Working at the Washington Examiner, the view through my office window is usually of an urban alley behind a 16th Street club two blocks north of the White House. To my left, through a glass wall, I normally see reporters and editors busy at desks in rows stretching down the newsroom toward 15th Street.
It’s not like that these days. The newsroom is empty and the lights are off. Instead, at a makeshift desk on the second floor of my house several miles away, my view is out over suburban backyards, where spring flowers bloom and children play on swingsets. There are, then, some small compensations for social distancing.
But this is no buoyant springtime. America’s 330 million people are caught in a pincer movement between a deadly disease and a deep economic recession that may be the only way to avert hundreds of thousands, even millions, of deaths. One or two people who were alive during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which killed 50 million people, are still with us, but none of us alive today can remember anything like what we are now going through.
The entire staff of the Washington Examiner is working flat out to bring readers all the latest developments, all necessary information, and all the most compelling stories of the coronavirus pandemic. Our 10 a.m. editors meeting, now via conference call, has become a sort of coronavirus task force. Perhaps 80% of stories and commentary are now devoted to the crisis gripping the nation ever tighter.
Our White House reporters are covering the response of President Trump and his administration to the pandemic, our campaign staff report on how it has utterly changed the electoral calculus, demolishing plans for summer conventions and sidelining the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Joe Biden. Reporters covering healthcare, energy, environment, defense, national security, foreign policy, and much more write every day about how the microscopic scourge has infiltrated every policy and political proposal of the federal government.
This is now our life and our work. At the same time, we know that readers’ lives have also been turned upside down to just as great an extent as ours. First, let me wish you the very best during this difficult time — the best of health and best of good fortune. We would also like to hear from you, so we know we are being as responsive as possible to your concerns, needs, and interests. Please email us at [email protected] to let us know how you are doing and, if you want, how we are doing.
The magazine this week tries to look ahead to a better time beyond the dark days we are now in and examines how the United States can get moving again after this terrible setback — how we emerge from the crisis, how we save the economy, and how we must reform regulations, so we are better able to deal with any such calamity in the future.
