Hard Lessons for Journalism in Covid’s Wake

Does a recent book finally herald a reckoning?

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

We live, I am afraid, in what history may call the Age of Trump, but I am even more confident it will term our time the Age of Covid. For all of that, however, as I have said before, we have woefully failed to come to terms with the pandemic, including in what it means for journalism, and what we need, as journalists, to learn from it.

A recent book may represent the beginning of the reckoning we need, and it is my subject this week. In Covid’s Wake hasn’t received the attention it deserves—it has not been reviewed in either the New York Times or the Washington Post—but it is well worth your time. The book is written by two politics professors at Princeton, and its subtitle is “How Our Politics Failed Us,” although the failures it catalogs extend well beyond politics, especially to both our universities and newsrooms.

The key findings of the book, persuasively documented, are guaranteed to discomfit both sides in our polarized country: first that the differences in lockdowns and mandates of 2020-21 between Blue and Red states did nothing to reduce deaths from Covid (take that, Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer et al.), but second that the variations in vaccination rates between the same states made a very significant difference in lives lost (take that, Donald Trump, Bobby Kennedy, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott).

My focus, however, is on what the book says about journalism, little of which is kind.

The dangers of MEOW

The overarching theme is that the pandemic became what William James called the “moral equivalent of war,” with the press doing what it too often does in wartime, which is to suspend skepticism and sometimes even inquiry. Think Vietnam and Iraq. In this case, it too readily accepted the arguments made by one side of a scientific debate on the efficacy of what are called “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs), including lockdowns and mandates. The authors cite specific, and in retrospect quite embarrassing examples of contemporary coverage on the questions of whether NPIs really reduced death tolls in the 1918 pandemic (the debate goes on) and whether imposing national lockdowns earlier in 2020 would have saved lives in the long run (probably not).

Too many journalists were not only insufficiently inquisitive, they also too readily accepted and reinforced a narrow approach to public health articulated by National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, who later sought to explain, “If you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. It doesn’t matter what else happens.” Even some journalists believe this.

Having now taught about engaging with the press at Harvard’s School of Public Health for four years, I can say that Collins’s view is far from universal. Questions of mental health, education loss and economic hardship, for instance, are all very much public health questions. If some scientists wish to adopt such a narrow view of public policy, it must remain to those at higher pay grades— our elected leaders— to not simply accept their conclusions, and to take a broader view. Journalists must play a role in informing that broader public debate. Too often in 2020-22 they did not do so, failing to consider the merits, for instance, of Sweden’s quite different, and in many ways ultimately more successful approach to the pandemic.

Taking the lab leak hypothesis seriously

One of the greatest failures, discussed at length in In Covid’s Wake, concerns the question of the origin of the pandemic, and specifically the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan. Here the journalistic shortcomings were initially mostly derivative of one in the scientific community, where leaders, including Drs. Collins and Fauci, seem to have suppressed debate, apparently because they feared the consequences that might follow, particularly with Trump in office, from a finding of Chinese responsibility. But widespread journalistic credulity on this point persisted far too long.

To some extent, that remains the case. We may not know what happened with Covid in China, from outset to outcomes, so long as the current regime there remains in power. It is remarkable, for instance, that we still have no reliable estimates of the Chinese death toll from the disease. If the Chinese government is unwilling to be honest about that, why believe anything else they offer on the subject—or assume nothing else is being withheld?

A couple of caveats

In Covid’s Wake is far from perfect. Written by two self-described liberals, its entire focus is on the failings of liberals, indeed a failure of liberalism itself. If only those on the left read the book, that might make sense as a corrective. But if the book ever achieves the audience it deserves, the failure to chart in depth the failures of the right, beginning with Trump and his first term team and extending to his acolytes in the states and the press, now embodied by Kennedy and still by Fox News, will represent a fathomless gap.

For a volume written by politics professors, the book also seems quite naïve about politics. It sagely observes, for instance, that all the key state governors who took varying approaches to the outbreak were re-elected, and that voters on both sides of the partisan divide thus could be said to have obtained the results they preferred. But the book fails to delve into why this might have been so. It makes much, for instance, of how the March 2020 epidemiological model that predicted 2.2 million deaths in the US was influential even though badly erroneous, but fails to ask if things would have played out differently if the model had instead—correctly—predicted 1.3 or 1.4 million American fatalities. I don’t think they would; more than a million deaths is still astounding, and the prospect would have been equally terrifying in the moment.

With those caveats, however, there is considerable wisdom in this narrative. The authors at one point sum up what they are seeking for the next time—and there will be a next time:

“We need greater humility and tolerance of disagreement and more honest communication of uncertainty from public health and other experts. We need greater respect for reasonable dissent, especially when it comes from the other side of the political spectrum. We also need more humility from public health authorities and a clearer acknowledgment that public health guidelines often rest on inconclusive evidence and a set of considerations far narrower than those relevant to a balanced weighing of all values affected when regulating the whole of society.”

Journalists would do well to take these goals to heart as guides to our own work.