Bi_3 wrote:CDC Director Walensky's words, not Blitzer's, but I don't understand what you are going for here. Getting people vaccinated is not the only thing that matters and when she misstates the science (intentional or not), she feeds the 'CDC director lied on CNN, WuFlu, event 201, OMG soczialism' stories.
I'm saying that the people who are receptive to "CDC director lied on CNN OMG socialism" messaging are people who are not reachable by putting the right words together on CNN, full stop.
If simply witnessing the CDC being inconsistent or poorly spoken on CNN was a predicator to vaccine or science skepticism, then that skepticism would also be reflected in the CNN audience. They witnessed it. You yourself said, "
no one is going to trust the science if (x)." And yet, most of the people who witnessed (x) do trust the science. Skepticism towards science or vaccination is not concentrated around that audience at all.
That skepticism is instead most heavily concentrated around an audience that lives inside a bubble created by media sources specifically built to amplify distrust, misunderstanding, and panic. Organizations willing to remove context, willing to misrepresent, and willing to simply deceive in order to maintain their narrative.
It's the same largely-online media bubble that had 34% of Americans convinced President Obama wasn't American. It's the same misinformation bubble that had 24% of Americans responding that the sentence "Democrats are part of a global cabal of Satan worshiping pedophiles" was either "mostly true" or "partially true." It's the same media bubble that had 30% of Americans convinced that Joe Biden stole the election. Or that had 44% of Republicans agreeing with the statement "Bill Gates wants to use vaccination to implant people with microchips." No conspiracy narrative, whether wildly divorced from reality or merely slightly deviated from it, can be bested so long as it has this media environment in which to thrive. It simply can't.
You cannot divorce the concentration of these disbeliefs....whether about the science of vaccination or about the presidency or any of it...from the messaging being consumed
daily by the disbelievers. The idea that if anyone from the CDC said the right thing on CNN then the people currently receptive to misinformation would no longer be, is implausible to me.