COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 24/06/2020
Jon Allsop
ON MARCH 9, I wrote in this newsletter about the challenges of covering COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus that was, at that time, spreading rapidly around the world. That newsletter very quickly came to feel like a dispatch from a different world—yet, reading it back again now, the many things that haven’t changed seem more notable than those that have. Back then, a spike in confirmed cases in the US was causing alarm. This week, that’s true again; as the New York Times put it on Monday, “new Covid-19 clusters have been found in a Pentecostal church in Oregon, a strip club in Wisconsin, and in every imaginable place in between.” When I wrote in early March, Trump had just said that he hoped a cruise ship with a COVID outbreak would stay offshore because he didn’t want to inflate the case count on US soil; yesterday, Trump confirmed that he wasn’t kidding (as his aides insisted he was) when he said, over the weekend, that he’d asked officials to slow down COVID testing because it’s showing the spread of the virus. That same week in March, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was just starting to become a national figure, told Congress that the US’s testing set-up was “a failing”; yesterday, Fauci told Congress that the US does not have the virus under control. From a journalistic standpoint, the coverage challenges I listed in March—including the risks of making the virus story all about Trump, rampant disinformation, and our lack of access to good data, all amid the dire financial state of the media industry—are all still with us.