In the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the media was not covering precisely in glory. To quote itself from the early February 2020 work, the US was already confirmed when the virus had already spread in China for over a month.
Last week or so, new cases of the 2019-NCOV coronavirus have skyrocketed. So the news article scolded us for worrying about it. “Don't worry about the coronavirus, worry about the flu,” BuzzFeed insisted. The flu “poses a bigger and greater risk,” the Washington Post said. “Why should we fear something in this country that doesn't kill people here?” an epidemiologist debated in the LA Times. Other outlets agreed. The former White House health advisor told Americans to “stop being panic and hysterical.”
My article argued that worrying about the coronavirus might have been a bit reasonable. But of course I also made some important mistakes. I wrote:
Similarly, conspiracy theories have circulated that the virus escaped from Uhan's lab. (Not true.) And there is a Different theory of conspiracy that was designed by Bill Gates (Funded to a research group that conducted pandemic control exercises on the virtual deadly coronavirus). (And not true either.) Internet trolls have spread false claims that bleaching can protect the coronavirus. (Don't do this.)
Two of these conspiracy theories were actually ridiculous, but one was correct. The virus could have absolutely escaped from Uhan's lab. We probably never know, but we certainly know that many scientists have publicly claimed this is a wild conspiracy theory that they personally worry about being true.
But my article is not the main thing that people think when asking how people feel that Vox is dealing with the early coronavirus crisis. Instead, almost everyone I talk to remember another article in which a week later (VOX vertical at that point) was run.
The film has the headline “No Handshake, Please”: The Technology Industry Fears Coronavirus” and does not actually contain blatant factual inaccuracies, but the tone is very clear.
“CDC data suggests that influenza is a greater threat to Americans than coronavirus. However, unlike influenza, the coronavirus is new and poorly understood, making it particularly scary to the public, including Silicon Valley elites,” the article argues. But of course, even at that early moment of the pandemic, it was completely right to be more nervous about a novel coronavirus with a much broader range of possible outcomes than known health threats like the flu.
Few people in the Bay Area talk about Vox's performance on Covid-19 here. I remember my article pushing back fires and people should take Covid more seriously. Almost all of them remember the light empty that the record articles felt encouraged them.
The lesson here is that for the media and for those who work in public communication, it's much easier to lose trust than to get it.
Move forward without looking back
A few weeks later, Europe was hit hard by its first devastating covid surge – a patient struggling to breathe in the hallway as the hospital is overwhelmed, bodies piled up – the media began to take Covid seriously.
In a way, this is exactly what should happen. People changed their minds when they saw new information. However, the fact that there were sudden fluctuations was rarely recognized.
That's pretty big when journalists write works that contain clear factual inaccuracies that require correction. I had to issue an amendment and a considerable number of people are involved. My boss has to spend a lot of time working with me on the language and their boss has to sign off.
Modification is a media priority. People drop a lot of other work and fix the fragments. Journalists feel the real pressure to be virtually not wrong and correct them when they do. Reporters who have written several works that require serious corrections are the kind of thing that will definitely be shown negatively in their performance reviews.
However, the pieces are not necessarily wrong in fact, not only are they framed by mistake, but there is no clear mechanism of similar reflection. That's a problem. Because framing can do a lot to misunderstand the reader for facts.
Prices that ignore what's wrong
In the case of the Covid pandemic, early coverage that dismissed people's fears and suggested that they probably slowed our collective responses has finally reduced the credibility of media and public health communicators when serious responses were needed to be convened later.
Many of the drawbacks here are public health officials, many who initially downplayed the threat and called laboratory origin theory a conspiracy. However, in many cases, the media tended to deal with these declarations without guaranteed skeptic questions, particularly given uncertainty. And I chose to highlight early February spats on whether Covid had less concern than the flu, but this pattern was repeated over and over again.
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The initial justification for the lockdown was that the initial responders were not overwhelmed, and it was necessary for several weeks to slow the spread. However, these lockdowns have since persisted without explicitly acknowledging that plans had been changed. With masks, the line went from “masks should be of little use and should be reserved for the first responder and doctor” (contradictions here are rarely accepted) to “masks are important.”
Outdoor gatherings were always much safer than indoor gatherings (and I said early on here on VOX), but many public health officials criticized outdoor gatherings.
All of these changes happened without much reflection on why we were wrong before. Each of them spent the necessary credibility desperately on Americans. Frankly, it meant treating people so that they weren't too smart, causing immeasurable damage to the trust of the people in the long run.
So why didn't there be any more calculations? The main reason is that there is a very strong incentive to prevent all involved from participating in one.
It was almost inevitable that everyone would get something fundamentally wrong, as new as Covid. When we open the Pandora overview and accountability box, our mistakes are much greater than the correct call.
Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, one of the better pandemic commentators, wrote earlier this week about how he lied about possible Covid Lab leaks. She encountered almost universal hostility from Twitter. This denounced all the bad New York Times coverage related to the entire pandemic.
Better ways to cover uncertainty
I expect an overwhelmingly negative reaction to this work. In this work, everyone probably forgot (initially accepts dismissing the lab's leak theory. Ours is a media environment that doesn't encourage you to admit your error. It's much safer to drill a hole in a memory hole.
With Covid, this was further exacerbated by the fact that there are still major differences of opinion about important questions about our answers. I think masks work to prevent spreading illnesses, but I think they made the wrong trade-off by requiring children to wear masks.
But that is not satisfying for anyone who thinks that all masking policies are wrong and that true community admission for error means admitting that masks didn't work. I think the vaccine was great, so my takeaway on lessons from Covid for half of the countries that think it's bad is not convincing.
With all that in mind, it's not shocking that there was no real community calculation. But I think it's very damaging.
Each of us has lived through devastating times during the pandemic. Many of us have buried our loved ones. Many people were dealing with fatigue in overcrowded hospitals. Many were later asked to make sacrifices that felt treated with light empt and indifference.
It was a massive, collective, global event and now there is little to talk about it.
Therefore, the long-term impact of Covid echoes domestically. It is absolutely aversive to think seriously about declining trust in institutions, the next pandemic, preventing failed schools, and increasing isolation. And everything unfolds without real clarity about how we got here and how to make sure it never happens again.
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