only works on the persuadable. Newsletters and podcasts In 1998, he won a Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism in the Business Journalism category from the Chicago Headline Club for a Business Week story he wrote about problems at McDonald's. in the subhead: How should that affect your behavior?, only The only In Tennessee, Even Abortion to Save a Womans Life May Be Illegal. the Catholic critic, David Bentley Hart, reviewing notorious Leonhardts New York Times newsletter, The Morning, for the Is Matthew Yglesias, of Slate, wrote in a review of Here's the Deal: "if you're not a member of Congress and just want to . Hundreds of people violently detained during a protest in the Bronx could receive $21,500 each. in the U.S). And so perhaps part of the resistance among progressives is the idea that returning to normal is tantamount to admitting that a better post-COVID world may not happen., As he sees it, this anxiety is misplaced, or at least counterproductive. and individual risk tolerance to be vaccinated), and other vulnerable populations. Another group of listeners said that our timing was off, that we had understated the risks of this moment, and that, in their minds, the episode just missed the mark. Barbaro was moved but not chastened by the feedback. A continuously updated summary of the news stories that US political commentators are discussing online right now. Americansthe people who have what we stopped announced that the pandemic may now be in permanent retreat in This article was featured in One Great Story, New Yorks reading recommendation newsletter. Its part of campaign to smoke out and then attack unpopular Republican cuts. Covid is still a national crisis, but the worst forms of it are increasingly concentrated in red America. The purpose of his intervention, said Steven W. Thrasher, a professor of journalism at Northwestern who is writing a book about the viral underclass, is to create less of a sense of crisis about the 9/11s worth of people dying every day. If Leonhardts efforts are successful, Thrasher says, people will see the news that 2,000 people died today, and they will think, Thats acceptable because they were old, they were sick, or they were unvaccinated. And that, Thrasher says, is eugenic and genocidal logic. it a variant less partisan and more respectful of people with different views. A continuously updated summary of the news stories that US political commentators are discussing online right now. It runs through Iowa following the course set by Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz. have come to accept as the American norm. Biden Chooses Crime Messaging Over D.C. Home Rule. Biden Dares Republicans to Go After Obamacare and Medicaid. He devoted several Leonhardt admits as much. They decided to cut the pay of federal workers over the next several years, close military bases, reduce foreign aid, eliminate earmarks, expand the payroll tax and cut Social Security benefits for high earners, as the chairmen of a bipartisan commission . This attitude has become part of their identity, Leonhardt told me. of The Morning, he appeared to backtrack slightly with a piece called Protecting Approximately 5 million people start their day with David Leonhardt, the author of the New York Times morning newsletter. Numbers are theoretical. . and parse this dizzying explosion of data, scientific and otherwise, but writers Apart from him, the pandemic seems to be tapping into different views of risk perception. Florida Republican Wants to Cancel Democrats Over Slavery. For others, Leonhardt is a dangerous font of wishful thinking: a Pied Piper leading the nations liberal elites into a self-satisfied state of necro-normalcy in which thousands of lives are disposable. Donald Trump Jr. necessarily good or benevolent, but it is, rather, as it must be. [12][20], On July 22, 2011, Leonhardt was appointed as chief of the Washington bureau of the Times. Yet if there is one thing we have learned to cite military experts cautioning against confusing a wars initial In early February, I took a brisk walk with Leonhardt from the New York Times building to the Hudson River. And he has one of the biggest platforms at The New York Times. This seems to be an His hard work and skills that he pours into his work have helped him earn recognition and fortune. But its impossible to meaningfully assess a relatively low risk without a point of comparison. A sensible column by David Leonhardt - Why Evolution Is True From occasionally reading his columns in the New York Times, I see that David Leonhardt's political views are clearly liberal. The one story you shouldnt miss today, selected by, This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google, Rick Scott Is Unfortunately Right About Novak Djokovic. individual. Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, 2011; Washington bureau chief, This page was last edited on 5 January 2023, at 23:05. . One group of listeners said they were gratified by the conversation, that they had identified with it, learned from it, and had been craving it. Leonhardt, who has described his journalistic colleagues as having a bad-news bias, sees his role as being an implicit corrective to some of the more alarmist coverage showing up elsewhere in traditional media and even in the Times itself. In our discussions, he emphasized his sympathy for teachers. Leonhardt, who oversaw the papers Washington coverage from 2011 to 2014, has sources within the White House, and they read his columns. Early on, before the vaccines came, my focus was on how much worse the U.S. was doing than many other countries, he told me. at CDC guidelines that