immanence

The global pandemic of Covid-19 has been accompanied by a proliferation of competing narratives of what the crisis is and means, and how it should be addressed. The UN and the World Health Organization have called this an “infodemic,” that is, an epidemic (or pandemic) of information that, in its confusing diversity, has made it more rather than less difficult to make sense of things. The infodemic has included a rapid spread of (what are being called) conspiracy theories.

In what follows, I outline an intentionally simplified theory about the Covid-19 “infodemic,” which I call a “media reliability theory,” and I provide an example to support it. I then discuss a few of its limitations and suggest the need for a more comprehensive model of the infodemic and of information in general. I call the latter an “infovirology” model, that is, one that focuses on how information spreads and the forms it takes as it does that. Like viruses, information spreads within ecosystems (information or media ecologies) and it is those ecosystems that need better understanding today. I end with some recommendations for a media regimen around the pandemic.

This is all work in progress, connected to a course I’ll be teaching this fall and to longer-standing work on media and cultural politics. Comments are welcome.

1. The media reliability theory

Information is as reliable as its sources. The divergence in perspectives around a topic such as the Covid-19 pandemic is largely explainable by this fact. Specific information in any instance may be correct or incorrect, but when the sources are reliable, false information will be corrected in time. When they are not, they are not likely to be corrected.

The conspiracy believers who claim that Covid-19 is a hoax, a sham, or a power play by nefarious medics, globalist billionaires, and/or others, mostly get their news from untrustworthy sources. For instance, these may include QAnon, InfoWars, David Icke, or one among many others, which may in turn be filtered through popular media personalities, heavily politicized news disseminators like Breitbart News, Fox News, and @realDonaldTrump, and (at another remove) science-skeptical groups including climate change deniers and the Conservative Political Action Committee. Some get their news from sources they themselves don’t know, but that they feel an affinity for (for reasons that have to do with the allure of conspiratorial thinking; more on that below). The growth of Covid-19 “skepticism” may largely be due to conjunctural and strategic reasons across an array of interest groups, but that growth wouldn’t be possible were it not for the “muddiness” of these original sources.

(So, for instance, among the anti-vaccination activists and conspiracy-minded New Age and alternative health practitioners who are among Covid-19 pandemic skeptics, I have noticed that some may know their immediate sources of information but not necessarily their ultimate sources. Or else they keep quiet about those since their new coalition, which includes some “strange bedfellows,” is strategically motivated.)

The “rest of us” get our news either directly or indirectly from the global, so-called liberal media, mulled through the machinery of empirical reportage, investigation, and debate on the one hand, and of competition for audience share on the other. At the commercial end of the spectrum (which most people rely on to a high degree), there is much more of the latter. At the public and independent end (where I’m including journalism supported by foundations that are mandated for journalism, social justice, and the like), there’s more of the first and less, sometimes even none, of the second. (And there is a far left, and other places where things get a little looped around, but let’s leave that aside for now.)

The Covid-deniers call all of that “the MSM” (mainstream media), mistaking their ignorance of actual media for a critical theory about how “the media” really operate. For the most part, the media don’t operate that way: they have a thousand agendas, shaped by multiple goals, pressures, sanctions and rewards, and sources of support. They might operate that way if there weren’t publicly supported and independent media all around the world, and a lot of dedicated professionals with integrity doing their jobs, but there are.

In summary, we can get a reasonably reliable picture of what is going on from media coverage that is readily available to us, at least to those of us with internet access. Knowing how to recognize what’s reliable in the mix of media coverage one has access to is a learnable skill. (I offer some of my own favorite sources at the bottom of this article.)

2. A case in point

The following video, as shared by many in social media, presents a brilliant distillation of popular conspiracy theorizing about the “mainstream media.”

I’ve had FB friends post this video without providing any information on what it actually shows, as if to suggest that it’s self-explanatory — that the video provides a clear, obvious, and horrifying indictment of the “mainstream media.” The video is typically shared with some exhortation to “Wake up and free your mind,” and has become lodged in a series of texts about an apparently decades-long CIA and “deep state” project called “Operation Mockingbird,” which began in the 1950s (it did) but that, according to promoters of this clip on social media, continues today (it does not).

As I write this, a screen-shot from the above video made up of stills of 24 different television stations reciting the same text can be found as the cover photo on the Facebook page for the documentary Out of Shadows. The film was produced by a group of self-proclaimed “patriots” to ostensibly document Satanism in Hollywood and connect it to liberal globalism, the CIA, the “deep state,” and the media. This “documentary,” we are told by its producers,

lifts the mask on how the mainstream media & Hollywood manipulate & control the masses by spreading propaganda throughout their content. Our goal is to wake up the general public by shedding light on how we all have been lied to & brainwashed by a hidden enemy with a sinister agenda.

