If you are a centrist, empiricist Dad, the handwringing is that the media [tv + radio+newspapers] already seems overwhelmingly right wing and anti-empiricist/anti-evidence.
Dilemma: free media is part of a free society. Yet polarised and fragmented free for all media means that some people will never find out what is actually going on and make informed decisions.
Obvs given that @Dannythefink has diagnosed me as someone who is not even honest to themselves about their own honesty, and is secretly an anarchist, the centrist Dad comment should be taken with a pinch of salt.
The BBC was meant to solve this problem, but its attempts at doing so seem increasingly problematic from my vantage point. Both-siding issues to generate false balance. Expertise thin on the ground.
And an editorial policy that seems to have bent with the populist times, as the management fend off the threat to their charter, funding model and operational independence by sacrificing something by way of political independence.
If you really find yourself dismissing all this as 'handwringing' then this really does in my mind mean you have crossed over to the dark side, and have abandoned the attempt to uphold democratic standards in favour of power politics.
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Pre-Brexit, the Good Friday Agreement allowed unionists to enjoy the sense of being an integrated part of the UK, with no border between themselves and GB, and nationalists to enjoy being an integrated part of Ireland, with no border between NI and RoI.
The NI protocol within the Withdrawal Agreement, agreed by the UK government, constitutes a partial economic border between NI and GB. Hence loyalists rioting. This agreement was the inevitable consequence of the govt deciding to interpret the referendum as a hard Brexit.
Leaving the customs union and the single market makes a border either between NI and GB or between NI and RoI inevitable.
Labour calling for an economic impact assessment of the TCA Brexit deal is a tactic that took me by surprise. It's not consistent with what I thought was their approach which was to put fingers in the ears about Brexit and move on.
Obvs such an assessment is not going to be made to happen by the government. But raising the issue, knowing the call will not be heeded, naturally leads to saying 'and of course they don't because they fear it will show that there are very large economic costs...' etc.
But doing that leads them back where technocrats like me [not quite the right word for unemployed economist] got stuck pre-referendum, into territory that cut no electoral ice.
If you are a monetary economist encountering stories about Mitch McConnell it can be confusing as in certain poses he looks very like Mervyn King, ex BoE Governor, and half of your brain is thinking 'what the hell is he doing talking about race in the US?'
When you have proposed a particular hammer, obviously all problems look like a nail, but with that aside I think a proper integrated epidemiological-econ modelling body, independent of govt, could really be adding to the debate over lockdown exit and vaccine passports.
Although big picture there is not a trade-off between £ and health, there is once you get to the fine details, eg the exact timing of lockdown release, what to release for whom. And an attempt could be made to quantify the costs and benefits.
Similarly vaccine passports, which are partly about the strategy for the transition from here until max vaccine take-up [and also partly about dealing with nonvaccinated in the longer term], can be modelled so we know what the 'discrimination' is buying and who benefits.
BBC don't have to get this wrong and help the government out. There are lots of people on here who can help them understand why this was a false choice, and why the govt retrospectively want to maintain that it was a real one.
Fair enough to say 'the govt will try to paint this as the choice they had to make, that it was an agonizing one, but in fact most experts see this as a false choice, because locking down earlier would have saved lives and £...'
and to follow up with 'and they would argue that the govt is trying to cover up for a failure to see this by continuing to stress a trade-off that wasn't there'