THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
4A
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EDITORIAL
School
spending
falls short
It seems unlikely that members of the Oregon Edu-
cation Association, the teachers union that lavishes
most of its campaign contributions on Democratic
candidates, will ever pine for Republicans to have
more clout in the Oregon Legislature.
At least not publicly.
But recent actions in Salem, where the Democrats
have supermajorities in the House and Senate, might
well have given some union offi cials, and members,
reason to at least ponder their political preferences.
Last week, Republicans in the House advocated
for the state to spend $300 million more for public
schools in the two-year budget cycle that starts July
1. But GOP members don’t have the votes to move
the school budget bill back to a committee, where the
amount could be increased, so the bill went to Gov.
Kate Brown’s desk at $9.3 billion. Republicans called
for $9.6 billion, the amount the Oregon School Boards
Association had suggested is necessary to avoid any
program cuts or layoffs.
Just two Democrats — Mark Meek of Oregon City
and Marty Wilde of Eugene — joined 20 Republicans
in voting for a motion to send the bill back to com-
mittee, with a goal of boosting the spending to $9.6
billion over the two years.
That wasn’t enough Democratic support.
Rep. Susan McClain, a Democrat from Forest
Grove who’s chair of the education budget subcom-
mittee, tried to defend the $9.3 billion by saying that
the Legislature is “creating record investments in
public schools this year.”
The $9.3 billion fi gure is up from $9 billion in the
current two-year budget cycle.
Rep. Dan Rayfi eld, D-Corvallis, co-leader of the
Legislature’s joint budget panel, said “it is our job as a
legislature to fi nd out what is the Goldilocks porridge
in our budget that meets the needs of our children,
but also at the same time, is a sustainable budget
that we can continue to operate on.”
The more apt fairy tale in this case is Rumpel-
stiltskin.
The federal government has been spinning quite
a lot of gold during the pandemic, and one result is
that Oregon’s revenue is burgeoning. The most recent
estimate from state economist Mark McMullen,
released in May, is for an additional $1.18 billion in
the soon-to-end biennium, with much of that coming
from rising income tax collections spurred by federal
stimulus payments. McMullen projects an increase
of $1.25 billion from projects for the biennium that
starts July 1, and $1.64 million more for the 2023-
2025 budget cycle.
Put simply, the state absolutely can afford the $9.6
billion schools budget the Republicans, and too few
Democrats, have advocated for.
House Minority Leader Christine Drazan, R-Canby,
pointed out that the fl ush state coffers isn’t the only
reason to boost education spending.
Oregon students have also suffered greatly during
the pandemic, with in-person classes limited at times
in every district, and students in some of the larger
districts missing more than a year of normal school-
ing.
“As we ask our schools to bring kids back to have
full in-person learning fi ve days a week, they are
going to be bombarded with unknowns,” Drazan said.
“The need for them to have the resources necessary
to create an environment where these kids can be
successful cannot be overstated. Our state has more
money than ever, and we’re committed to giving fami-
lies the choice of in-person learning next fall. This is
the wrong time to move forward with a ‘cuts’ budget.
Our kids deserve better.”
Indeed they do. It’s a pity that the majority Demo-
crats in Salem, who can always count on support
from the teachers union, didn’t do the same for their
political benefactors.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
Online fact-checking can
cause more harm than good
By Faye Flam
Labeling misinformation online is
doing more harm than good. The pos-
sibility that COVID-19 came from a
lab accident is just the latest example.
Social media companies tried to sup-
press any discussion of it for months.
But why? There’s no strong evidence
against it, and evidence for other
theories is still inconclusive. Pathogens
have escaped from labs many times,
and people have died as a result.
Social media fact-checkers don’t have
any special knowledge or ability to sort
fact from misinformation. What they
have is extraordinary power to shape
what people believe. And stifl ing ideas
can backfi re if it leads people to believe
there’s a “real story” that is being sup-
pressed.
Misinformation is dangerous. It can
keep people from getting lifesaving
medical treatments, including vaccines.
But fl agging it doesn’t necessarily solve
the problem. It’s much better to provide
additional information than to censor
information.
Part of the problem is that people
think they know misinformation when
they see it. And those most confi -
dent of their ability to spot it may be
least aware of their own biases. That
includes the fact-checking industry
within the mainstream media, who
were caught removing earlier posts on
the lab leak theory, as well as social
media “fact checkers” who aren’t ac-
countable to the public.
Earlier this year, I interviewed
physician and medical podcaster Roger
Seheult who said that he was censored
by YouTube for discussing the clinical
trials of hydroxychloroquine and Iver-
mectin as potential COVID-19 treat-
ments. No wonder so many people still
believe these are the cures “they” don’t
want you to know about. Much better
would be an open discussion of the
clinical trial process, which could help
people understand why scientists think
those drugs are unlikely to help.