This film wouldn’t be worth mentioning here if it weren’t for the fact that it excerpts the above “mind control” video, and that its home page echoes QAnon memes that resound across this conspiracist echo chamber (for instance, the same bible quote from Ephesians that “Q” has popularized, et al.), and that it is being widely shared (with millions of views) as a QAnon video in social media.

Here’s the kicker: what the video above actually shows is a montage of real television news anchors mostly from a single day in March, 2018, on a single television news network — that is, on stations owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group. They did this at the direction of Sinclair’s owners, who were responding to Donald Trump’s call to condemn the so-called “fake news” that has been critical of his own presidency. In other words, these heads talking at us mean to tell us that the ones Trump calls “fake news” are “fake news,” but that they themselves are real. When criticized by media watchers afterwards, Trump himself defended the network, calling it “far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.”

The irony is that to find this out you actually have to search in the “mainstream media,” more specifically, on CNN, which reported on the matter even before the script aired, and in the New York Times and the Washington Post, which wrote about it soon after. The actual video montage was assembled by a left-leaning media activist, Deadspin’s Timothy Burke, and clearly titled “Sinclair’s Soldiers in Trump’s War on Media,” but all of that context has been left out in the video’s afterlife on right-wing web sites (and in much of social media). Another version of a similar montage, with more background information, was created by Think Progress, but that one has not spread nearly as much, due of course to its provision of actual information on what it shows.

In other words, the right has weaponized a video that originally embarrassed a prominent organization within its own camp, the largest owner of local television stations in the country. By appropriating the editing skills of Timothy Burke and eliminating any mention of the details about Sinclair, it has instead turned the video into a weapon against “mainstream media.” And there it has taken on a life of its own, providing support for anyone’s argument that we can’t possibly trust “the media.”

This is only one example of the kind of viral memetic fare that has been circulating in social media recently, connected to a conspiratorial skepticism around dominant media narratives of the current pandemic. Other examples include the video “Plandemic,” which burst into social media in early May before traditional media began subjecting it to critical scrutiny. (On Plandemic, see here, here, here, here, and here. On pandemic conspiracy theorizing more generally, see here, here, here, and here. And on the Out of Shadows video, see here; I’m sure there will be more debunking of its far-fetched claims in the weeks to come.)

All of that can be usefully compared with actual studies that show that exposure to mainstream broadcast and print media correlates with more information and less misinformation around Covid-19, while exposure to conservative media and to social media correlates with higher levels of misinformation. Of course, if you mistrust academia — as QAnon partisans and media-hyperskeptics alike may (especially those with greater exposure to conservative and/or social media than to mainstream media) — then you are likely to take that to mean its precise opposite. 

3. The implications

The suggestion that “the media” produce a unified, propagandistic message for everyone certainly merits consideration, at least in relation to specific historical contexts. Criticism of “mainstream media” has been around for decades and was a staple of left-wing media studies from the time when most Americans watched three television networks (the “big three”: NBC, ABC, CBS), which dominated broadcast media from the 1960s until the mid-1980s.

While in authoritarian countries media have been more obviously controlled by governments, in capitalist democracies state actors have developed more sophisticated ways of shaping the messages that media present to their viewers. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s “propaganda model” of mass media, first presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, applies particularly well to large-scale broadcast media in the United States, where arm’s-length public media like PBS and NPR have been relatively weak and forced to compete in the marketplace against much more powerful, privately owned and generally profit-drive media enterprises – that is, in a context in which media are at least partly in the business of “selling audiences to advertisers.” The propaganda model accounts for five “filters” on media, including media ownership, advertising, the media elite, “the flack machine,” and the notion of a “common enemy.”

Today, however, even that fairly nuanced model of mass media is arguably outdated. The media most of us rely on now are sharply divided, and in many cases starkly polarized, in their agendas; are highly globalized, with international players both informing and disinforming in powerful ways; and are multi-layered, with information coming to us through a range of technologies (televisions, computers, smart phones, et al.), a range of delivery mechanisms (from direct sources to aggregators of various kinds), and a range of intermediaries (including social media “friends” and acquaintances).

