'It's Not Who Has the Most Deaths; It's Who's Doing What to Prevent the Spread'
Janine Jackson
Janine Jackson interviewed journalist and FAIR.org contributor Neil deMause about reopening reporting for the August 7, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Janine Jackson: Listeners will have heard of Donald Trump's recent interview on the coronavirus in which, holding a colored bar graph, he told Axios’ Jonathan Swan that, “If you look at death, right here, the United States is lowest in numerous categories, lower than the world.” In reality, of course, the US has some 4.8 million confirmed cases of coronavirus, and 150,000 deaths and rising. Trump said, “It's under control as much as you can control it.” In reality, other countries that have reacted differently have had greater success in containing the virus.
The interview provided vivid, if unnecessary, evidence of Trump's angry ignorance and soullessness. But what's lost when the conversation stays framed around him, when media see their job as triangulating between Trump and the truth? There's a lot at stake—for journalism, but preeminently for the lives and health of the people of this country.
Here to bring us an update on coronavirus coverage is Neil deMause. He's a freelance journalist, a frequent contributor to FAIR.org and author. His most recent book is The Brooklyn Wars. He joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Neil deMause.
Neil deMause: Hey, good to be here, Janine.
JJ: Let's start with your latest piece for FAIR.org: You're talking about Melbourne, Australia, which just declared a “state of disaster.” But the piece is, on another level, about the United States, and about US reporting. What are you trying to convey there?
NdM: Yeah, so there was a fair amount of attention in the US and worldwide to the fact that Melbourne, which is the second-largest city in Australia, had declared a state of disaster, because the virus had come surging back at a level that they hadn't seen since the spring. And it has reestablished lockdown—only one person in the household can leave the house to go shopping—very strict measures.
But as I started looking into it more, I realized that Melbourne—even at the high rate of infection that they're seeing now—is still doing much better than the vast majority of the United States. If Victoria, the state in Australia that Melbourne is in, were a US state, it would be about in the top third, in terms of containing the virus. And this is obviously a problem.
And it's always difficult for the US media to really pay much attention to anything that doesn't affect the US. But when it does pay attention to another country, and the only lesson it takes is, ”Man, sure is tough to be Australian,” and not, “Oh my goodness, Australia is doing all this with even a moderate level of infection,” and, meanwhile, states like Florida, that have multiple times the infection rate, are doing very little, and you can go out and eat at restaurants in many parts of the state—that's the wrong lesson we should be taking.
JJ: In terms of comparison or context, we are seeing a focus on different states within the United States. Some of it looks like schadenfreude, you know, states that said, ”We don't need no stinking quarantine,” and then saw cases spike. But you think that there might be a distraction or a misdirection in just holding states up against other states, too simplistically?
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NdM: Yeah, I think one of the problems is it becomes this matter of scoring the standings, right? “Florida’s in the lead! No, now California is in the lead!” That's really not what it's about. I mean, go back three, four months, and it was New York and New Jersey that were in the lead. And that's how a pandemic spreads, right? It hits here, it hits there.
And it's not so much about who has the most deaths or even who had the most deaths last week; it's about who's doing what to try and prevent the spread and contain the spread, and what's most effective.
And I feel like that's what we're really missing in a lot of the coverage. There's an occasional article here or there that will say, “What's really effective? What can we do to reopen school safely, is going back into offices something we should be doing, is opening restaurants something we should be doing?”
But that gets lost in the noise of “Who has the highest death rate?,” you know, “What is this governor or that governor saying today?” Which is obviously much easier to report, but it's much less informative for people who are having to live through this.
JJ: And I think that we can acknowledge that this is uncharted territory; there are a lot of unknowns here. But I think it's fair to demand media address it as such, with appropriate disclaimers and acknowledging different degrees of certainty, and not, as you're kind of hinting at, just run it through the story machine, as if they already knew how things would turn out, and they can do their standard approach of quoting politicians and comparing states in a kind of horserace way.
