Coronavirus revisionism: When the media pretends their narrative is ‘reality’

Left-leaning explainer site Vox, even while chastising the White House and Fox News for previously downplaying the threat from the novel coronavirus, tweeted this:

So, what was the old tweet, and what do they mean by the wordy phrase “no longer reflects the current reality of the coronavirus story”?

The old, deleted tweet read thus: “What is this #coronavirus? It’s part of a family of viruses that attack the respiratory system. Should I travel during the outbreak? The CDC and the State Department advise avoiding China for now. Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.”

Notably, the Jan. 31 tweet didn’t say that this wasn’t at the time a problem. It flatly stated that coronavirus was not “going to be a deadly pandemic.”

Rather than apologize for an incorrect prediction and the hubris behind it, precisely the sort of thing Vox and journalists have been loudly criticizing others for, this tweet suggests that the “current reality” had changed. But that isn’t so. The reality is exactly the same. We were headed for a pandemic in late January, and now, we’ve got it. Now Vox is disappearing the evidence that it downplayed the coronavirus.

It starts to make sense if you realize the “reality of the coronavirus story” doesn’t mean “the truth of the matter.” It means “the narrative.”

That original Vox tweet downplaying the coronavirus was its arrogant response to conservative proposals to curb entry to the United States from China.

“Don’t Listen to Sen. Tom Cotton About the Coronavirus” was the HuffPost headline that same day. Cotton’s bad advice, as it happens, was in “calling for all Americans in China to ‘get out now.’” Cotton was “demanding the U.S. implement an extensive travel ban targeting China” and “proposing a ‘Manhattan Project-level effort to create a vaccine.’”

So, Cotton was the bad guy of the day. The narrative of the day, or, as Vox puts it, the “reality,” was that conservatives were fearmongering on this disease in what had to be a racist way. (Those conservatives happened to be right.)

The “reality of the coronavirus story” on Jan. 31 was also apparently that “China has moved swiftly to get the outbreak under control,” in the words of the Vox article linked to by the since-deleted tweet.

Come March, though, the narrative — sorry, the “reality” — was that the virus was killing thousands of people, and President Trump, far from overreacting with his travel ban, had, in fact, not done enough.

This is how news pages cover the world. Rather than communicate “just the facts,” they try to tell what they think is the deeper, truer story. This isn’t necessarily bad. We need context, after all, not just “facts.” There are 100,000 facts about the coronavirus every day, and most are useless to the average reader. (What would you do with the age distribution of recovered patients in hospitals in Madrid?)

So it’s up to reporters and editors to take in as many facts as possible and shape a story out of it. But the imperfect humans who assign, write, edit, and tweet these stories have biases and sometimes even a political agenda. More damning, some of them present their stories as objective “reality,” presuming to “explain” the whole picture to you, when all they really have is a set of somewhat-fact-based assertions from a particular perspective.

This helps you understand why so much of the media was happy to misrepresent what Trump said about states getting ventilators. Sure, they were distorting his remarks, but there was an underlying truth they wanted to get out. The federal government wasn’t taking a leading role, and in their mind, this was, first, a problem and second, a justification for misrepresenting what Trump actually said.

It’s the fake-but-accurate problem, which one encounters constantly when doing media criticism.

When the New York Times ran a deeply flawed study purporting to count the lies of President Barack Obama and those of Trump, and chart them on a line graph, I pointed it out. I noted Obama lies that were omitted and pointed out the silly false precision of “counting lies.” The general response was, ‘Come on, you KNOW Trump is more of a liar.’

In other words, the New York Times article made factual claims that were either false or faulty, but the story it was telling — that Trump is a big liar — was what really mattered.

Again, news stories will always be the curation of facts into a coherent narrative. We can’t avoid that. But journalists and editors shouldn’t be pretending their narrative is the “reality.”