DREW HOLDEN: A COVID Autopsy, Part 5: ‘Kids Will Be Resilient with Lost Education.’
But perhaps no legacy media coverage failure about COVID was worse than the threat the virus posed to kids, and what steps the government should take in response. Remember the fight over school closures?
Amid the push to reopen after 15 Days to Slow the Spread, and for months (and even years) thereafter, legacy media fought tooth-and-nail against efforts to allow students to return to in-person learning. As parents were trying to figure out how to ensure their children’s education could continue amid the pandemic, legacy media outlets were preaching panic at every turn.
Take the New York Times. As late as August 2020, the outlet was publishing headlines asking “As the Coronavirus Comes to School, a Tough Choice: When to Close” – a when, mind you, not an if, even five months after lockdowns started. It was a perspective, published as straight news, seemingly encased in amber of what the paper said back in March. Under a section titled “A growing consensus,” NYT alleged, the increase in school closures was “reflecting a growing consensus that the benefits of closings outweigh the harms, especially since many of the harms can be mitigated,” highlighted by the fact that “a transition to e-learning is possible.”
The paper went further. Despite a paragraph of disclaimers about expert concerns that “the effect of school closings is extremely difficult to predict because of unknowns like how infectious children are and because of the difficulty in separating out the effect of school closures from other measures that states took to control the virus” and that, at the time, “testing was especially limited and spotty, raising questions about how well the number of confirmed cases reflected actual infections,” the Times’ title of the piece (just in time for the debate on whether to cancel a second year of in-person school) was definitive: “School Closures in the Spring Saved Lives, Study Asserts.” And it wasn’t enough for the Times that public schools locked their doors – “If Public Schools Are Closed, Should Private Schools Have to Follow?”
But it wasn’t just the Times – the message that it was too dangerous to allow students to go to school was everywhere.
Read the whole thing.