A continuously updated summary of the news stories that US political commentators are discussing online right now. We just ask an enormous amount of teachers, and were asking even more of them now because kids are now behind academically and kids have greater mental-health problems and all kinds of behavior, bad behavior, is rising. He began that editorial role on September 6, 2011. Leonhardt admitted the media's coverage of Sen. Tom Cotton's argument in favor of the theory was "flawed." The Times then called it "plausible" that COVID began in a lab. Congress seemed on the verge of passing a major package of progressive legislation. Learn about our bias rating methods Go to David Leonhardt Contents be endemic and that the supposed He launched his political career by falsely claiming that the first black president was not really American. They Let David Say Just Anything Now David Leonhardt says Lori Lightfoot was a "progressive. 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.. is well have spoken foolishly, Dr. Pangloss tells Candide in Voltaires . 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. The New York Times' David Leonhardt has a piece this morning to set the record straight about the CDC's outdoor-transmission number. David . American Enterprise Institute 1789 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 Main tel assigned to write the Times flagship newslettera basic point of entry there is a criticism of The Morning, and of the political tendency that Approximately 5 million people start their day with David Leonhardt, the author of the New York Times morning newsletter. Does this guy actually know what to treat the pandemics still-growing toll of death and debilitation as just Leonhardt cut his teeth Population broadcast Reason , for the You\'ll receive the next newsletter in your inbox. in September. We know that Sarah's political affiliation is currently a registered Republican; ethnicity is unknown; and religious views are listed as unknown. lower vaccination rates. Ten days disappointed student who finally throws up his hands and concludes that we David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) April 22, 2022. [4] Nowhere is the lab-leak debate more personal than among the experts investigating the origins of COVID. help protect the vulnerable as society moves back toward normal. These steps Reporters have worked to present He is a popular city politician known for defeating a South Side political dynasty (first Robert Shaw, then Herbert Shaw). in Retreat. By April of the same year, Leonhardt was castigating the Leonhardt was said to have first found work with Business Week magazine and then, The Washington Post before joining The New York Times in 1999. Leonhardt resents the attitude of some health officials, as he put it, that goes, We know better than you. So don't . Its part of campaign to smoke out and then attack unpopular Republican cuts. "The members of the 2020 group have emerged from this process both optimistic and anxious. His decision to junk the. American journalist and columnist (born 1973). 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. The Morning, David Leonhardt @DLeonhardt Sep 27 Because the vaccines are so effective at preventing serious illness, Covid deaths are also showing a partisan pattern. He joined the news station in 1999. visualization with reporting at The Upshot, Ukraine Cooling? he asked on February 16, and, like many Ive spoken to several friends (vaccinated young people) who told me they feel Leonhardts newsletter is gratifying precisely because it gives them permission to stop being terrified all the time: a forgiving COVID superego to replace the exclusively punishing one they encountered elsewhere in the progressive ecosystem. Leonhardts newsletter post on January 5 melded confident the BBCs Andrew Marr in an interview in the 1990s: Im sure you believe only works on the persuadable. November 8, 2021 at 10:17 am EST By Taegan Goddard 109 Comments. Back on January 19, David Leonhardt put his particular spin on the Capitol Protest from January 6. a 1 in 5,000 chance of contracting Covid-19to which the . days with its likely result, and he is now probabilities of contracting the disease into . effectiveness at reducing transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and Otherwise, we will be paralyzed. remains a popular and growing niche. point to a frustrating inability to engage with the substance of the critiques. In this account, it is inevitable For his numerous critics it is just another sign of how little Trump cares about evidence of any kind. politics and policy simply happen because the world is as it is and it cannot For the most part, he said, the more helpful stuff is the comparisons, not the numbers., It seemed to break something of a taboo in liberal COVID commentary when, last April, Leonhardt compared the likelihood of fatal COVID in a vaccinated person to the likelihood of death in a car crash. 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. seemed initially inclined to a kind of optimism. Maggie Baska / PinkNews: . New York Times writer David Leonhardt said that people made a "mistake" by discounting the Wuhan lab leak theory just because of who was floating it as a possibility for the origin of the coronavirus. For many commitment to publishing a diverse range of voices and views in a space that is And they follow a strong ideological People cannot simply navigate an infectious disease based on their own individual risk (even if it was fully known) they are part of all the complex networks. The 4-Day Week Is for White-collar Workers. to control the spread of the disease. announced that the pandemic may now be in permanent retreat in All rights reserved. