NYT fearmongering Covid-19
Covid-19 is bad enough without fearmongering. A recent NYT headline announced, “A Grim Measure of Covid’s Toll: Life Expectancy Drops Sharply in U.S,” explaining “American life expectancy fell by one year, to 77.8 years, in the first half of 2020.” A more honest reading of the statistics would be: Over the past year, due to Covid, the average American lost 9.5 days from their normal life expectancy. The NYT headline makes a preposterous projection; it makes sense only if the current Covid death toll continues for the next forty years.
Drawing on a recent federal government’s report, the headline is not “fake news,” the numbers are accurate. But the agency’s stress and the NYT framing show precisely what we argue in our forthcoming IPSR article: pandemic politics, in both media and academia, have fostered a drastic rise in global fear both for our health and about death. This collective existential anxiety has some benefits, not least the swift development of vaccines. But it has a darker side too: a grim material, mental, and moral, toll.