Some media (the purely commercial ones) are exclusively in the business of “selling audiences to advertisers,” but even they are competing over audiences with a mix of desires and needs. Others are funded by public sources with diverse agendas (think of the BBC, PBS, NPR, PRI, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Al Jazeera, RT, Deutsche Welle, France 24, NHK, Xinhua, CCTV, et al.). Others combine public, private (e.g., family foundations), and reader/subscriber bases of support (e.g., The Guardian, The New York Times, et al), or are based on not-for-profit models (Associated Press). Some of their reader-supporters demand journalism (investigation, reportage, etc.), while others demand little more than entertainment. That’s one of the huge dividing lines in the media today: between those that actually investigate and report and those that merely aggregate, re-report, and repackage, with a goal to maintain advertiser interest.

Facebook and Google News are among the many media aggregators (the first one aggregating indirectly, the second directly) that countless people rely on today, and the fact that they are profit-oriented means that they are technically “selling audiences to advertisers.” But this hardly means that the news people get from them is shaped by that model. Media literacy today can ill afford to be stuck in a 1970s U.S. model where everyone in the country watched the same three television networks. In this sense, then, we can safely say that we (at least those of us with adequate internet terminals) have access to more information than we have ever had, and that it is literally at our fingertips. Meanwhile, the term “mainstream media,” or “MSM,” has made its way around the political spectrum, becoming a cri de coeur of the white nationalist “alt-right” and the evangelical Christian right, even as it has found adherents in other, less easily-placed cultural movements.

This does not resolve the problem of the infodemic – if anything, it exacerbates it by making so much information available. So the question becomes: whom can we trust? That is where media ownership and support becomes an overarching issue, and it is genuinely a live battleground today, with prominent U.S. politicians (like Elizabeth Warren) taking up strong calls for breaking up media monopolies. The urgency of media policies adequate to the digital age does not take away from the need to support media that do practice good journalism.

But that is precisely why we need to pay attention to reliability in our sources. Casting those we dislike as “mainstream media” and listening instead to anyone who shares our overarching critique of “the system” renders us incapable of picking through the chaff of what’s out there. We live at a time when there is more than one “system” at play in the world, and we need to get better at telling one apart from another. That’s where the rest of this article goes.

4. The limitations: Beyond an informational model of media

Things are rarely are simple as any theory can make them seem. This is the case with media in a rapidly evolving digital world, and it is also the case with crises like the Covid-19 pandemic, with its sudden, unexpected, and deep challenge to so many assumptions that have marked our everyday lives to this point. So, as we all struggle to make sense of the pandemic, it is to be expected that not all reputable and reliable voices will line up to support the same narrative. There are, for instance, some reputable voices in the mix among the “Covid-19 skeptics.”

The global media themselves are a complicated field. The dominant model of thinking about them remains an information model, which distinguishes true information from false information, labeling the latter either disinformation (which is intentionally false) or simply misinformation. In what has been called the “post-truth” era, however, we may need new models for thinking about how people get informed about the world.

The traditional model assumes that as we learn more and more accurate information, our political machinery mobilizes in response to it. As I posted previously, this idea mimics the ideal of science whereby new information may at first generate an “oscillation” between multiple perspectives, but ultimately “converges” around a single consensus. With complex, “nonlinear” issues in a complicated and dynamic social milieu, we may not see that kind of singular convergence anytime soon. Instead, there is more likely to be convergence around multiple “basins of attraction,” and it is important to understand the social, political, economic, and cultural influences on how and why they diverge the way they do.

A more comprehensive and adequate model of media, then, would need to recognize that there may be no starting agreement on what constitutes sufficient knowledge on an issue, or on how to move from knowledge to action (or policy) related to that issue. The Covid-19 pandemic is the perfect example of something that scrambles all of our usual parameters of judgment, implicating science, medicine, politics, ethics, culture, ecology, and everything else into its calculus.

Media continue to play their “traditional” roles of informing public discussion (media as fourth estate) and of shaping public discussion (including through their “propaganda” function, per Chomsky and Herman), but they also serve new functions. In my current thinking, I’m focusing on at least three of these, which I am calling media’s role as “noise machine,” as “fear machine,” and as “org-machine” (or “self-organization machine”).

