nuclear-news

The next day’s news coverage (Bloomberg News, 3/23/20; New York Times, 3/23/20) confirmed what the tweet implied: At the end of March, the White House will consider lifting recommendations that US residents stay at home and engage in “social distancing,” in order to get the economy rolling again.

This would, public health experts agree, be a disaster, both in terms of death toll and as far as having any chance of eventually bringing the pandemic under control. The Imperial College London’s projections (3/16/20) of the consequences of an unmitigated epidemic are 2.2 million dead in the US alone, and likely a lot more after taking into account the impact of overwhelmed hospitals making it impossible to get care for other health needs.

Meanwhile, public health experts say it’s now too late for short-term measures to work (New Yorker, 3/20/20), with at minimum eight weeks of social distancing and other closures needed to bring infection rates down to less immediately dangerous levels, with repeat shutdowns likely necessary in the summer and fall until a vaccine can be tested and made available (New York Times, 3/17/20); Hong Kong has already had to restore more stringent measures just two weeks after it first lifted restrictions (CNN, 3/23/20).

Unfortunately, thanks to some of the same journalistic pitfalls that have undermined news coverage of early phases of the crisis (FAIR.org, 3/19/20), reporting on Trump’s statements ended up soft-pedaling the dangers of the economy-first approach, and denying readers important information on what will likely happen if the White House tries to lift restrictions too soon.

As is common in breaking news coverage, most reports took a just-the-facts approach to the matter, pairing Trump’s statements with disease experts’ warnings, and leaving it to readers to decide whom to believe. The New York Times (3/23/20), for example, led by reprinting Trump’s tweet, then countering it with the opinion of infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, who serves on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, that “it would take several more weeks until people can start going about their lives in a more normal fashion.”

That kind of journalistic balance is problematic enough when it presents elected officials’ opinions as equally important as those of public health experts, in the middle of a public health crisis. But as the Times article (by Maggie Haberman and David Sanger) continued, it tilted even further toward the words of politicians, not scientists: Those quoted included former Trump homeland security advisor Thomas Bossert (who called social distancing “imperative”), Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin (who described talk of a “complete shutdown of the economy” as “fake news”), Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham (who said the US shouldn’t “back off aggressive containment policies”), and anti-tax advocate and Reagan White House advisor David McIntosh (who said the government must “put an end to the social distancing some time in the near future to restore economic activity”). No actual scientists other than Fauci were cited.

Even on the numbers themselves, the Times skewed its coverage toward fears of an economic downturn: Its article twice cited the millions of job losses that would result from a long shutdown, but never mentioned the millions of deaths likely if the US chooses to lift restrictions too soon.

CNN (3/23/20), meanwhile, presented some coronavirus projection figures, though they were almost certainly too low, and framed as a question of exactly what monetary value to place on human lives:…. https://fair.org/home/presenting-trump-and-science-as-equals-isnt-balanced-its-dangerous/