THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
A4
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OUR VIEW
Mask
mandate
puts
schools in
focus
In defense of ‘misinformation’
I
n late July, our school-age children and youth
were once again thrust into the center of the
COVID-19 pandemic when Gov. Kate Brown
ordered new mask mandates for K-12 students.
Our students shouldn’t be there. Nor should our
teachers and administrators.
Yet they are, and while it is disappointing and
creates new questions about local control, the gov-
ernor’s decision was the right one — for now.
Still, the new mandates potentially push stu-
dents and teachers and administrators into the
middle of what is essentially a cultural/political
debate regarding vaccinations and the seriousness
of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There is also the risk that many parents — for
various reasons — will keep their students away
from education centers because they do not agree
with the mask mandate. If so, that doesn’t help in
our collective effort to provide our youth with the
best education possible.
Another piece that complicates this new para-
digm is that many children are still ineligible to be
vaccinated.
Recently, Intermountain Education Service
District Superintendent Mark Mulvihill said the
new mask mandate puts schools “in the crosshairs”
of an issue that has polarized America. He rightly
was concerned about how much more pressure will
be placed on teachers and school administrators to
enforce a new mask requirement.
As a community, regardless of where we stand
on vaccinations and masks, we should work to be
as helpful as possible to our local schools.
We need to remember that the teachers, super-
intendents and other school offi cials are not re-
sponsible for the mask mandate. They, like all state
agencies, must obey the orders of the governor.
They don’t have the option to ignore her mandate.
That means trying to push them into the center
of a political/cultural debate about COVID-19 and
vaccinations is wrong and won’t solve the basic
problem.
Our students and their teachers should not be
in the middle of this debate. However, as cases
climb, and vaccination rates continue to lag, we
now face a new COVID-19 crisis. No one wants to
return to the draconian restrictions instituted by
the governor last year. We must all work hard to
ensure we do not.
Meanwhile, we must give our local school dis-
tricts, teachers and administrators all the help we
can as they struggle to work through yet another
COVID-19 challenge.
———
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker
City Herald. Columns, letters and cartoons on this
page express the opinions of the authors and not
necessarily that of the Baker City Herald.
STEPHEN
CARTER
I’m no fan of the current war on
“misinformation” — if anything, I’m a
conscientious objector — and one of the
reasons is the term’s pedigree. Although
the Grammar Curmudgeon in me freely
admits that the word is a perfectly fi ne
one, the effort by public and private
sector alike to hunt down misinformers
to keep them from misinforming the
public represents a return to the bad old
days that once upon a time liberalism
sensibly opposed.
First, as to the word itself.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces
“misinformation” in its current sense
to the late 16th century. In 1786, while
serving as ambassador to France, Thom-
as Jefferson used the word to deride
the claim that the U.S. Congress had at
one point sat in Hartford, Connecticut.
In 1817, as every fi rst-year law student
knows, the U.S. Supreme Court used the
word as part of a shaky effort to defi ne
fraud. In the run-up to the Civil War,
supporters of the newly formed Republi-
can Party denounced as misinformation
the notion that they harbored “hostile
aims against the South.”
Depending on context, the word can
even take on a haughty drawing-room
quality. Sir Hugo Latymer, the pro-
tagonist of Noel Coward’s tragic farce
“A Song at Twilight,” discovers that his
ex-lover Carlotta believes that she has
the legal right to publish his letters to
Hugo’s ex-lover Perry. Says the haughty
Hugo: “I fear you have been misin-
formed.” (Writers have been imitating
the line ever since.)
True, according to the always excel-
lent Quote Investigator, a popular Mark
Twainism about how reading the news
makes you misinformed is apocryphal.
QI does remind us, however, that there’s
a long history of writers and politicians
using the term as one of denunciation.
Which leads us to the pedigree
problem.
Chances are you’ve never heard of
the old Federated Press. (The old Feder-
ated Press has no relation to the current
organization using the same name.) It
was founded in 1918 as a left-leaning
competitor to The Associated Press, and
died 30 years later, deserted by hun-
dreds of clients after being declared by
the U.S. Congress a source of “misinfor-
mation.”
Translation: The Congress didn’t
like its point of view.
But the Federated Press was hardly
alone. For the Red-hunters of the Mc-
Carthy Era, “misinformation” became
a common term of derision. As early
as 1945, the right-leaning syndicated
columnist Paul Mallon complained that
“the left wing” was “glibly” spreading
“misinformation about American for-
eign policy” — and, worse, that others
“were being gradually infl uenced by
their thinking.”
In a 1953 U.S. Senate hearing on
“Communist Infi ltration of the Army”
— yes, that’s what the hearing was
called — Soviet defector Igor Bogolepov
(popular among the McCarthyites)
assured the eager committee members
that a pamphlet about Siberia distrib-
uted by the Army contained “a lot of
deliberate misinformation which serves
the interest of the Communist cause.”
A report issued by the Senate
Judiciary Committee three years
later begins: “The average American is
unaware of the amount of misinforma-
tion about the Communist Party, USA,
which appears in the public press, in
books and in the utterances of public
speakers.” Later on, the report pro-
vides a list of groups that exist “for the
purpose of promulgating Communist
ideas and misinformation into the
bloodstream of public opinion.” Second
on the list is the (by then dying) Feder-
ated Press.
In 1957, the chief counsel of a Senate
subcommittee assured the members
that “misinformation” distributed by
“some of our State Department offi cials”
had “proved to be helpful to the Com-
munist cause and detrimental to the
cause of the United States.”
The habit lingered into the 1960s,
when — lest we forget — President
John F. Kennedy and his New Fron-
tiersman were adamant about the
need to combat the Communist threat.