The first of these, media as noise machine, is exemplified by certain politicians’ use of media to dominate the airwaves by pumping out messages without stopping, and seemingly without much concern for their truth value (think of Trump’s constant tweeting, though the 24-hour news regurgitation of cable networks could be seen as a certain form of this). The second, media as fear machine, is best seen in the constant promotion of narratives identifying certain groups as blameworthy villains or outright enemies. Each of the two U.S. political parties does some of that, blaming the other side for any and all ills. Trump’s attempts to blame Democrats, Obama, China, and whoever else are perhaps less “fear machine” than “noise machine.” The alt-right’s demonization of “liberals” and “globalists,” from George Soros and Bill Gates to “the deep state” and its UN counterparts, is perhaps a more thorough example of a fear machine.

These first two functions are clearly related and mutually supportive. And ironically, those who decry the “MSM’s” coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic as being intended to create panic—that is, to be a “fear machine”—tend to promote their own fear machine when they urge distrust of all media sources, along with the governments and institutions (including scientific and medical establishments) whose bidding those media are ostensibly doing. The situation we get, then, is a competition between rival “fear machines.”

The most important of the three, however, for any theory of social change, is the third, media as self-organization machine. This refers to the ways in which media contribute to enabling action, mobilization, and organization around new agendas and sociopolitical programs. Phenomena like the conservative Tea Party movement, Occupy Wall Street, Egypt’s Tahrir Square, and Ukraine’s Maidan were all not just protest movements but social change movements. Some succeeded more than others at achieving their goals. All of them made use of media to organize the takeover of space (both physical and “cultural” space) and, to some degree or other, to redistribute political agency. This is where media can have a genuinely transformative impact. But for self-organization to occur, media users must actively engage with media, not passively consume them, in order to reshape political discourse and the imagination of what is possible.

5. Post-Truth: An Epidemiology of Media Trust

In his recent book Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game, sociologist Steve Fuller offers a rather startling call for a new epistemology of truth, or what I would like to call (with a spin on his approach) a new “epidemiology of trust.” An epidemiology of trust would study how information becomes truth, that is, how it comes to be trusted so that it takes on the force of truth for its adherents, a truth by which they come to shape their lives and understandings. An epidemiology of trust studies how trust becomes epidemic, and how it can fail to do that. (There is a sub-field of epidemiology called infodemiology, which analyzes online informational data to inform public health policy, but I have in mind something deeper and more comprehensive than that—something more like an “infovirology,” which would study how information becomes so viral as to become taken for granted, that is, pandemic.)

Fuller writes:

While some have decried recent post-truth campaigns that resulted in victory for Brexit and Trump as ‘anti-intellectual’ populism, they are better seen as the growth pains of a maturing democratic intelligence, to which the experts will need to adjust over time. (p. 181, italics added)

The necessary adjustment is to recognize that credentials are no longer sufficient as a basis for trust. “Discussions about the rules of the game and one’s position in the game” are no longer being kept separate, as they were in the “truth condition.” In the “post-truth condition,” players “jockey for position in the current game, while at the same time they try to change the rules so as to maximize their own overall advantage.”

Fuller continues:

In a post-truth utopia, both truth and falsehood are themselves democratized. Thus, no one will ever be deemed incorrigible – either incorrigibly right or incorrigibly wrong. While this prospect seems quite egalitarian, before signing the contract you should attend to the fine print. You will neither be allowed to rest on your laurels nor rest in peace. You will always be forced to have another chance to play in a game whose rules are forever contestable. (p. 182)

Fuller’s focus here is on the loss of common standards establishing the authority over what qualifies as knowledge. Credentials and expertise are no longer pre-assumed, but always have to be forged and negotiated. While this sounds radical, I would like to amend his argument to make it less about “jockeying for position” in “games” of “truth,” and more about expanding what counts as credibility in the production of truths.

It’s helpful here to contextualize Fuller within the field of science and technology studies, where he has, over the years, engaged in a dispute with Bruno Latour (see, for instance, here) over how sociologists should study science. Fuller has supported a loosely social-constructionist and normatively humanist position, which maintains that scientific facts are, at least in part, socially constructed, and that sociologists of science should focus their analysis on the social determinants that shape how facts are made, the better to inform our efforts to improve society.

Latour, on the other hand, has defended a “symmetrical” approach to understanding how nature and society co-determine each other, with each being active in the forging of complex “networks” of actors and agencies. For Latour, it’s crucial that we learn to recognize the ways in which elements of what we take to be “nature” interact with elements of what we take to be “society” in the production of historically causal networks that rearrange relations among the constituents of the world. Latour’s position on epistemology (how we know what we know) has evolved over the years to be something like this: that epistemological certainty may never be a given, but that epistemological confidence is built through the painstaking work of network-building and network-maintenance. Only by paying attention to the specifics by which “knowledge” is generated can we come to any conclusions about the reliability, or the robustness, of that knowledge.

