while being fully vaccinated is a personal choice, and it’s a choice that has no effective downside, so why is the press so focused on the topic?
As one Twitter follower of mine wrote after I raised concerns about the media’s weird mask coverage, “So many of us lost love ones this past year or got really sick and they act like there is something nefarious to being cautious for a little while longer.”
Guess where this comes from?
Make no mistake, the media mask fixation comes straight from Fox News, which pressed Biden on his mask wearing practices just hours after he was sworn into office. Tucker Carlson has since declared, “the only people who wear masks outside are zealots and neurotics.”
The ongoing mask coverage comes with an unmistakable whiff of Both Sides journalism, as journalists insist both liberals and conservatives “ignore the science” during the pandemic. But like most media Both Sides equations, this one is comically imbalanced — vaccinated liberals who keep wearing a mask cause no harm to anybody, whereas conservatives who refused to wear a mask during the pandemic helped spread a deadly virus that claimed more than 600,000 American lives.
The most aggressive example of the media finger pointing came from a recent piece in The Atlantic headlined, “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown.” Painting progressive as detached from reality in 2021, and weirdly committed to living their lives by pandemic era protocols, The Atlantic insisted, “diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity.”
And this:
Even as scientific knowledge of COVID-19 has increased, some progressives have continued to embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning.
Yet the anecdotal examples The Atlantic linked to in that paragraph — closing beaches, banning access to playgrounds — were events that took place last year.
Meanwhile, the supposed news hook for the Biden mask fixation is the idea that by occasionally wearing one he’s causing people not to get vaccinated because he’s signaling there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, or that the vaccine doesn’t work. The evidence is overwhelming that the people who refuse to get vaccinated are made up largely of white, conservative, Trump supporters who have treated the pandemic as a partisan issue and who refused to wear masks last year.
Taking their cues from Trump who spent much of 2020 mocking people who wore masks as being “politically correct,” they lean towards thinking the virus was a hoax. The idea that those entrenched Republicans are now looking to a president they uniformly dislike for guidance on the pandemic, and that if he sometimes wears a mask it will deter them from getting vaccinated, defies logic.
It upsets people to see others wearing masks for reasons that elude me. And apparently, it isn’t confined to the Trump worshiping right or the anti-vaxxers.
I agree with Boehlert that the idea that wearing masks upsets the unvaccinated because it makes them feel like they will never, ever be free again is pretty ludicrous. The non-vaccinated are holdouts for completely different reasons, whether it’s vaccine safety, politics/religion or apathy. None of those people are not getting vaccinated because they see masks or other mitigation strategies and figure their lives will never go back to normal so why bother. They are all living their normal lives already, vaccinated or not.
I do think that the apathetic are the most likely to be persuaded to get vaccinated if you make it worth their while because they really don’t give a damn one way or the other. Put a little cash in their pockets and they’ll do it. The rest are going to make up their minds based on very different criteria than if Joe Biden wears a mask when he walks up to the microphone.