But it always, in a way, comes back to who gets to speak, and who do journalists listen to to shape their stories? What are your thoughts about the sourcing in Covid stories?
NdM: Obviously, I will freely acknowledge, as a journalist, this is a hard story to cover, right? The facts are changing constantly. It's something that nobody knew anything about until a few months ago. It's not something that you can use your storehouse of past stories to go back and say, “Oh, OK, well, this is just another step in the story we've been telling for a long time.”
However, there is one way to make this a lot easier, which is to go to the experts who do know about this, right? And there are epidemiologists and infectious disease experts who have been studying, if not Covid, how epidemics go, and how vaccines work, and how social distancing works, and have been studying this for years and decades. And we're seeing a little bit of that, but way, way, way too little.
A perfect example was that story back in early July that spread like wildfire, about how vaccines might not be effective, because it looks like after you get Covid, your antibodies drop off quickly, right? This all started with a story, I think, in the San Francisco Chronicle, that was based mostly on one researcher who was not an infectious disease expert; he's a molecular biologist who was involved in trying to promote the idea that we should be studying treatments, rather than vaccines, because vaccines may or may not work. Which is a legitimate viewpoint, but it obviously means that he's someone who's going to be more inclined to say, “We have to pay attention to, well, could vaccines fail?”
JJ: Right.
NdM: And the rest of the epidemiology world, as FAIR reported, was not thinking this way, and since then, in the last few weeks, it’s come out as, “Actually, antibody rates come down, but it still looks like they stay at a high enough level, and your immune system is primed to create more,” —to where vaccines—there's no guarantees—but we should be able to expect them to work as well for Covid as for anything else.
So again, so many of these stories—What's safe to reopen? What we should be doing? Do masks work?—are something that you can easily get some information by just calling around and saying to the experts, “What do we know? What don't we know? And what can we tell the public?”
And that's the sort of thing that journalists are, again, doing occasionally, but not nearly enough, and need to be explaining in a way that gets to all the nuances, and explains, again, what we should be doing, what we don't know if we should be doing, and what we still need to study. It's not the kind of thing that modern journalism really is expert in, because it's much easier, again, to just go and find one expert saying, “Yeah, sure is really bad.” And then, you know, that's your headline. But that's not what the American public, and that's not what American policymakers, need at this point.
JJ: Can I just ask you, finally, it seems like a lot of stories seem to have an unspoken assumption that,
“Well, since we're not going to stop the virus, what's the best way to do X, Y or Z?” There's almost a giving up on the idea of true containment, and we seem to be talking about mitigation. Is that really where we should be? Is not the lesson that you have to control the virus in order to restart the economy, and go back to schools and all these other things? Some of the reporting I find very confusing, because it seems to start with the idea that that's just not possible.
 Neil deMause: "If you do want to reopen schools, far more important than paying attention to how much hand sanitizer there is on hand, is make sure there isn't a lot of virus out there that people can be catching." (photo: David Dyte)
NdM: Yeah. And one of the things that epidemiologists are saying very clearly is, If you do want to reopen schools, far more important than paying attention to how much hand sanitizer there is on hand, is make sure there isn't a lot of virus out there that people can be catching, right? That's how it's worked in other countries, in Europe and Asia, where they have started reopening schools. It's much safer to do it if the virus isn't running wild out in the community.
That is a lesson that seems to be really, really hard for everybody to understand, is that, when you're talking about containment, when you're talking about trying to get the viral levels down, it's not even just about saving people from getting sick or dying right now. It's about getting us back to a point where we can keep the virus at a very low level, so that you can start to do some things and reopen the economy and reopen schools, and maybe reopen offices and other indoor things (even though indoors is very dangerous), because you've created the context for that. And that's something, again, that I wish that the US media were looking more to other countries, and trying to see what's worked there; what can work here. But we're still not quite up to that point.
JJ: We've been speaking with journalist Neil deMause. You can follow his writing at deMause.net. Thank you so much, Neil deMause, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
NdM: Always a pleasure.
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