Latour and Fuller agree on the idea that to convince the public, the process of how science is “made” needs to be made public, not hidden beneath the veneer of scientific authority. In Latour’s version (which pays more attention to the roles that physical and biological reality play in the “making”), it means “laying out” the “manufacturing secrets” of science. In the case of climate science, this includes paying attention to

the large number of researchers involved in climate analysis, the complex system for verifying data, the articles and reports, the principle of peer evaluation, the vast network of weather stations, floating weather buoys, satellites and computers that ensure the flow of information. (Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, p. 3)

Once all of these are laid out, with all the multiple redundancies between the data sets, measurements, models, et al., the robustness of the total corpus becomes difficult to contest.

By contrast, climate denialists have very little to show for themselves. They can, of course, quibble with individual details (such as the famous “hockey stick graph“), but if the network is seen for the elaborately engineered amalgam that it is, it becomes much more difficult to argue that the whole edifice comes apart from an argument over one or two details. The robustness of the network is found neither in some untouchable ideal of science nor in any specific detail that might be questioned, but, rather, in the actual—institutional, technical, social, and material—practices of science. 

An approach like this can be applied to the practice of journalism as well. To adjudicate journalistic media on the basis of their trustworthiness means going beyond questions of whether an article is well written or agrees with one’s preconceptions. The question becomes: what goes into the building up of a set of truth-claims? Or, in Latourian terms, what alliances have been made, through what efforts and in what technical and discursive networks, in order to make a certain set of claims about the world possible, and then to distribute them as they have been distributed?

For a print or online article, for instance, we can ask: Who is the author and what is their history with the topic? Who was consulted in the piecing together of the argument presented? How do the pieces of the argument line up with what is known or verifiable outside of the case being presented here? Which fields of expertise have been consulted by the author, and which are missing? What is the status of the specific representatives of each field or discipline within that discipline? (Are they representative of one research program amidst competing research programs, or do they plausibly speak for a majority or consensus opinion?) If there are multiple perspectives representing a multiplicity of ways of piecing together the “truth” on this topic, are these perspectives fairly represented? In what are those disciplines, and disciplinary differences, grounded: what sorts of material, institutional, technological, and economic networks are they dependent on and answerable to? (That point is a crucial and potentially very complicated one.)

Regarding the publication itself, what are the processes of review, fact-checking, and editorial oversight practiced by the journal, web site, or media venue in question? Who pays the costs of producing it, and what are their interests and objectives?

The last question, about interests and objectives, bears a relationship to our third function, that of media as self-organization machine. Media in-forms; it forms us through the information it provides, insofar as we take that information and make use of it. Media’s capacity to do that is dependent on its vision for the world it serves. What mandate does a particular medium—a newspaper, journal, web site, podcast, think tank—follow? If media have lost the public trust, it is in part because they have not educated that public in what it is they aim to do and how exactly they do it.  

An epidemiology of media trust asks media to take on this new function of being open about their inner workings, their internal organs and machinery, the vision that drives them and the multiple ways they work to realize that vision. If media followed this, The Economist would become not just the weekly that tells us what happens around the world, with a fiscally liberal slant (and no author by-lines), but a journal with a long history of relations with politics and empire, that has moved away from some of them (if it has) explicitly and for clear reason. The New York Times would bring back its Public Editor, whose role in acknowledging the limitations of its own reporting are central to giving it the credibility and trust it asks of its readers. Publications would, in general, be more humble and more upfront about their shortcomings and dependencies.

All of this contextual information is already available to us, with a bit of research (and the help of Wikipedia), when it comes to historically well established media sources. But with the untrustworthy media, it rarely is, and that difference needs to be made explicit and palpable to casual readers. Trust matters, and it is something that’s built over time.

Here is where conspiracy theorizing will fail in comparison (except when there are real conspiracies to be found). Let’s review the three modes of media I have introduced in the preceding section, along with ways in which media can respond to these three functions.

If media function as noise machines, they can also function as filters to the noise. If media function as fear machines, they can also functions as hope and empowerment machines. And if media function as self-organization machines (here we are reversing the valence), they can also function as self-disorganization, or even self-demolition, machines.

Conspiracy theories respond to an array of psychological needs and desires. Among them is the sense that they “connect the dots” of a previously disconnected, meaning-deficient or even perplexing set of phenomena. When a person encounters a theory, or even the hint of a theory, that might provide answers for questions that may not have been precisely formulated, but that seem to have been there in the background of one’s awareness (e.g., why are things in the world becoming more confusing? why does it seem like I can’t trust anyone? etc.), that person’s interest is piqued.

