As she wound down a frenzied workweek spent delivering an article on the coronavirus to editors at The New Republic, and having published coronavirus op-eds in The Lancet and Foreign Policy, author and journalist Laurie Garrett was pondering whether to join a chorus of TV analysts on the pandemic.
“I told CNN I wouldn’t appear on there anymore unless they would answer my questions about [COVID-19] transmission in their newsroom … They use the same brushes and lipsticks and [make-up artist] hands on everybody,” said Garrett, describing what’s happened behind the scenes when she’s previously discussed infectious disease on that network.
Appearing on TV or elsewhere to weigh in on the coronavirus pandemic, and to correct disinformation from President Trump and some Trump aides, feels as much an urgent duty as her job, said Garrett, whose on-the-ground coverage of Zaire’s Ebola outbreak won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism.
She and other writers on the health, medicine and science beats, indeed, form a rarefied frontline of unprecedented, round-the-clock news coverage that, in their eyes, is among the most critical that many of them have ever done.
“We’re in uncharted waters. The media is playing this story in more directions than I’ve ever seen” a single news topic played, said David Oshinsky, whose tome, “Polio: An American Story,” won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for history. His “America's Forgotten Epidemics” essay ran March 13 in The Wall Street Journal.
It’s hard to say whether the overflow of headlines about COVID-19, the scientific name for coronavirus, is wholly good or wholly bad, historian Oshinsky said, while he waited on that Friday morning to hop a bus from Manhattan’s Port Authority for the 70-mile ride to his home in New Hope, Pa. The bus company was preparing to shut down service earlier than usual.
Oshinksy, a professor at NYU Langone Health, where he directs the medical humanities division, continued: “But, again, there’s no way you can minimize a story like this. This virus appears to be spreading. Previous coronaviruses burnt out early; this one is different. This makes for enormously good copy. There’s a breaking story about coronavirus — important or not — every time you turn around.
“Is that a good thing? Medical issues have been largely overlooked in textbook and student learning in comparison to diplomatic history and military history …. Medical history is a footnote. It does not arise until something like this happens.”
That more than 50 million people globally died of the 1918 influenza pandemic — 500 million were infected — should neither be a relative footnote nor a fact largely unknown by today’s general public, Oshinsky said. Though President Wilson was being treated for the flu back then, Oshinsky noted, he commanded his physician to publicly announce that he merely had a cold. Spain, a neutral nation during World War I, accepted having that pandemic dubbed “Spanish influenza,” and was persuaded to do so by leaders of warring nations trying to dodge any suggestion that the pandemic began inside their borders.
“No one wanted to give the appearance that they were vulnerable to the enemy,” Oshinsky said. “There was all this censorship. Now, we’re in the opposite situation. We have a huge global media that is hyping this story in every way possible. Every day a new story unfolds: Dr. Fauci will say this, or Vice President Pence will admit that. This is a story of incredible gradations.”
Which makes it all the more critical that journalists reporting the coronavirus story rely on non-partisans such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the physician heading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has served under six presidents, said Sheree Crute, a 20-year health journalist, who is covering coronavirus.
“The trusted sources are the epidemiologists, the researchers, the empirical, fact-based scientists and other workers on the frontlines of this,” said Crute, editor-in-chief of Fierce for Black Women and a former board member of the Association of Health Care Journalists. “Any veteran reporter, any good reporter is aware that someone with a political agenda is not the one to talk to, unless it’s a local official explaining local quarantine or preventative methods or who to call if you’re charged $79 for hand sanitizer.”
Late on March 12, that health journalists’ association cancelled its annual conference, which was slated for Austin, Texas, and had coronavirus on the agenda.
Indeed, coronavirus itself is affecting how and where journalists are doing their work. An attendee at the annual Investigative Reporters & Editors conference was, on March 11, presumed to have coronavirus but was waiting for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmation of those initial test results. (The spouse of a second conferee, after being presumed to have coronavirus, actually tested negative.)
The Washington Post and The New York Times are among Pulitzer Prize-winning and other newsrooms that have ordered certain staffers to work remotely for a while.
Revenue from events, and advertising and tickets sales surrounding them, comprise 90 percent of revenue for Seattle-based The Stranger, its leaders wrote. Eli Sanders, its associate editor and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, tweeted an announcement about a Donorbox campaign launched to help the alternative news weekly stay afloat.
This transmogrified journalism landscape demands extra diligence, said freelancer Fran Kritz, who’s covered health for more than 30 years, and now handles assignments for, among others, NPR’s online news site.
“Two weeks ago, I was at a Council on Foreign Relations briefing on coronavirus. Seeing and hearing the experts in person is so well worth it. The caliber of questions was very different, very high,” Kritz said. “Some of what you learn is off on the sidelines, hearing the reporters’ questions that aren’t on television, and hearing other conversations.”
The nearest she’s now coming to that involves hitting “reply all” to her editors but also reporter colleagues who are now being included on emails about coronavirus. “People are trying to create the kinds of office meetings and sidebars we might usually be having in person but can’t do right now,” she said.
Also, Kritz said she is doing considerably more fact-checking and multiple-sourcing of stories. “I went to five sources when, under different circumstances, I might need just two. It was a piece on symptomology, and it’s important. What you’re writing, people are hanging their lives on.”
Laurie Garrett noted that the pressures on those covering coronavirus might not be as vast if health, science and medical writers had not, during the run-on of newsroom budget and staffing cuts, been among some of the first to be laid off.
Foreign Policy, for example, “paid me in the low hundreds for my last coronavirus piece. Obviously, I’m not doing this work for the money,” said Garrett, whose books include “The Coming Plague”, about emerging diseases and nations unequipped to handle them.
Still, as a freelancer, she bemoans the fact that she’s earning the salary she made decades ago as a journalist in her 20s. The loss of expertise from full-time, well-paid journalists who are deeply referenced and knowledgeable enough to accurately cover a pandemic is something news organizations, large and small, should be grappling with, she said.
“But I see no evidence,” she added, “that they’re even thinking about that.”