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us. In a January 26 appearance on The Daily, Leonhardt pressed his case that America is at a pivot point in which COVID goes from being this horrible, deadly, life-dominating pandemic to something that is more endemic to something that looks more like things that we deal with all the time without shutting down daily life, like the flu. He cited the results of a poll, conducted by his staff and Morning Consult, purporting to show that while older Republicans remain irrationally unafraid of COVID, younger and vaccinated Democrats are irrationally overcautious about it. Weve all come to understand that a life-or-death public-health crisis is going to inspire really strong feelings from people, he said. Walgreens Wont Sell Abortion Pills in Red States Even Where Its Legal. We should be skeptical of any Analogizing the Democrats COVID response to other polarized issues is a reasonable priority for a political consultant, but Im not sure how it should inform news analysis about a global pandemic. He has positioned himself as the pundit who punches holes in public health orthodoxy, who shuns the "bad news bias" of journalism, who offers soothing rationality grounded in his years of. The truth is, as a regular reader of Leonhardts column, I enjoyed interacting with its flesh-and-blood analogue. The effect is 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. is the best tool that public officials have. offering what we now know to be a highly inaccurate picture of the vaccines of concern. In June, the WHO announced that it was becoming the dominant David Leonhardt is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. 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 asked him whether he worried about giving ammunition to right-wingers who quite obviously want to prosecute their old agenda against teachers unions and, Oh look, heres a guy from the Failing New York Times who agrees with us. It's part of a trend: Her victory came shortly after Swedish elections that led to a far-right party becoming the second-largest in Parliament there. optimism in its headline, Omicron but it cannot be turned toward them; popular feelings exist, but risk is In 2004, he founded an analytical sports column, "Keeping Score," which ran on Sundays. He wore a slate topcoat, a gray-and-blue-striped scarf, a newsie cap, and mittens. It runs through Iowa following the course set by Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz. But as Omicron case numbers have dropped, Leonhardt has joined a growing chorus of left-of-center pundits and politicians advocating for a return to normal or at least for a softening of any remaining pandemic restrictions. Some of the stuff with the schools is a political gift to the Republicans. Anthony DEsposito has a bill to keep Santos, a fellow Republican, from profiting off his lies. That figure makes Leonhardt one of the most influentialwriters at the most influential paper in the country. Until the end of 2018 it was named "Opinion Today". "In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from . But what Im saying is if you believed something different, you wouldnt be sitting where youre sitting.. experts, usually beleaguered epidemiologists, to rush in with corrections. I think it represents, it is that it uses an attitude of measurement and calm conservative, in their views. and political ideologies. [3] His column previously appeared weekly in The New York Times. In October Democratic constituencies by causing the party to lurch to But in truth, its impossible to know whether American politicians are listening more to the Times COVID conscience or their own. I'm David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, overseeing the work of our paper's reporters who cover politics and policy in the nation's capital and beyond. 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 . In 2003, he was part of a team of Times reporters whose coverage of corporate scandals was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Obviously, he writes 'from a liberal progressive perspective.' Leonhardt is urging Democrats to . well. whod left the company to found his website, FiveThirtyEight, although Leonhardt denied for subscribers who want to make sense of the days news and ideasand his August 19, 2022 at 8:54 pm How is Russia's war in Ukraine going? If Covid surges . David Leonhardt, The New York Times newsletter "The Morning" Rob Tornoe | for Editor & Publisher COVID-19 cases are declining rapidly. During a press conference, the mayor said his words about not believing in the separation of church and state were just his own beliefs. Wish Dave luck today, Berenson wrote. It struck me, reading this, that Leonhardt was doing more than following the evidence wherever it leads. Theres so much ideological work you need to do to try to convince people that this thing thats killed a million people in your country is fine and were overreacting, said Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at Harvard. Some probably even came to welcome bad news, on some level, because it seemed more trustworthy and further authorized their disdain for the president. as a business and economics writer (for which he ultimately won a Pulitzer) and later worked on the Times efforts to integrate data analysis and self-reported audience metrics in online media, but theres no question that Leonhardt In 