Even without the power of censor-
ship, social media culture encourages
the facile labeling of ideas and people
as a way of dismissing them — it’s easy
to call people deniers or as anti-science
because they question prevailing
wisdom.
Of course, there are ideas that are
very unlikely to be true. These gener-
ally involve elaborate conspiracies or a
complete overhaul in our understand-
ing of the universe. Or, like cold fusion
and the vaccine-autism theory, they’ve
been tested and debunked multiple
times by independent investigators.
I discussed the new interest in the
lab leak with another science journal-
ist who was interested in why so many
reporters are still treating the natural
spillover hypothesis as the only pos-
sibility. We agreed this isn’t like the
connection between carbon emissions
and climate change, where there’s a
scientifi c consensus based on years of
research and multiple, independently
derived lines of evidence. Here, even
if a few scientists favored the natural
spillover early on, the question is still
open.
Last year, some scientists rightly
objected that accusing any lab of caus-
ing a worldwide pandemic is a serious
charge and one shouldn’t be made
on the basis of proximity alone. That
doesn’t mean we should ignore the
possibility, or assume that some other
equally unproven idea is right. In the
face of an unknown, why would the
fact-checking people deem one guess
to be a form of misinformation, and
another guess to be true?
And the lab leak idea got confl ated
in some people’s minds with conspiracy
theories that the virus was deliberately
created and released for population
control or some other nefarious agenda.
But a lab leak could have involved a
perfectly natural virus that a scientist
collected, or virus that was altered
in some well-intentioned attempt to
understand it.
Writing in his blog, journalist and
Bloomberg contributor Matthew
Yglesias calls it a media fi asco. “(T)he
mainstream press … got way over their
skis in terms of discourse-policing.” He
admits he Tweeted his disapproval of
a thoughtful, well-written New York
Magazine piece that helped revive the
lab leak debate last January.
The author — novelist Nicholson
Baker — didn’t claim any smoking gun,
but made a convincing case that the
issue was still open. A Medium piece
by former Times writer Nicholas Wade
added little to what Baker said, but
came at a time when the public was
ready to reconsider. A recent Vanity
Fair account details how the issue was
suppressed inside the US government.
Looking back, there really wasn’t
that much new news to report. Very
little new evidence has been uncovered
over the last year. The pandemic’s
origin is still unknown. The fi asco was
the media’s propagation of the lie that
the issue was settled and that anyone
questioning it might be deemed an
idiot or conspiracy theorist.
And maybe the intentions of the
Facebook fact checkers were good. If
there was a magical way to identify
misinformation, then social media
platforms could do more to refrain from
spreading it. Suppressing ideas they
don’t like isn’t the way.
Yesterday I had a long talk with
someone who volunteers at a girls’
school in India, and she said she’d been
in contact with some students who
expressed fear of COVID vaccines,
even though their neighborhood has
been ravaged by the pandemic. When
she gave them additional information,
about relatively greater danger of the
disease, they chose to get vaccinated.
What helped was not taking away in-
formation but giving people additional
information. Censoring information
— or what one deems “misinformation”
— isn’t as helpful as it seems. The best
we can do is keep questioning, and give
people the most complete story we can.
Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion
columnist and host of the podcast
“Follow the Science.” She has written
for the Economist, the New York Times,
the Washington Post, Psychology Today,
Science and other publications.
Your views
Why isn’t Pine Creek Road
‘grandfathered in?’
I have been a resident of Pine Creek
for 45 years. For the fi rst nine years
of that time we accessed our property
through what is now the “locked gate”
area to get to our home. After that
we moved down to our present home
and view the road’s daily traffi c. Pine
Creek has been well used by everyone
from all over all year whether hiking,
four wheeling, skiing, sledding, fi shing,
hunting, riding horses, and having
campfi res in the many fi re rings that
dot the road, with no problem. A few
different logging concerns owned the
property before this new owner who is
not a newcomer to the area. After mov-
ing down from our former home to our
new home, the “locked gate” property
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was logged by one of the logging con-
cerns. I was friends with some local his-
torians who told me some Pine Creek
history. Right past the “locked gate”
there was a bridge across the river
where people from Baker City and the
area would come to picnic. At one time
you could see the timbers of what sup-
ported the bridge though they are now
gone. Right past the “locked gate” was
a stamp mill. The road bed of our fi rst
home was built on the old ditch which
brought water to run the stamp mill.
There was a sawmill at the junction
of the road to our former home. There
were piles of slab wood there until
after the logging. The main road was
the way to the Baisley Elkhorn Mines
which was a thriving community in
its day, the thoroughfare being built in
1889. The middle mine usually has a
mining claim on it. People have had to
access this road for the upkeep of Pine
Creek Reservoir for the usage of water
for the valley’s ranchers and farmers.
Pine Creek has been a well used road
through all the years by many many
people. From the viewpoint of history
and all of Pine Creek Road’s usage,
what has happened to “grandfather
rights?”
Lynne Zwanziger
Baker County