The signals were everywhere and we ignored them. Collectively. Governing bodies, politicians, and journalists.

A query with the catchy expression “global pandemic” or “global pandemic preparedness” in scientific databases, restricted to a 2009–19 range, will return more than 1400 results in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), 30 in-depth papers in ArXiv (Cornell University), and a stunning 17,000 results in Google Scholar, which aggregates multiple repositories. As for the general public, it had the choice between no less than 98 TED Talks on the matter.

We had no excuses.

Even if government officials didn’t put it on the agenda, why did the media not perform its watchdog role? Why didn’t we question preemptively the obvious unpreparedness of the public and private structures?

The causes are multiple: loss of expertise, a shift in priorities toward superficiality, and the failure of editorships unable to overcome rampant shortcomings.

One of the main casualties of the continual newsroom depletion is the loss of expertise. I have addressed this issue many times over in the Monday Note. The last time was in my 2020 “predictions”, in which I expected a shift in a good direction for newsrooms:

→ Modern newsrooms will increasingly rely on external expertise to address complex issues. Anyone starting a news operation today would rely on a small core of seasoned editors, some in-house specialized writers, and build networked expertise (this will require a novel HR approach with subcontracting to secure good journalism and pay for it accordingly).

At the same time, I was calling on journalism schools to create dedicated curricula aimed at seasoned professionals willing to switch to journalism.

While I was maybe optimistic about this trend materializing, I was right on the urgent need to consider it. The COVID-19 tragedy gave us a telling example.

What would have changed? Many things could have been different. First, scores of scientific works warning about the general unpreparedness would have been noticed and (perhaps) led to some pressure on governments.

Just before the H1N1 episode in 2009, France had accumulated an inventory of 1 billion high protection masks (N95 equivalent). It was the consequence of the SARS epidemic. In the same way, the government had stored 20 million doses of vaccine. Later, the Health Ministry responsible for this precaution was blasted for this “excessive” stockpile — which was eventually destroyed as it decayed. Its successors elected not to renew the inventory, invoking the fact that there was a profuse supply — in China. A journalistic opus was made by a TV correspondent named Elise Lucet, known to favor style — trailing people with her mic — over substance. At some point, she asked the former health minister how she looked at herself in the mirror after this costly decision. A bitter vindication ensued for the former official as France was confronted with a depleted stock of masks.

Newsrooms harboring experts — in house, or more realistically, on retainers — would have been more likely to read low-noise signals or even connect the dots of apparently unrelated facts, to put together a true picture of what is unfolding. (Artificial Intelligence in newsrooms will eventually help — an emerging field called “story detection” — but it was not ready this time…)

The shortage of experts is also rooted in a priority shift that plagues major news organizations. All of them became obsessed with not being left in the dust by digital-native organizations riding the wave of social networks. As a consequence, newsroom managers, supported by bean-counters, found it clever to hire bunches of expendable digital “content” serfs who were mandated to keep up with the social frenzy. It was seen as a better investment than keeping a former doctor turned medical correspondent, even if he or she was loaded with decades of expertise, able to lean on a reliable network on practitioners, surgeons, epidemiologists, public health officials, etc. A pure cost vs. benefit choice, and ultimately a bad one.

This evolution towards shallowness had two consequences: an inability to deal with complexity and a tendency to yield to sensationalism. Two opposite examples:

On March 26, the New Yorker published a compelling story by Siddhartha Mukherjee describing the destructive mechanism of a coronavirus inside a patient. Mukherjee is a renowned physician, specialized in oncology and biology, and has won multiple awards for his biography of cancer. His 4500-word story last week is deeply reported through the lens of an expert. The story has a rare information density: it describes 239 concepts andis supported by 39 citations of academic and scientific works. A journalistic masterpiece.

The author illustrates perfectly the need for mastering complexity in a matter as sensitive as biology and epidemiology:

Most epidemiologists, given the paucity of data, have been forced to model the spread of the new coronavirus as if it were a binary phenomenon: individuals are either exposed or unexposed, infected or uninfected, symptomatic patients or asymptomatic carriers. Recently, the Washington Post published a particularly striking online simulation, in which people in a city were depicted as dots moving freely in space — uninfected ones in gray, infected ones in red (then shifting to pink, as immunity was acquired). [Note: It looked like this, and was indeed spectacular:]

Each time a red dot touched a gray dot, the infection was transmitted. With no intervention, the whole field of dots steadily turned from gray to red. Social distancing and isolation kept the dots from knocking into one another, and slowed the spread of red across the screen.

This was a bird’s-eye view of a virus radiating through a population, seen as an “on-off” phenomenon. The doctor and medical researcher in me — as a graduate student, I was trained in viral immunology — wanted to know what was going on within the dots. How much virus was in that red dot? How fast was it replicating in this dot? How was the exposure — the “touch time” — related to the chance of transmission? How long did a red dot remain red — that is, how did an individual’s infectiousness change over time? And what was the severity of disease in each case?

Truth is, in most newsrooms there is no one who bothers with this kind of granular questioning, which would inevitably undermine the visual feast of spectacular infographics produced by the Post, the New York Times or the South China Morning Post.

At the polar opposite of such journalistic rigor sits widespread clusters of editorial sloppiness, powered by laziness, approximation, and bias. This is my second example.

On March 29th, Le Monde published a 1700-word story featuring a volunteer for the vote-counting after the March 15 municipal elections in France. Amid a serious controversy, the French government decided to go ahead with the vote, despite increasingly stringent measures to contain the epidemic. A bad decision, in retrospect, resulting from a combination of political pressure from everywhere, met by a certain lack of backbone from President Emmanuel Macron.

All the 70,000 voting stations in France were carefully prepared, nothing was left to chance. Most likely a zero-risk of contamination. Altogether, about 200~250,000 volunteers were involved in operating the stations and counting the ballots. As expected from such a large cross-section of the French population, some caught the virus, without any certitude on how they got contaminated. This uncertainty did not deter Le Monde from publishing an “investigation” topped with a catchy headline referring to the tragic fate of the “Kamikaze of Democracy” (a character’s juicy quote), as if Macron had used these people as Chernobyl “liquidators” (as of today, none of them has developed any complication).

The story, written by no less than four reporters, is a textbook example of approximation, prejudice, and falsehood, with anecdotes such as a volunteer developing the first symptoms right after the closing of the voting station. Never mind that there are no records of such an expedited incubation, it was too good of a story to pass on or to fact-check. Loaded with its great headline, the piece was well shared on social networks. The fact that such a story escaped all editorial filters also illustrates the inherent weakness of Le Monde’s current masthead. In due fairness, let’s mention that such blatant deficiencies are often compensated for by Le Monde’s frequent great journalistic work.

Addressing these errors will be hard, especially with the economic devastation the entire media industry is now facing (we will look at it in the next Monday Note). But the profession will not be spared by a serious introspection. To survive and justify online subscriptions (revenues will have to forgo the advertising line, for a while), newsmedia will have to be better at every critical level of the trade: reporting, grasping complex issues, explaining them, and above all resisting the pressure of immediacy and sensationalism. I’m certain we can still find sustainable models that aim in the right direction.. It will require new approaches, new training, and, to some extent, new people.

— frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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