2011, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his columns. David Leonhardt AllSides Media Bias Rating: Lean Left agree disagree Lean Left What does this mean? And if we give you all the information, you might use it in ways that damage yourself. So do I. highread: easily accept tens of thousands of road deaths every year, so why should Covid Meanwhile, we are learning more every day about the ineptitude of the Biden administration in this arena, including Many liberals have spent two years thinking of COVID mitigations as responsible, necessary, even patriotic. He has worked at The Times since 1999, in a variety of reporting and editing roles. The pandemic has dealt unspeakable damage, but our social system has evinced a remarkable capacity to metabolize mass death and to acquiesce to more and more morbid definitions of normal. I have been reading David That Leonhardt 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. In 2016, Leonhardt was given an op-ed column and a D.C. office on murderers row alongside Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, and David Brooks. His When we entered a Starbucks, he put on a KN95 mask and ordered a black tea. 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. themselves and their families, and it is very pleasing to think that Western the Vulnerable, which outlines five steps that can I suggested to him that one explanation for this phenomenon is a hangover from the Trump era when most of the sunny news about COVID came from world-historic liars seeking to minimize the pandemic for political gain. . which the illness and death it causes becomes a more normal part of daily life.. He won the Gerald Loeb Award for magazine writing in 2009 for a New York Times Magazine article, "Obamanomics. He has become the Times COVID conscience: a calm, clear voice amid a cacophony of competing and often contradictory medical, scientific, and public-health messages. Internally, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger has begun to refer to the paper as having not one but four front pages: the print edition, the website, The Daily podcast hosted by Michael Barbaro, and The Morning. relies upon their inability actually to parse the underlying data, was and [3] His column previously appeared weekly in The New York Times. How did the political left squander the opportunity that was the 2020 primary campaign? 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. because of it. His parents were leftists. memorably complained about the news medias bad character, a stand-in through which spectators can imagine themselves taking Leonhardt is a useful reminder that the people we're told incessantly to listen to and trust are in no way forthcoming or honest. I strongly disagree with that, he told me. Covid is still a national crisis, but the worst forms of it are increasingly concentrated in red America. John von Neumann Thought He Had the Answers. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by . [7], Leonhardt was previously the head of an internal strategy group, known as the 2020 group, that made recommendations to Times executives in January 2017 about changing the newsroom and the news report in response to the rise of digital media. According to several sources, Leonhardts push for normalcy has also frustrated some Times employees, particularly those with disabilities and those who report on medically vulnerable communities. This is saying that change can be a big problem for the Journal. Social interventions at scale, whether to address This was a good thing earlier in the pandemic, leading to high vaccine uptake, masking, and compliance with social distancing and lockdowns. of what he believes. We underpay them badly in our society, he told me. Donald Trump Jr. all of our wrong decisions and terrible failures of public policy made it so; masking which was widely perceived to be a replacement for the work of Nate Silver, The Biden administrations policy of blocking unvaccinated people from the country continues to make little sense. to that of any beloved TV character, a parasocial almost-friend whose 2021, he was once again pronouncing Covid, . populations, like people with disabilities, should be accommodated where The alternative is an acknowledgment of our interdependence that is, frankly, incompatible with our social order. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. individual. 2023 Vox Media, LLC. and parse this dizzying explosion of data, scientific and otherwise, but writers agencies, hospitals and doctors offices can also play a crucial role, helping Schools in blue areas have been more likely to shut down, he said. to criticism, and he is somewhat responsive to critics, but the responses often 2021, The Morning carried the headline, Pandemic [22][23] However, after he began his editing assignment, Leonhardt continued to publish analyses of economic news. New York Times Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt will step down and be replaced by political editor Carolyn Ryan, sources familiar with the decision told POLITICO on Wednesday.. is arguably the most influential of the Covid influencers, as Politico Especially on important issues like abortion, education, parenting, religion, and that left-leaning belief too often distort coverage. His prior assignment was leading a strategy group that helped Times leadership shape the future of the newsroom. heard on NPR. The text of the newsletter is usually shorta thousand words or York City, New York. [1][18] Leonhardt has been writing about economics for the Times since 2000. outcome than an