“International communism is expend-
ing great efforts to spread misinforma-
tion about the United States among
ill-informed peoples around the world,”
warned the Los Angeles Times in a
1961 editorial. The following year, At-
torney General Robert Kennedy gave a
major address in which he argued that
America’s ideological setbacks abroad
were the result of — you guessed it —
Communist “misinformation.”
I’m not suggesting that “misinfor-
mation” is always an unhelpful word.
My point is that for anyone who takes
history seriously, the sight of powerful
politicians and business leaders joining
in a campaign to chase misinformation
from public debate conjures vicious
images of ideological overreaching that
devastated lives and livelihoods.
I’ve written in this space before
about the federal government’s deliber-
ate destruction of the career of my
great-uncle Alphaeus Hunton, based
largely on his role as a trustee for the
Civil Rights Congress, a group labeled
by the Senate as — you guessed it — a
purveyor of “misinformation.”
So forgive me if, in this burgeon-
ing war on misinformation, I remain a
resister. America has been down this
road before, and the results were ugly.
I’m old-fashioned enough to believe
that your freedom to shout what I
consider false is the best protection for
my freedom to shout what I consider
true. I won’t deny a certain pleasurable
frisson as the right cowers before what
was once its own weapon of choice.
And I quite recognize that falsehoods,
if widely believed, can lead to bad
outcomes. Nevertheless, I’m terrifi ed at
the notion that the left would want to
return to an era when those in power
are applauded for deciding which views
constitute misinformation.
So if the alternatives are a boister-
ous, unruly public debate, where people
sometimes believe falsehoods, and a
well-ordered public debate where the
ability to make one’s point is effectively
subject to the whims of offi cially as-
signed truth-sayers, the choice is easy:
I’ll take the unruly boister every time.
———
Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg
Opinion columnist. He is a professor
of law at Yale University and was a
clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Thurgood Marshall. His novels include
“The Emperor of Ocean Park,” and his
latest nonfi ction book is “Invisible: The
Forgotten Story of the Black Woman
Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most
Powerful Mobster.”
OTHER VIEWS
Masking up again, and stiffer vaccine mandates
Editorial from New York Daily
News:
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio
had a week to consider the CDC rec-
ommendation that “fully vaccinated
people wear a mask in public indoor
settings in areas of substantial or
high transmission” of COVID-19, as
the quickly spreading delta variant
has necessitated a change. Despite
plenty of time, the mayor and his
health commissioner are only rec-
ommending the recommendation.
The formal legal term is “ducking.”
It’s our recommendation, too,
but unlike the Health Department,
we don’t have the ability to issue
a mandate, which is the best way
to boost compliance. New Yorkers
have plenty of experience with
COVID-19, and those wise enough
to get vaccinated (de Blasio just
marked 10 million doses) are
already putting their masks back
on inside. City Hall’s decree would
only help.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he
agrees with the CDC, but he can’t
impose a new mask rule unless the
Legislature gives him that power,
which they’re not going to do. For
a year, de Blasio wanted author-
ity returned to local control from
Albany. He has it. Now use it; re-
quiring masking now will increase
the chances that this COVID-19
wave passes more quickly, and we
can go back to bare faces indoors
again soon.
On vaccines, both the mayor
and governor have urged private
employers require the shot (as has
President Biden), but they’ve only
taken small steps toward that goal
with their own workforces, settling
for a weaker vax-or-weekly-test
option, about which some unions
still balked. Cuomo did go the whole
way of mandatory vax with the
limited number of people working
with patients in state-run health
hospitals.
De Blasio was correct to issue an
executive order requiring that every
new employee get vaccinated or
provide legitimate evidence of medi-
cal or religious exemption. If it’s
good enough for new cops and new
fi refi ghters and new teachers, it’s
good enough for those who started
working last week or last year or
decades ago. It’s an easy slogan,
especially for employees interacting
with the public and unvaccinated
kids: No jab, no job.
CONTACT YOUR PUBLIC OFFICIALS
President Joe Biden: The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.,
Washington, D.C. 20500; 202-456-1111; to send comments, go to
www.whitehouse.gov.
U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley: D.C. offi ce: 313 Hart Senate Offi ce
Building, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C., 20510; 202-224-3753;
fax 202-228-3997. Portland offi ce: One World Trade Center, 121
S.W. Salmon St. Suite 1250, Portland, OR 97204; 503-326-3386;
fax 503-326-2900. Baker City offi ce, 1705 Main St., Suite 504, 541-
278-1129; merkley.senate.gov.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden: D.C. offi ce: 221 Dirksen Senate Offi ce
Building, Washington, D.C., 20510; 202-224-5244; fax 202-228-
2717. La Grande offi ce: 105 Fir St., No. 210, La Grande, OR 97850;
541-962-7691; fax, 541-963-0885; wyden.senate.gov.
U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz (2nd District): D.C. offi ce: 2182
Rayburn Offi ce Building, Washington, D.C., 20515, 202-225-
6730; fax 202-225-5774. La Grande offi ce: 1211 Washington Ave.,
La Grande, OR 97850; 541-624-2400, fax, 541-624-2402; walden.
house.gov.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown: 254 State Capitol, Salem, OR
97310; 503-378-3111; www.governor.oregon.gov.
Oregon State Treasurer Tobias Read: oregon.treasurer@
ost.state.or.us; 350 Winter St. NE, Suite 100, Salem OR 97301-
3896; 503-378-4000.
Oregon Attorney General Ellen F. Rosenblum: Justice
Building, Salem, OR 97301-4096; 503-378-4400.
Oregon Legislature: Legislative documents and information
are available online at www.leg.state.or.us.