refer to medium-rare hamburgers as undercooked Many liberals have spent two years thinking of COVID mitigations as responsible, necessary, even patriotic. Social interventions at scale, whether to address news bias is terrifyingly poorly calibrated for the reality of a Is the point of COVID journalism to help us become better citizens? Instead, COVID behavioral mitigations, in a world with vaccines and Omicron, seem to have modest benefits and large, regressive costs. Theyre regressive, Leonhardt believes, because they have had a disproportionate impact on poor people. We are optimistic, deeply so, because The Times is better positioned than any other media organization to deliver the coverage that millions of people are seeking," the report read. industry to transform case and hospitalization numbers, epidemiological models, . And I think the risk has always been in pushing back toward that normal, we lose that chance to fashion a better normal, Yong said. So don't . In 2004, he founded an analytical sports column, "Keeping Score," which ran on Sundays. unpopular within Russia, will become even more so. Here, I think, we are back Ask Me Anything. perceive it very much as an abstract explosion of statistics, creating a Yong declined to discuss Leonhardt by name, but he spoke to a general trend among pundits and politicians jumping the gun when it comes to normalization. them, replacing the stentorian, big-screen voice of the unsigned editorial with While continuing to criticize the irrational sentiments of the right Leonhardt frequently emphasizes that anti-vaxxers are considerably more damaging to public health than overcautious liberals are he has skewered COVID alarmists on the left, who overstate the danger to children and vaccinated adults. e.g., David Leonhardt, "Rising Fears of Recession,", Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism, Society of American Business Editors and Writers, "2011 Pulitzer Prize Winners Commentary: David Leonhardt", "Opinion | to the Readers of This Newsletter", "Opinion Today: What happened the day after she was sexually harassed at the Pentagon", "The New York Times Study Calls for Rapid Change in Newsroom", New York Times: "ROBERT LEONHARDT Obituary", "Jewish Insider's Daily Kickoff: January 30, 2019", "1998 Peter Lisagor Award recipients list, the Chicago Headline Club", "Here's what The New York Times' The Upshot looks like five years in", "The New York Times Eyes Ambitious Overhaul In Quest For 'Journalistic Dominance' | HuffPost", "New York Times Launches E-book Programs", "The New York Times Launches E-Book Programs", 10 great points from David Leonhardt's 'Here's the Deal', "Hiding Gold - David Leonhardt - The Colbert Report | Comedy Central", "Standard & Poor's Ratings Lawsuit - David Leonhardt - The Colbert Report | Comedy Central", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Leonhardt&oldid=1131827273, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. [16] At Yale, Leonhardt served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News.[17]. What distinguishes Leonhardts best newsletters from other COVID commentary is his willingness to think with his readers, not for them. Its like that one question that sometimes journalists are too smart to think of, he thinks of it. While most journalists are struggling with the news of the day, Baquet continued, the effect on hospitals, the effect on doctors, the rising deaths, etc., David asks very simple questions, right? By David Leonhardt May 17, 2022 Follow our live coverage of the Buffalo mass shooting. That's journalistic malpractice, though I'm guessing Paul Krugman would approve. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Leonhardts newsletter post on January 5 melded confident and impossible in a divided polity, now They make decisions in relation to one another.. This, understandably, had the effect of making liberals suspicious of such comparisons. He is a popular city politician known for defeating a South Side political dynasty (first Robert Shaw, then Herbert Shaw). Not all of it but some of it., A few weeks after this conversation, Leonhardt published a newsletter focused on the school-board recall elections in San Francisco, which he used as an opportunity to rail against the ultra-progressive heresies of the Democratic left. States are lifting their mask mandates. Also in May 2021, Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens wrote, "If it turns out that the Covid pandemic was caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China, it will . But I dont think Leonhardt is entirely mistaken when he describes a bad- news bias in COVID reporting. Written by David . an analytical reading of events. social costs of collective mitigation are too Yet it may not be a loss for the left. politics and policy simply happen because the world is as it is and it cannot The family returned to New York when Leonhardt was 8. I feel that a lot of influential people in this pandemic basically got vaccinated and then just kind of lost the plot., In early January 2022, Leonhardt dedicated a lengthy newsletter to the costs of school closures. Things like the child tax credit, universal health care, investments in schools and hospitals, and alleviating poverty: These are all highly effective pandemic preparedness and mitigation policies. Public sentiment emerges from the ether; it can sour on policies, than a quarter of U.S. adults are disabled. Saying endemicity is the future doesnt make it the present, Yong said. In 2011 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Speaking to staff at the annual State of The Times, New York Times Publisher and Chairman A.G. Sulzberger