Media accountability for school closings

Journalism is full of cheerleading and award-giving. But what about accountability?

By Angie Schmitt & Rachel Barnhart

It’s easy to look back on pivotal moments during the pandemic and imagine how they could have played out differently and spared people serious harm.

A new report from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, for example, found children in high poverty districts where schools were closed for more than half a year lost about a half year of academic progress.

Mental health problems in teens are at crisis levels. A CDC study published in April found that students who felt “disconnected from school” were twice as likely to attempt suicide and reported higher feelings of hopelessness.

In addition, the health of public schools has been badly undermined, with millions of students vanishing from the rolls.

A lot of this was predictable – and many people did predict it.

That’s why there’s a need right now for some reflection on the role the press played in all this.

There’s a need right now for some reflection on the role the press played in all this.

It was frustrating for us, as people with backgrounds in journalism, to watch the tendency of U.S. reporters to stoke fear and amplify alarmism while failing to ask tough questions of government officials and ignoring robust discussions of tradeoffs of policy decisions.

However, now that most schools have reverted to a state of relative normalcy, there seems to be little will to revisit those kinds of coverage decisions, at least at mainstream or left-leaning outlets.

One reporter who has recently taken on the topic of whether schools should have reopened earlier is David Leonhardt at the New York Times.

“Extended school closures appear to have done much more harm than good,” he wrote in May, “and many school administrators probably could have recognized as much by the fall of 2020.” The report also notes that there is no clear evidence that school closures reduced COVID transmission.

Lines like that seem too little too late, but nevertheless it’s a startling admission from the New York Times.

We think that’s a shame because no paper influenced the school reopening debate more.

At key moments, reporting from the Times sensationalized the risks to children and sowed doubt about the safety of reopening.

No paper more than the New York Times influenced the school reopening debate.

Apoorva Mandavilli, a New York Times reporter “focusing on science and global health,” is considered by many advocates for school reopening – a group we both identify with – to be one of the more responsible figures.

Her reporting, and in particular her Twitter commentary, were often alarmist on the subject of reopening schools, and the effects of COVID in children, frequently stridently so. In addition, her reporting often included embarrassing errors that reflected a clear bias.

In October 2021, the New York Times issued a correction after Mandavilli claimed 900,000 children were hospitalized in the U.S. for COVID. The actual number was 63,000.

Last month, she was forced to issue another correction after overstating the mortality risk of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) – a rare complication from COVID – by a factor of more than 50.

However, Mandavilli is far from the only Times reporter or columnist who overstated COVID risks or downplayed school closure effects.

For example, the Times published an op-ed in October 2021 by author Judith Warner headlined “Parents, stop talking about the ‘Lost Year.’”

The subhead was that “kids will be fine if parents model resilience.” The headline has since been changed to “how to help your adolescent think about the last year.”

It’s not clear how or why it was changed, but we think parents who were alarmed about their own children’s mental health and smugly dismissed by the paper deserve some kind of explanation or post mortem.

Mandavilli is far from the only Times reporter or columnist who overstated COVID risks or downplayed school closure effects.

Of course, the failure wasn’t limited to one person or outlet.

Local outlets, especially in blue states, were not immune to the same patterns.

One parent wrote recently for The Grade about feeling bitter about the failures of the Seattle Times:

“I believed the Seattle Times could have had a significant impact on the reopening debate, yet its coverage was timid and primarily toed the party line that reopening was too risky, without acknowledging the real harms.”

In journalism, we are fond of giving ourselves awards. But it’s a shame we don’t have the same sort of system for correcting and addressing serious errors.

And as local journalism declines, and the profession becomes increasingly concentrated in a handful of unaffordable cities, there is increasing danger that we will find ourselves in an insular echo-chamber that is out of step with ordinary people’s concerns.

In journalism, we are fond of giving ourselves awards. But it’s a shame we don’t have the same sort of system for correcting and addressing serious errors.

The pandemic, and our response, which was sometimes chaotic, and intensely partisan, undermined trust in a lot of our institutions.

Trust in the media is on the decline as well. In October, 2021, a Gallup poll found American’s “trust in the media dipped to the second-lowest point on record.” Of course, that doesn’t prove that coverage of the pandemic led to this distrust, but in our view, it was probably a factor.

Now is a time where we in the journalism industry could use some introspection on its pandemic coverage, including analyzing who benefited and who was harmed.

Reporters‘ responsibilities to the public go beyond a competition for “likes.”

Real people are affected by reporting decisions — sometimes seriously. It’s very important that those entrusted with key positions of author on public health possess the humility to occasionally question their priors, and if they’re unwilling or incapable of that they need editors to hold them accountable.

Those conversations should happen now if we are to rebuild trust that will be needed to repair our social fabric and institutions.

Angie Schmitt is a former journalist, author, urban planner and mother based in Cleveland.

Rachel Barnhart is a former journalist who now serves as an elected legislator (a Democrat) in Monroe County, New York. 

Previously from The Grade

How to avoid writing needlessly alarmist school reopening stories

Negative COVID coverage and prolonged school shutdowns

How media coverage turned vulnerable kids into an invisible threat –

How the Seattle Times’ COVID coverage missed the mark

Back to school coverage has been unnecessarily alarmist — again. But there’s still time to improve