Coronavirus coverage: Fake TV smiles just make things worse

The fake smile. It’s painful enough when someone’s trying to sell you something, but it’s downright rude when it’s offered during a time of crisis, frustration or grief.

I first noticed this phenomenon on the local news maybe 30 years ago. We were about to go through our 20th day of 100-degree temperatures in a month (or something like that). Everyone was miserable. Yet there was Mr. Smiley Weather Dude, acting like he’d just won a million bucks in the lottery. I turned the TV off.

I haven’t watched the local news in decades, mainly because I got tired of shallow, smirking heads delivering news of car crashes, apartment fires and government scandals between tasteless smiles and vapid banter.

Oh, the incongruity!

They might as well start singing, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”

No one likes bad news, but when it comes from smiling, laughing messengers, it’s that much harder to take. It gives the impression that, “You poor saps have to go through this, but we don’t care. We’re just fine here!”

It’s like a punch to the gut. Rubbing salt in the wound. Adding insult to injury. Pick your well-worn cliché. Maybe you should take fiddling lessons so you can practice in case Rome burns again, Smiley Anchor.

Default-happy seems to be demeanor of choice for TV journalists delivering the news. And others, too. Videos show flight attendants with plastered-on smiles demonstrating how to evacuate a jumbo jet in the event of a crash: as though it would be some big party. Commercials for the latest obscenely priced designer medication show carefree families frocking in the park; meanwhile, in the background, an announcer calmly ticks off potential side effects: “May cause irritable bowel, sweating, constipation, fever, heartburn, psychosomatic anxiety, brain hemorrhage, alien abduction or, in extreme cases, even death.”

(The very idea of drugs companies paying millions to advertise already-overpriced drugs to people who can’t afford them sickens me. But that’s another story.)

At least pretend to care

This brings us to the coronavirus tragedy. And yes, it’s not just a “crisis,” it’s a tragedy. People are angry. They’re angry about being put out of work. They’re angry about being stuck at home. And they’re scared about not being able to pay their bills or that they — or their loved ones — might contract the disease. And they’re hurting because people they know are stuck in a COVID-19 quarantine. Or dead.

Yes, safety measures are necessary, but telling us we have to stay away from our loved ones or stay home from work with a smile on your face makes it seem like you don’t give a rat’s ass. You might say we’re “all in this together,” but if you still have a job and you haven’t been infected that comes off as disingenuous and cruel. Especially if you don’t wipe that insipid smile off your face. At least try to pretend you care.

If you’re a journalist, it’s easy to numb yourself to the tragedies you’re reporting. And if you’re a government official, you probably have no clue what people outside of Washington or City Hall are going through. You’re more concerned with your own re-election than anything else. Oh, it’s not entirely your fault: You’re conditioned that way. Still, if you’re in politics, you probably have such a big ego there’s not much room in that self-centered brain of yours to care about “the little people” you were elected to serve.

But at least for a moment, pretend you care more about people than votes or Nielsen ratings. Pretend you understand what it might be like to be bored to death, stuck at home, with nothing to think about but the mounting bills you can’t pay or the possibility that you might get sick at Walmart. Think about that for a minute and wipe that automated, teeth-whitened smile off your face just long enough to think about the ramifications of that bad news you’re delivering.

People are dying. People are out of work. People are suffering. If you realize the implications of that and you’re still smiling, there’s something very, very wrong with you.

Our addiction to outrage only empowers the bigots

One unfortunate byproduct of the internet age is the rush to judgment: the pressure to decide – and boldly declare – just how despicable an act is before we know all the facts.

But if we can’t just blame the internet, not if we want to be honest with ourselves. The internet is a tool, one we use to justify our own laziness and focus our addiction to outrage. We want to be pissed off. We want to feel superior, to believe that we are best equipped to make decisions about other people’s lives.

When we aren’t.

That’s not the worst of it. Outrage is contagious, viral, if you will. Not only are people tempted into outrage by their own egos, they’re afraid they’ll be shamed shamed – right along with the original target – if they’re not outraged. If something isn’t condemned immediately, suspicion arises.

“You must be one of them. How could you possibly side with that (racist, sexist, homophobic ... fill in the blank) so-and-so? You must be just as bad yourself!”

It’s not hard to recognize the same kind of dynamic that led to communist purges in the McCarthy era. Supposed “sympathizers” were as bad the alleged communists. This isn’t far removed from grade-school scandbox mentality. Growing up in the 1970s, before advances in LGBT rights, kids on the playground were routinely shamed as “gay” if they failed to measure up to some social norm. And anyone who dared defend them was called “gay,” too.

