CITY JOURNAL – A 2018 Gallup poll found that 62 percent of Americans believe the media is biased. Did such bias affect coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic?
I run a research team in the department of epidemiology at the University of California–San Francisco.
In our report, the first to analyze a newspaper systematically, we found significant evidence of bias in the New York Times, considered by some to be the newspaper of record, on pandemic coverage—skewed toward overstating the threat posed by the virus.
Our study examined all corrections issued by the New York Times to articles relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. Between 2020 and 2024, the newspaper issued 576 corrections for 486 articles.
Naturally, in times of crisis, facing uncertain and evolving information, reporters will get facts wrong.
Sometimes they may, for instance, over- or underreport the number of children who have died or misstate the effectiveness of interventions like lockdowns.
If news organizations are unbiased, one would expect such errors to occur with relatively equal frequency.
That’s not what we found. Instead, the paper’s errors tended to exaggerate the harm of the virus (or the effectiveness of interventions). Corrections were made for such errors nearly twice as frequently as for errors that downplayed harms.
Fifty-five percent of errors overstated the harm of the virus, while only 24 percent understated (the rest were equivocal). In other words, when the New York Times got things wrong, it tended to do so in a way that falsely stoked fear and encouraged harmful social restrictions.
In October 2021, a particularly notable correction read as follows—inviting questions as to how such a remarkable mistake could make it into print at all:
An article on Thursday . . . misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children. It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic.
Glad they could straighten that out …