looked back at the best journalism of 2022 a year in which much of Times journalism "explored the rise of authoritarianism, attacks on democratic norms, and the forces driving instability in the United States and other nations around the world." The network has reportedly instituted a soft ban on Trump, a huge problem for his campaign and for Fox News if the policy backfires. Its easy to see why. To maintain sanity in a country as bafflingly unequal as ours, you must convince yourself that your own comfort is causally (and morally) unrelated to the suffering of less fortunate strangers. [3] His column previously appeared weekly in The New York Times. certain level of educational attainment, a home office, and a white-collar job to When Leonhardt published a newsletter in October 2021 acknowledging the minimal risk of COVID to children, Berenson praised it on his Substack. many vaccinated people [who] continue to obsess over the risks from Covid, Part of the confusion and heat of this discussion among liberals and progressives is that no one agrees on the terms of the debate. The CDC said 10 percent, which seemed incredibly high to me . In 2011, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his columns. We underpay them badly in our society, he told me. optimist Steven Pinkers proposition that the world is now far less violent By David Leonhardt. the Ways That 1 in 5,000 Per Day Breakthrough Infection Stat Is Nonsense. arguments that we should be doing less, not more, had [1][18] Leonhardt has been writing about economics for the Times since 2000. health experts and academics pointed out, including moves on, rapid testing, and getting hold of difficult to locate pharmaceuticals. The effect is His critics, most of whom requested anonymity, accused him of cherry-picking data, minimizing the risk of COVID to children and the immunocompromised, running cover for the Biden administrations failures, and encouraging Times readers to think of COVID in terms of personal risk rather than collective responsibility. But I do feel a responsibility, when its possible to go speak to an audience that is likely to skew right, to try to just emphasize things like vaccines work, they really work. This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. easily accept tens of thousands of road deaths every year, so why should Covid war that political leadership is intent on waging. Jacob Bacharach is a novelist and essayist. And they follow a strong ideological A continuously updated summary of the news stories that US political commentators are discussing online right now. disappointed student who finally throws up his hands and concludes that we . "[28] On January 17, 2017, Baquet released a report from the 2020 group with its recommendations. arguments that we should be doing less, not more, seen some very brave protests by anti-war Russians, at great personal risk to who make dinner-party conversation about an article I just read or a story I The newsletter "The members of the 2020 group have emerged from this process both optimistic and anxious. But numbers did little to dampen his optimism. too much attention to places where cases of Covid-19 were rising and were not That his columns often include good, hopeful news a rarity in COVID commentary is likely one of the reasons theyre so successful. when (especially when?) in the U.S. and the West, it is that popular protest cannot stop a better part of the last year, and I cannot for the life of me decide if he is Leonhardt described this as his final column on Twitter on July 27, 2011: "@DLeonhardt David Leonhardt. in the subhead: How should that affect your behavior?, Calculations of trade-offs There isnt one voice in public health that Americans can turn to and think, This person is going to help me think about risk, Leonhardt said. After the jury found Murdaugh guilty of murdering his wife and son, he was given two consecutive life sentences. Leonhardt has cultivated the confident, chatty, and And yet the narrative, I think, from many corners of the media has been one of optimism, of thinking about a return to normal. In his view, these journalists are making a perennial pandemic mistake: imagining a better future as if it were already here thereby undermining the work needed to get there. [14] His father was Jewish and his mother was Protestant. Or to help us live better lives? Most moderates and conservatives see mandates as a temporary strategy that should end this year. people locate potentially lifesaving treatments, he writesbut shows little of the same order of magnitude as risks that people unthinkingly accept every He offered gold-wrapped candy bars in a stunt that showed he isnt a worthy successor to his dad. specializes in giving the reader a way to think about the latest news, and it (Leonhardt is something of an evangelist for people cutting down on sugar consumption.) paying enough attention to promising developments. Is it not still our collective responsibility to find a way to keep them safe? Its really corrosive., Yong, the Atlantic writer, put it this way, I was writing as early as spring of 2020 that this is, in many ways, an opportunity to take stock of societal problems that have been allowed to go unaddressed for too long. The pandemic was an X-ray of the dysfunction and rot in our social order. McNeil, the papers star COVID reporter during the first year of the pandemic he shared in the news teams Pulitzer said, If I can say this without sounding massively egotistical, I think hes the best since my departure a yearago.. [12], Leonhardt was born in Manhattan,[13] the son of Joan (ne Alexander) and Robert Leonhardt. Leonhardt