Revisiting legacy press claims from early in the pandemic.
The indictment of a top aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci, formerly of the National Institutes of Health, for misleading the public on COVID has kicked off a renewed effort to hold the experts accountable for dishonesty and deceit about the virus. But do we really remember the start of the pandemic? What the experts and their handmaidens in the legacy media said was true, and what definitely – allegedly – wasn’t?
Those were heady days. Information about the virus and its danger were hazy; leaders and everyone else were scared about what was to come. It can feel uncharitable to look back critically at the pronouncements and decisions made at the time considering that.
But these were not forgivable missteps, or slightly missed calculations. The failures were era- and generation-defining.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. Governments and elected leaders were the decision makers, after all. But I feel like we’re in danger of letting the legacy press off the hook. The institution of the media has constitutionally enshrined protections precisely because they are supposed to hold government to account – and what could have been a more vital time to do so than when governments at all levels were wielding more power, limiting individual freedom more dramatically, than any time in recent history?
Instead, the legacy media became watercarriers for the use of government force, and the hall monitors of lockdowns and mask mandates and all manner of other restrictions.
Every prediction, every warning, every scold, was delivered with complete certainty by media-selected experts and their legacy press messengers, paired with a know-it-all condescension toward anyone who might even ask questions. It was The Science, after all.
I fear we’re already forgetting just how wrong the press and its collective cadre of experts were about combatting a pandemic, how misleading legacy media reporting on The Science was, and the attendant harm suffered across America as a result.
Yes, there was much these individuals couldn’t have known at the time. So why did they act like they did?
This is the first entry in a four-part series I’m calling “A COVID Autopsy,” to try to remember just how misguided, just how ridiculous, just how wrong so much of what was alleged by the press at the time turned out to be. And in some small way, capture the damage done as a result (most of that will come in Part 4).
In an attempt to capture the scale of failure and hypocrisy and synthesize the specific instances thereof, I’m breaking out each piece in the series by specific topics, from lockdowns to school closures and beyond. I’ve tried to denote places where those making the predictions had reason to think otherwise, and also call out the hypocrisy when these groups went from confidently declaring one thing to reversing course and asserting the exact opposite with the same conviction – a pattern that reliably appeared just as soon as a certain president weighed in.
Each of these topics has enough inaccuracy and deception to dedicate a whole piece to. On some, I’ve linked to my own longer attempts at doing that, or to the work of others doing likewise. Buckle up, there’s a lot.
The Novel Coronavirus
To help remember what the sequence of events was, there’s no place better to start than on the initial coverage of COVID and lockdowns.
You may have forgotten, but in what became a theme of COVID, the initial coverage was far different in tone and substance than where it would end up. In many cases, the dividing line in coverage wasn’t about the facts or even The Science, but about what President Donald Trump was saying at a particular moment in time.
Let’s start with masks. While the legacy press, The Science, and Democrats would eventually shift to dogmatic support for wearing a mask at all times as the only way to be a decent citizen (CNN, August 5, 2020: “The debate over masks today is a lot like the decades-long fight to mandate seat belts.” captures it well), each of these groups doubted the efficacy of what would soon become a symbol of the pandemic. The legacy media were of one voice in early 2020: stop buying masks, they don’t work, and shortages will hurt health care workers. Remember?
CNN, January 28,2020: “There’s been a run of surgical masks in the US because of the coronavirus scare. You don’t need them, physicians say.”
USA Today, February 17, 2020: “Top disease official: Risk of coronavirus in USA is ‘minuscule’; skip mask and wash hands.”
NPR, February 25, 2020: “Health Officials Warn Americans To Plan For The Spread Of Coronavirus In U.S.”: “Experts say that commonly worn surgical masks aren’t very effective protection.”
CNN, March 2, 2020: “Masks can’t stop the coronavirus in the US, but hysteria has led to bulk-buying, price-gouging and serious fear for the future.”