Yesterday’s post was spun off a Chris Hayes tweet responding to Nate Silver, so to mix things up a bit, today’s is prompted by a Nate Silver tweet replying to Chris Hayes (screenshotted above for social-media purposes, but here are the tweets in case you’re some kind of masochist and want to click through to read the responses):
(I don’t really intend to turn this into a “Gripe about Chris Hayes” newsletter, this is just a bit of synchronicity. But, you know, at least I’m not Freddie deBoer…)
I agree with Silver that Paxlovid probably ought to count as unexpectedly good news— an easily administered treatment that reduces the risk of severe illness or death by 90% is potentially a game-changer for dealing with Covid-19. Its failure to get much traction relative to bad news isn’t terribly surprising, though— it’s a fairly direct consequence of the way the 24-hour news cycle works.
What I mean by that is that while this week’s newly released results on Paxlovid are good news, they’re also old news as reckoned by modern standards. This is an update to a story that broke more than a month ago, when they halted the trial early, and as such is already kind of “priced in” to the thinking of people reporting Covid news. There are some important new details in the recent updates, but they’re fairly technical, and don’t really change the basic picture, which is kind of inherently binary: a treatment is either safe and effective or it’s not. Having already reported “It’s safe and effective,” saying the same thing again with more Science Words doesn’t register as News.
And these kinds of stories get bit by the news cycle coming as well as going: this initial news of the trials got a somewhat muted response because while it’s good news, it’s good news whose positive consequences are kind of far in the future. Yes, the drug’s performance is amazingly encouraging, but it first has to pass the bureaucratic gauntlet to get official approval, which will take God knows how long, and then there are significant manufacturing bottlenecks. That makes the goodness of the news less immediate, and thus reduces the enthusiasm for reporting on it (which is already dampened a bit by the need for a lot of Science Words in the stories).
Put all that together, and it’s not surprising that encouraging news about treatments doesn’t get much play. These are inherently slow-moving stories, particularly ill-suited to the demands of the 24-hour news cycle which needs something colorably new to yell excitedly about at least daily, preferably hourly.
There’s also a kind of differential Tolstoy effect to positive vs negative Covid stories: all the positive stories are alike, while each negative story is news in its own way. Once you’ve had the initial release of encouraging data about a new treatment, every positive update is repetitive: “It’s still safe and effective.” The only way for a treatment to become News again is for the results to take an unexpected negative turn.
On the other hand, a negative story like the omicron variant involves something wholly new, with none of the key details known. Which means that every new detail is News. Most of these aren’t any more significant to the overall picture than incremental updates as a drug moves through the testing and approval process, but they’re new, which means they can be grist for the news cycle in a way that paxlovid really can’t.
This is a particularly clear example of the process, but this same basic thing plays out in all sorts of reporting. Another good recent example is the grumbling about Biden not really getting much play for the final passage and signing of the bipartisan infrastructure bill: it got written up back in the summer when it passed the Senate, so by the time it passed the House and was signed into law, it was priced in and didn’t feel like News any more. Back when it was passed, though, the response was muted by the knowledge that it would be delayed in the House, so it never really paid off. But meanwhile, every gnomic utterance by any random Senator about the BBB bill is News— they just said this today!—and those almost invariably look bad for the Democrats.
This is all of a piece with the problem of journalistic norms that I’ve gone on about in previous rants. It’s not a matter of dis- or mis-information, it’s a deeply ingrained part of the worldview that constantly demands novelty, even when it’s wildly unreasonable given the time scales of the processes involved. The need for attention-grabbing hooks pushes inexorably toward more negative stories, all the time, and it’s helping make everybody crazy.
So, that’s me back on my bullshit again; if you find this sort of bullshit congenial, or know somebody else who would, here are some buttons:
And if you’d just like to tell me it’s bullshit, the comments will be open.