The labels have changed, but the principle remains the same. The process has merely accelerated in the age of social media.

Mob ‘justice’

Mob mentalities weren’t built in a day. They were built in the amount of time it takes to film a video and post it on Twitter. It’s the psychological equivalent of arson: Drop a match by the side of the road and watch it incinerate everything in sight.

Case in point: CNN recently ran a story about Dominique Moran. I mention her name because it’s important, I think, to realize that people affected by our addiction to outrage are real people with real lives that can be turned to shit in the blink of an eye by nothing more than an accusation.

Moran is a 23-year-old woman of Mexican-American heritage, but according to the outrage culture, she was branded as “white” because it’s more convenient to be outraged at white people these days. We wouldn’t want to complicate the narrative, now, would we?

According to CNN, she was working at Chipotle when a group of black customers entered the store. Moran had seen video footage of the men “dining and dashing” in the past when a credit card was declined, so she required them to pay for their meal in advance. One of the men responded by accusing her of racism, then began shooting a video and later posted it online.

It went viral, complete with nasty name-calling and calls for her to be blackballed (“I hope you never get another job”) in the comment field. and She wound up being fired because, you know, outrage demanded it.

The outrage had taken on a life of its own.

Perfect storm

Modern outrage is the product of a perfect storm. On the one hand, you have a media culture built on the constantly shifting foundation of instant gratification. Social media enables it, and the news media perpetuates it. When you’re chained to a 24-hour news cycle, the pressure to be “first” in reporting accusations is immense – especially if it’s already trending on Twitter. If you’re out there “ahead of the story,” you’ll get more clicks, more viewers ... and more advertising revenue. The pressure inherent in “breaking the news” makes an earlier era’s rush to hit the newsstands first look like a walk in the park. And it makes mistakes all but inevitable. (For more on this dynamic, see my book Media Meltdown.)

On the other hand, there’s an understandable frustration with our legal system. When monied elites can run out the clock on justice by filing endless appeals, or use their resources to make legitimate accusations “go away,” is it any wonder mob justice becomes attractive? There’s a lot of truth to the old saw that justice delayed is justice denied, so it’s natural for social justice vigilantes to take matters into their own hands.

There’s just one problem. It doesn’t work. You wind up “winning” a battle with a straw man and losing the war against the monster.

At what cost?

The cost goes of our rush to judgment goes far deeper than Dominque Moran’s anxiety and lost job, or the other highly personal costs born by any individual who’s falsely accused. Because whenever we sacrifice an innocent victim on the altar of our outrage, it gives real racists, sexists and homophobes ammunition to argue that they’re being set up and persecuted. It uses real victims like Moran as an excuse to promote the kind of false victim mentality that attracts people to racist and sexist groups in droves.

If you’re a member of the outrage culture lamenting the rise in white supremacy, you might be part of the problem. When you point that finger to scapegoat Dominique Moran or some other person you’ve never even met, four others are pointed straight back at you. And if you refuse to admit it, the problem only gets worse – which will further fuel your outrage. And that of the racists on the other side. Vicious circle doesn’t begin to describe the damage.

In our rush to judgment against the Dominique Morans of the world, we give the real enemy – white supremacists, neo-Nazis, homophobes and their ilk – an excuse to dismiss credible accusations as merely another “left-wing conspiracy.” Worse, we give people on the fence an excuse to believe them. We can’t afford to do this.

The antidote to “justice delayed” is not “injustice imposed,” which is exactly what the outrage culture – fueled by media pressures and social media access – promotes. Our judicial system may be imperfect, and at times unjust or even corrupt. Still, that doesn’t mean we should turn the gavel over to social media vigilantes fueled by sanctimony, prejudice and their own fear of being demonized.

But that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Heaven help us.

The Covington debacle: No adults in the room

We see what we want to see, and we believe what we want to believe ... even when someone else offers a different perspective. It’s truer now than ever, and nothing illustrates it better than the reaction to dueling videos of a confrontation involving students from Covington Catholic High School, black activists and a Native American drummer at the Lincoln Memorial.

Images in the initial video show a student wearing a MAGA hat smiling what looked like a smug, self-satisfied smile at a Native American veteran drumming less than an arm’s length in front of him. Other students are seen jumping up and down, chanting in the background. A second video, however, shows another group (unseen in the first video): four black activists angrily shouting nasty, degrading slurs at the students.

Those who had expressed outrage at the students after seeing the first video tended to react in one of two ways upon seeing the second. They either held fast to their initial criticism of the students, or they issued mea culpas for jumping to what they now said had been the wrong conclusion.