Conspiracy theories can provide a way of seemingly “cutting through the noise” of the noise machines that are already there, around oneself. They can promise to both put a label on the fears (and “fear machines”) that are already there, and to respond to them. Even as they amplify those fears, in crediting them and effectively “centralizing” them (i.e., suggesting they are real and ascribable to particular forces in the world), they seem to promise a way out of fear. (If only you align with us…)

As for self-organization, conspiracy theories can offer the sense that self-organization is already taking place — somewhere out there. (The truth is out there.) This promise of conspiracy theories, however, is a ruse. It can only be a reality when the conspiracy in question is real. To adjudicate that requires an empirical apparatus — a way of sifting between the different possible ways of connecting dots — that most conspiracy theorists lack, and that is where the media can be helpful. But it requires taking the motives of conspiratorially-inclined readers and viewers seriously.

There’s much more to be said about all of that, and about how to see when a dot (one of the many that a conspiracy theory connects together) is just a dot, and when it is a point in a much larger network or assemblage. There is a certain undecidability about political issues in the post-truth world (which Jodi Dean’s 1998 book Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace first articulated for me; it’s a point I tried to build on with my own work on New Age subcultures years ago). That undecidability may be our starting point, but there still remain truths to be found. They just require the reinvigoration of trust in the mechanisms by which truths are made. That means the mechanisms need to be made more explicit. In a world of digital media, with its fingertip access to information in all its epidemic (and infodemic) cascades, that takes work.

The first step, I am convinced, is a better understanding of how media work, and since that’s a rapidly moving terrain, there is no resting on our laurels with it.

Afterword: My own Covid-19 media regimen

For the record, here are some sources I’ve been finding particularly helpful with understanding and following the Covid-19 pandemic.

• The Guardian and the New York Times dominate my Google News Feed (and I’ve been subscribing to the Guardian Weekly, which beats most newsweeklies in my estimation; the Times Magazine’s “Quarantine” issue also has some remarkable writing in it);
• The Syllabus, with its diverse welter of thoughtful perspectives on the pandemic, keeps my mind wide open, as do some of the readings on Stu Elden’s ever expanding list and Matteo Villa’s institutional data tracker;
• National Public Radio and Public Radio International shows (and podcasts) like On Point, On the Media, Coronavirus Daily, The World, The New Yorker Radio Hour are entertaining and informative;
• The Atlantic has raised itself away from the rest of the pack of popular journals with its pandemic coverage, making some of it paywall-free (though unfortunately not their series on “Shadowland,” on the conspiracy culture surrounding the pandemic; “The Prophecies of Q” is especially relevant to the case I write about above);
• The New Yorker has been great: see for instance their articles on the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which accounts for why Seattle dealt with the pandemic much better than New York City; on what the pandemic shows about the U.S. health care system; on Seoul’s experiment in digital contact tracing; on mutual aid networks that have arisen in the wake of the pandemic; and on their ongoing dispatches on daily life during the pandemic;  
• Others in the globally informed left-liberal press, such as Le monde diplomatique, the NYRB Daily (with its Pandemic Journal), The Nation (with its Scenes from a Pandemic), The New Republic, and Mother Jones, are helpful, as are occasional glances to the political right (such as Reason and The National Review) to keep myself honest;
• The Columbia Journalism Review is always good for getting a behind-the-scenes understanding of the serious (but mainstream) media (here’s their pandemic coverage), and ProPublica does some excellent work;
• Finally, news briefings from the science press (Nature.com and Sciencemag.org) and from the WHO and the CDC provide a running awareness of the current scientific consensus (and of course it helps to have a fair-minded understanding about how scientific consensus-building works).

Needless to say, some of these require subscriptions (usually after a certain number of reads per month). Others (especially the podcasts) do not. Some digital subscriptions are not nearly as expensive as print subs, especially if you are a student or educator. Of daily newspapers, The Guardian is one of the few that are entirely free (except for occasional pop-ups asking for donations, which I recommend you respond to if you can). And obviously I have consulted far beyond the above list — reaching deep into the world of conspiracism — for the purposes of this article. But I don’t recommend everyone spend as much time there as I have. There are more useful things that need doing.

Other recommendations are welcome. As are general comments on this article-in-progress.

For the record: As I consider this piece a work in progress, I’ve been adding little things to it (so far mainly links to other web sites) since first publishing it.