Musings·Dec. 23, 2021·1 min

Covering COVID Like Trump

The press covered COVID the way it covered Trump, and a generation of journalists may know no other way.

A television studio drawn in plan view: a desk, three cameras, a control-room window, and two chairs facing each other across the desk drawn in red, called out: real perspective, two chairs, zero sources; one dimension, twenty feet — Studio, plan view.

Nearly two years into watching mainstream press cover COVID, I’m struck by how much it looks like covering Trump:

Parroting info—sometimes official, sometimes simply self-serving—to fill a newshole without a lot of deep reporting.

A near-infinite supply of drama-hands hot takes that drive readership at the cost of trust and division.

Coverage glancingly touching on what was actually said and done, then obsessively reporting about how people react to what was said and done.

An abandonment of editorial judgment—what wins is what gets eyeballs, context (or, many times, accuracy) be damned.

Increasing blocks of programming built around journalists interviewing journalists to provide Real Perspective(TM). (OK, so that one isn’t limited to Trump and COVID, but it’s an awful development.)

My wannabe-economist says this is just efficiency at work: These dynamics make COVID a fairly inexpensive and efficient topic to create journalism around. And there’s no denying some portion of the audience craves this level of wall-to-wall reporting. (Whether that’s a case of meeting demand or inducing demand is another discussion.

Still, I can’t help but wonder: When the dust settles, to what extent will we be left with a press that only knows how to report this way?

Newsrooms are largely young because young people are cheap; many of them will come out of this with the Trump/COVID dynamic as their only real reference for covering big news, and many experienced reporters and editors will have left the business.

That’s not a new problem for the industry, but the way we’re covering COVID (and Trump before it) is new. I can’t recall another extended period where the press got into such a homogenous rut.

I don’t know the long-term outcome of any of this. Maybe it’s just another brick in the sepulcher we’re building for journalism. Or maybe my worries are just another blah-blah in what I’ve come to call (and deride) as the journalism-despair industrial complex.

But as someone who’s been obsessed with the news for more than 40 years and working in or near it for 35? This feels different.

Greg W. Brooks. First published on Facebook, Dec. 23, 2021.