It’s these two divergent reactions that illustrate, even more than the incident itself, how polarized we are as a society. And how entrenched we’ve become in our reliance upon dogmatic, black-and-white thinking. The facts be damned: Our side is always right. That’s why the current president’s poll numbers barely move. They’re not based on his actions or any reasoned judgment about those actions. They’re based on tribal identity and an us-versus-them bunker mentality.

Hats vs. slurs

Regarding the incident at the Lincoln Memorial, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Let’s start with the students. The MAGA hat has become a symbol that invites confrontation. To many people, it represents everything from xenophobia to racism, sexism to fascism. Wearing a hat like that doesn’t invite discussion, it shuts it down. It’s an in-your-face declaration of allegiance that encourages one of two responses: fight or flight.

Critics of the students said they heard them chanting things like “Build that wall!” in reference to Donald Trump’s proposed wall along the southern border. The students deny that, saying instead that they were shouting a school chant.

It doesn’t matter.

A wall chant wouldn’t have been surprising, but it wasn’t necessary, either: It was already plain as day how the students felt about Trump and his policies, thanks to their hats. It wasn’t the contents of the chant that mattered, but the fact that the students started chanting in the first place. Chants are, by their very nature, confrontational and intimidating.

The students said they received permission from their adult chaperones before starting the chant. The adults should never have given that approval. In so doing, they heightened tensions further and created even more room for misunderstanding. Chants, like lectures and shouted protests, are one-sided discussions that leave those on the receiving end feeling bullied, powerless and angry. They don’t defuse tensions, they heighten them.

But the adults’ culpability in the D.C. incident goes beyond this. Not only did they put the students in a situation where confrontation was likely to occur, they allowed – or perhaps even encouraged – them to wear provocative MAGA hats, all but guaranteeing that such a confrontation would take place.

The adults may very well have wanted just such a confrontation. They had come to protest, and they were itching for a fight. But is it ever OK to use teenagers as proxies to make a political statement? I don’t care whether you’re protesting against abortion, global warming, substandard wages or immigration. Putting kids on the front lines in a physical conflict is a war crime, so it stands to reason that you shouldn’t do it in a shouting conflict, either – especially when there’s nowhere to run. (The students, by their own account, had to stay where they were because they were waiting for a bus to pick them up.)

The results in any situation like this are predictable: The kids are attacked – which is exactly what happened here. The cowardly adults, meanwhile, benefit in more ways than one. They can hide behind their kids, using them as psychological human shields, while they pretend to be the grown-ups instead of manipulative instigators. Second, they can reinforce the dogma they’re trying to teach the next generation. Because, you know what? When people are attacked, they get defensive, and they tend to harden their stances against a perceived aggressor. The chaperones didn’t have to reinforce the kids’ prejudices; they allowed the situation to do it for them.

Staredown at a weigh-in

The four black protesters played right into all this, shouting homophobic slurs and calling the students everything from “crackers” to “a bunch of incest babies.” Regardless of the actions of the kids or their chaperones, this kind of language is abhorrent. Full stop. If you’re an adult, you don’t get to attack kids like this, even if they’re wearing MAGA hats, any more than a man calls a woman the “B” or the “C” word. It’s vile and disgusting, regardless of your race, religion, gender or anything else. If they’re breaking the law, have them arrested. Otherwise, leave them the hell alone.

The Native American drummer, meanwhile, stated that he tried to insinuate himself between the two groups, yet he faced the students throughout, not the four protesters. Even more to the point, he did so while banging a drum and chanting as he stared directly into the lead student’s eyes. There’s no reason to doubt that he was, in fact, trying to defuse the situation, but his actions had the opposite effect. Intentionally or not, he escalated the tensions by using the body language of challenge and confrontation (a staredown), and upped the ante by chanting and drumming.

The other students, in response, seem to have at least partially surrounded him, and the lead student’s smirking response sent a message (again, intentionally or not) that he wasn’t about to back down. He held his ground, as if daring the drummer to start something. Regardless of how he might have tried to justify his actions later, his body language said, “Bring it on!” The two looked like a couple of boxers at a weigh-in before a title fight.

The biggest irony in all this is that it took place on a weekend honoring Martin Luther King Jr., whose philosophy was the antithesis of everything that occurred. Can you imagine King yelling the kind of things the black protesters were shouting at the students? Or trying to provoke a confrontation by engaging in a staredown? King was all about nonviolent protests and passive resistance. Not a single party involved in the D.C. incident could be described as passive, and violence was very nearly the result.

Yes, the kids behaved badly. But that’s why you need adults in the room. Unfortunately, in this case, there didn’t seem to be any.