America — and the media — needs a Covid reckoning

In the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the media did not exactly cover itself in glory. To quote myself from an early February 2020 piece, when the virus had already been spreading for more than a month in China and the US already had confirmed cases: > In the last week or so, new cases of the 2019-nCoV coronavirus have soared … so have news articles scolding us for worrying about it. “Don’t worry about the coronavirus. Worry about the flu,” BuzzFeed argued. The flu “poses the bigger and more pressing peril,” the Washington Post said. “Why should we be afraid of something that has not killed people here in this country?” an epidemiologist argued in the LA Times. Other outlets have agreed. An ex-White House health adviser has told Americans to “stop panicking and being hysterical.” My article made the case that maybe it was slightly reasonable to worry about the coronavirus. But of course, I got some crucial stuff wrong, too. I wrote: > Similarly, there’s a conspiracy theory circulating that the virus escaped from a Wuhan research lab. (Not true.) And there’s a different conspiracy theory that it was engineered by Bill Gates (who funds a research group that has done pandemic-control exercises about a hypothetical deadly coronavirus). (Also not true.) Internet trolls have spread false claims that drinking bleach protects against coronavirus. (Please don’t do this.) Two of those conspiracy theories were in fact absurd, but one was correct: the virus absolutely may have escaped from a Wuhan research lab. We’ll probably never know, but we know for sure that many of the scientists publicly asserting that this was a wild conspiracy theory privately worried that it was true. But my article isn’t the main thing that people think of when I ask them how they feel Vox handled the early coronavirus crisis. Instead, almost everyone I talk to remembers another article that Recode (at that time a vertical of Vox) ran a week later. The piece was headlined “‘No handshakes, please’: The tech industry is terrified of the coronavirus,” and while it doesn’t actually contain any blatant factual inaccuracies, the tone is very clear: Only a paranoid tech bro would be worrying about the coronavirus. “Data from the CDC suggests that the flu is a greater threat to Americans than the coronavirus. Yet unlike the flu, the coronavirus is new and not well understood, which makes it especially scary to the public, including Silicon Valley’s elite,” the article argues. But of course, even at that early moment in the pandemic, it was entirely correct to be more nervous about the novel coronavirus — which had a much wider range of possible outcomes — than a known health threat like the flu. Almost no one I talk to here in the Bay Area about Vox’s performance on Covid-19 remembers my article pushing back on dismissiveness and warning people should take Covid more seriously. Almost all of them remember the contempt they felt that the Recode article was encouraging toward them. The lesson here — for the media and for anyone who works in public communication — is that it’s much easier to lose trust than to gain it. Moving forward without ever looking back A few weeks later, Europe was hit hard with the first catastrophic Covid surges — hospitals overwhelmed, bodies piling up, patients struggling to breathe in hallways — and the media started taking Covid seriously. In a sense, this is exactly what is supposed to happen — people saw new information and changed their minds. But the fact that there was an abrupt swerve was rarely acknowledged. When a journalist writes a piece that contains a clear factual inaccuracy requiring a correction, it’s a pretty big deal. I’ve had to issue corrections, and quite a few people are involved: my boss has to spend a fair bit of time working with me on the wording, and their boss has to sign off. Corrections are a high priority in the media — people will drop lots of other work to get a correction to a piece up. Journalists feel real pressure not to get things factually wrong, and to fix them when they do. A reporter having written several pieces that needed serious corrections is the kind of thing that will absolutely show up negatively on a performance review. But there’s no clear mechanism for similar reflection when a piece doesn’t necessarily get the facts wrong, but just frames them wrongly. That’s a problem, because framing can do just as much to misinform readers as facts. The price of ignoring getting it wrong In the case of the Covid pandemic, early coverage that dismissed peoples’ fears and suggested they were irrational probably delayed our collective response — and lastingly decreased the credibility of the media and public health communicators when they later needed to muster a serious response. A lot of the fault here lies with public health officials, many of whom initially downplayed the threat and called the lab origin theory a conspiracy. But too often the media tended to treat these proclamations without the skeptical questioning that was warranted, especially given the uncertainty. And while I’ve chosen to highlight the early February spats over whether Covid was less concerning than the flu, this pattern repeated itself over and over again. --- This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. --- The initial justification for lockdowns was that we just needed a few weeks to slow the spread so our first responders weren’t overwhelmed; but then those lockdowns persisted, without clear acknowledgment that the plan had changed. On masks, the line went from “masks don’t help much and should be reserved for first responders and doctors” (the contradiction here rarely acknowledged) to “masks are crucial.” Outdoor gatherings were always much safer than indoor ones (and I said so here in Vox from early on), but a lot of public health officials criticized outdoor gatherings — up until the Black Lives Matter protests, at which point they largely said such events were fine. Every one of these changes happened without much reflection on why we had previously got it wrong. Every one of them spent credibility that was desperately needed with the American people. Every one meant treating people, frankly, like they weren’t very smart, and in the long run did incalculable damage to public trust. So why hasn’t there been more of a reckoning? The primary reason is that there are incredibly powerful incentives for everyone involved not to participate in one. With something as new and as fast moving as Covid, it was almost inevitable that everybody would get something radically wrong. When we open up the Pandora’s box of recriminations and accountability, our mistakes loom much larger than our correct calls. The sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, one of the better pandemic commentators, wrote earlier this week about how we were lied to about the possibility of a Covid lab leak. She was met by near universal, seething hostility from Twitter, which blamed her for all of the New York Times’s bad coverage of everything related to the whole pandemic. A better way to cover uncertainty I’m expecting a similar overwhelmingly negative response to this piece, in which I admit a mistake — initially dismissing the lab leak theory — that everyone had probably forgotten about. Ours is a media environment that doesn’t encourage acknowledging your errors; it’s much safer to memory hole them. With Covid, this has been made worse by the fact that there are still major disagreements over key questions about our response. I think that masks work to prevent the spread of disease, though I also think we made the wrong tradeoff in requiring kids to wear masks and generally refused to acknowledge what a major sacrifice they were for many people who just hated the feeling on their faces. But that’s not satisfying to someone who thinks that all masking policy was a mistake and that a true Covid admission of errors would mean admitting that masks didn’t work, period. I think the vaccines were great, so my takeaways on the lessons from Covid won’t be convincing to the half of the country that thinks the vaccines were terrible. Given all that, it’s not shocking that there hasn’t been a real Covid reckoning. But I think that has been very, very damaging. Every single one of us lived through a devastating period during the pandemic. Many of us buried loved ones. Many worked to exhaustion in overcrowded hospitals. Many were asked to make sacrifices that they feel were later treated with contempt and indifference. It was a massive, collective world-altering event — and now that it’s over we barely talk about it, because talking about it would mean reckoning with it and no one in power wants to reckon with it. So Covid’s long-term effects will reverberate through the country: lower trust in institutions, an absolute unwillingness to think seriously about preventing the next pandemic, failing schools, and rising isolation. And all that will unfold without any real clarity on how we got here and how we can make sure it never happens again. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

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America — and the media — needs a Covid reckoning