The NPC and the Media Narrative
Thoughts about our untrustworthy news sources.
I want to throw a few interesting news pieces at you that you might not have heard about. Then I want to tie them into an Internet meme, explain the deeper resonance of the meme, and talk about what this might mean for the future.
Let’s start with Dr. Vinay Prasad’s video from this week. Two doctors who were on the FDA’s vaccine approval committee resigned earlier this year, stating that they felt they were under inappropriate political pressure from a White House bound and determined to approve boosters for everyone, at all costs. They’ve written two op-eds in the Washington Post making the case against the current administration’s handling of vaccine approval.
There’s also some very interesting things happening if you watch the metrics closely (like I do). For instance, cases rising precipitously in New York City:
New York City has done “all the right things”: they have a vaccine passport system where children as young as 5 need to show proof of vaccination to enter public spaces such as restaurants and theaters. They have mask mandates down to the age of 2. They have a vaccine mandate coming in 2022 for all private businesses, hoping to increase the already-significant levels of vaccination, already at 80% with at least one dose.
And yet, up goes the curve. And neither of these stories, the resigning FDA vaccine heads or New York City policies apparently failing, is probably something you’ve ever heard.
There’s an Internet meme that’s one of my favorite things of the last several years, because it’s hysterical on the surface, and reveals some pretty deep truths the more you think about it.
It’s this guy.
This is an NPC, standing for “non-player character”. It was originally a term in video games — your elite warrior with a level 47 buster sword is walking through a village, and talks to a bartender about the band of roving plumbers that just came through, whacking people on the head with lead pipes. The bartender is an NPC, a character in the story that can’t be played, but just repeats pre-programmed phrases or scripted conversations.
Use of the meme leads to amazing stuff like this:
Most of the meme usage is making fun of the ideological left, but it applies to much more than that. What it represents is that it’s much easier to repeat the talking points you’ve heard incessantly repeated around you and not put any deeper thought into it. People will just absorb whatever they read as they scroll through Facebook, it hits them emotionally but never pushes them to deeper thought about it, then they go back to binging Squid Game or scrolling through Tiktok.
(A professor named Charles Pezeshki, on Twitter as “Connection Doctor, Empathy Guru” and blogging at It’s About Empathy, has opened my eyes to a lot of this. I have a thread I want to pull here about my attempt at increased empathy for people on the other side of the COVID divide and Haidt’s Six Moral Taste Buds, but I’m going to save it for a future post. Watch this space.)
One thing I’ve grown to appreciate over the last two years is that very few people think as deeply about this stuff as I do. And that’s FINE. Most people don’t have the bandwidth to think or care about vaccine mandates or the symbolism of masks. It’s just easier to trust what you hear than to think about it. And when CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, every major newspaper, every network talk show host, and every celebrity on social media comes to you with the same point of view and the same opinion, it’s very easy to accept that this must just be correct.
But at some point, you see something like this case chart for New York City:
And you think, wait a minute, they have vaccine passports, have a coming private business vaccine mandate affecting uptake, AND have had mask mandates since December 13. Why are the cases still going up if those things work?
You see this graph on active cases in South Korea:
And you think, wait, last year I was told that all the Asian countries had squashed COVID because they’ve all worn masks since SARS-1 in 2003. Did all the masks stop working? Did they ever work?
You see a graph like this, showing that cases in San Francisco are on the rise, logging more cases per day than at any point in the pandemic:
And you think, wait, they have vaccine passports, 90% of eligible residents with at least one shot, plus they have indoor AND outdoor mask mandates, yet cases are still rising? What gives?
Or more likely, you don’t see these graphs, and you don’t hear these stories, because our news media has become completely untrustworthy. And the culture at large hasn’t figured it out yet.
Remember these headlines from the summer, when the American South was being pummeled by Delta because it was the typical respiratory virus season in a tropical climate:
But when the Northeast US now has its respiratory virus season and the virus takes off despite having every mandate, restriction, and passport system that Florida lacks, no one hears a word against NY Governor Kathy Hochul or NJ Governor Phil Murphy:
In September, President Biden stated in his speech that it was now a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, leading to his announced requirement for vaccination for federal contract employees and health care workers in facilities accepting Medicare dollars. But now at the end of 2021, this logically cannot be the case any longer.
Reality will tell you that mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and the myriad policies enacted by our leaders have clearly failed at their reported mission, to slow the spread of the virus. And yet, the media reports with bated breath about Chicago now requiring proof of vaccination to enter bars, restaurants, and gyms, a policy which has failed in NYC, LA, San Francisco, and all over Europe.
Speaking of Europe, how much coverage is the US news media providing to the regular protests against vaccine mandates and similar policies?
The expert and media narrative is simply incapable of changing. To admit that they were wrong and have been wrong would be to admit defeat, to open the door to questions of when they knew they were wrong and why they continued to state obvious mistruths. It’s sunk cost fallacy all the way down.
The best they can do now is to state that the game has changed due to Omicron, which is more infectious due to binding site preference, not due to change in mechanism. It is spread by aerosols, it has always been spread by aerosols, and will always spread by aerosols. Cloth masks were always “facial decoration”, now they just have a way to admit it.
At some point, most people, even the NPCs, will look around and realize that vaccination isn’t preventing people from catching COVID, isn’t preventing people from spreading COVID, and isn’t providing the societal benefits that have been advertised. The cognitive dissonance will be too much to bear.
This will be the developing story over the next few months, particularly as the Omicron wave comes and goes. People will realize that the narrative held by the mainstream media is incongruent with what they observe, and they will adjust their behaviors accordingly.
There will be some true believers who will refuse this shift. They will have integrated COVID safetyism so deeply into their identity that to take off the mask would be removing a part of themselves. They will be with us always, in our supermarkets, in the malls, at sporting events. But they will be a shrinking minority.
The media will not be able to hold this narrative forever. They will run into the brick wall of reality, and decades of goodwill they have engendered will be squandered. You already see this, as CNN fell from 1st in basic cable at the beginning of the year to 17th by the end of the year, and 31st in primetime.
We will see the Plexiglass barriers slowly be taken down, start to see more smiles on our fellow shoppers, fewer QR-code menus in restaurants. The Leana Wens and Michael Osterholms will find somewhere else to scare people into submission. Most people will take their lives back, and in five years will chuckle at what we went through.
At least, I have to hope so.
An outstanding essay which I wish everyone would read. Imagine if you could have 15 minutes on a mainstream media show!! Thank you Joshua... another home run!