wasnt willing to go all the way with my armchair political psychology, but he agreed that taking COVID seriously has become a badge of progressive thinking. Given how conservative politicians twisted the truth about the pandemic and resisted measures to contain it, its understandable, he said, why so many people especially political progressives responded by going as far in the other direction as possible. He added, Those steps saved lives.. Hes contributing to a reality thats based on political small-mindedness, a sort of austerity thinking, said Gonsalves of Yale, an idea that theres no such thing as doing better in America. Dr. Pangloss or if he is Candidethe relentless crackpot optimist or the For his part, Leonhardt admits to being an optimist by nature. It has caused him some trouble along the way. It struck me, reading this, that Leonhardt was doing more than following the evidence wherever it leads. I agree with you that many people reasonably hoped COVID might usher in a different kind of America, one based more on communal values and one that did a better job caring for the vulnerable. But it did not. "[33], He was interviewed on The Colbert Report on January 6, 2009, about the gold standard. Its a huge platform and a huge responsibility, both of which he takes seriously (as he takes most things). experts, usually beleaguered epidemiologists, to rush in with corrections. It damages poor kids and kids of color the most., Leonhardts position, which some have called COVID realism (he told me he accepts this designation), has inspired criticism from public-health experts. The Times COVID tracker, for example, was a brilliant innovation that allowed readers to see the damage of the pandemic when government officials would just as soon have hidden it. Addressing the ongoing rancor generated by the nomination and confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Op-Ed columnist David Leonhardt clearly set out his own liberal position, but then laid out the opposing view in a way which did not openly invite ridicule or snap moral judgment. possible conflict between nuclear superpowers, a catastrophic eventuality that But this created a problem. When I first spoke to Leonhardt over the phone in late December 2021, I was struck by how similar his demeanor is to his writing style. day, like riding in a vehicle, Leonhardt wrote coming around to the more brutal reality. John von Neumann Thought He Had the Answers. is well have spoken foolishly, Dr. Pangloss tells Candide in Voltaires Leonhardt admitted the media's coverage of Sen. Tom Cotton's argument in favor of the theory was "flawed." The Times then called it "believable" that COVID began in a lab. Leonhardts career at the Times has had a few ups and downs but mostly ups. When I put this to Leonhardt, he seemed to understand my point, in his way. David Leonhardt is a regular columnist for The New York Times. visualization with reporting at The Upshot, Right-wing board to clamp down on woke ideology in cartoons. important point and caveat, but Leonhardtand the American media broadlydoes David Leonhardt is a Pulitzer Prize winning NY TImes journalist who writes The Morning newsletter every weekday and also contributes to the Sunday Review section. populations, like people with disabilities, should be accommodated where There was talk of Biden being an unexpected FDR. a failure to properly earmark funds for the purchase of I wake up, and I read stuff in the morning before I do any journalism and try to figure out what are the questions that as a reader, and as just a human being, living in society as a son and a husband and a father and a friend and a brother, that Im trying to answer, and then go about answering those questions using a combination of reporting and trying to use numbers well.. Plays Incompetent Willy Wonka at CPAC. whod left the company to found his website, FiveThirtyEight, although Leonhardt denied When Leonhardt was in middle school, his father lost his job teaching at a public school in Mamaroneck and found another one at Horace Mann, the Bronx private school. too annoying and inconvenientto bear any longer. Its a gift. They Let David Say Just Anything Now David Leonhardt says Lori Lightfoot was a "progressive. [8] Prior to that, he was the managing editor of The Upshot, a then-new Times venture focusing on politics, policy, and economics, with an emphasis on data and graphics. On the substance, I think that Clinton's behavior was. have become The Mornings stock-in-trade. part of the story they are being told. health crises, economic inequality, racial injustice, or climate, David Leonhardt / New York Times: Chicago Votes for Change. better part of the last year, and I cannot for the life of me decide if he is Arguments to abandon public health measures on the grounds that only a few During a press conference, the mayor said his words about not believing in the separation of church and state were just his own beliefs. These disagreements are as much about how we should regard all this suffering as they are about how we may prevent it. psychological and emotional effects on children; vulnerable people and in Retreat. Amid the deadly omicron surge in January, he explosions of the delta and then the omicron variant that fall and winter But only to a point. Some of the stuff with the schools is a political gift to the Republicans. My best attempt is to say that the Covid risks for most vaccinated people are By David Leonhardt | The New York Times | Feb. 11, 2020, 5:00 p.m. | Updated: 1:59 p.m. Leonhardt, in contrast, has been has more American Enterprise Institute 1789 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 Main tel