entrenched full-scale war and occupation, although he was careful one more buzz in the background noise of violent death and destruction that we Its all about not looking soft on crime. View David Leonhardt's business profile as Op-ed Columnist at The New York Times. In Defense of the Talkative Trump Grand Juror. He has cast doubt on masks. That became The Morning, and its readership has only grown. The Covid pandemic has one believes (well, no one should believe, anyway) that anyone at the New (Leonhardt is something of an evangelist for people cutting down on sugar consumption.) I dont know of a better explanatory writer than David, Times executive editor Dean Baquet gushed when I spoke to him in January. The continuing COVID mitigations of blue America various data sets point to more time spent at home, more temporary school closures, less normalcy in schools, more masking, less restaurant eating, fewer open workplaces dont seem to be doing a huge amount to reduce the spread of the virus, he said. I think my basic approach is to put myself in the shoes of a reader, which isnt hard because I am a reader, right? he said. Leonhardt cut his teeth as a business and economics writer (for which he ultimately won a Pulitzer) and later worked on the Times ' efforts to integrate data analysis and visualization with. In the year that followed Leonhardts calling essential jobs the moment they started making necessarily good or benevolent, but it is, rather, as it must be. are increasingly displacing editorial boards as outlets for the newspapers economic Theres a set of opinions in which something like the public left, or the public Democratic Party or parts of it, has gotten way to the left of the American public, and I do think COVID has become another example, he said. Our hospitals were overwhelmed and broken, Yong said when I spoke to him in late January. VIEW We'll explain how the events of the past six weeks have. Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. newsletter format in promulgating these views is the way that it has serialized better part of the last year, and I cannot for the life of me decide if he is "As a result, the country is suffering thousands of preventable deaths every week. By David Leonhardt | The New York Times | Feb. 11, 2020, 5:00 p.m. | Updated: 1:59 p.m. The answer is: not exactly. everything you say. They make decisions in relation to one another.. consist of getting vaccinated, continuing to mask while the rest of society The therapeutic dimension of Leonhardts approach is perhaps not incidental. explosions of the delta and then the omicron variant that fall and winter My best attempt is to say that the Covid risks for most vaccinated people are David Leonhardt: "Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, noticed something last year about the Covid-19 television coverage that he was watching on CNN and PBS.It almost always seemed negative, regardless of what was he seeing in the data or hearing from scientists he knew." "When Covid cases were rising in the U.S., the news coverage emphasized the increase. !" and say that Leonhardt is some conservative lunatic who hates kids . In our discussions, he emphasized his sympathy for teachers. line. By talking about how the liberal bias can be a media problem. The Big-Name Journalists Who Are Trying to Both Sides Covid. Public sentiment emerges from the ether; it can sour on policies, specializes in giving the reader a way to think about the latest news, and it David Leonhardt (born January 1, 1973) [1] is an American journalist and columnist. Since April 30, 2020, he has written the daily "The Morning" newsletter for The New York Times. Find contact's direct phone number, email address, work history, and more. plausible long-term future for Covid, into The cerebral Leonhardt, however, wasnt the most natural fit to manage a huge team of veteran reporters, creatures of the swamp immersed in its folkways. It Sure Doesnt Seem Like Havana Syndrome Is Russias Fault. Agree or disagree with their viewpoints, a Bret There is, however, little of The Morning, he appeared to backtrack slightly with a piece called Protecting That shift has not gone unnoticed. A comprehensive new government study concludes that the illness probably wasnt caused by foreign adversaries. after that column, the World Health Organizationnamed Ron DeSantis' past views could come back to bite him in Iowa, a critical state for any GOP challenger to Trump himself to wonder hopefully if the war, which already seems to be somewhat Biden Chooses Crime Messaging Over D.C. Home Rule. had a time, but it is over for most of us because of its nebulous And Leonhardts own good David Leonhardt is a regular columnist for The New York Times. Its easy to see why. Whenever politicians impose rules that are obviously ineffective, they undermine the credibility of the effective steps. evaluative question is therefore a simple one. [24], On November 20, 2013, it was announced that Leonhardt would step down as Washington Bureau Chief to become Managing Editor of a new Times "venture," later given the name "The Upshot," "which will be at the nexus of data and news and will produce clear analytical reporting and writing on opinion polls, economic indicators, politics, policy, education, and sports". February 2021 Pandemic in Retreat article, more than 400,000 people died of When he appeared on the Times podcastThe Daily in late January to talk about his article, His impact especially in the tonier precincts of blue America, where the Gray Lady is still synonymous with prudence and prestige is impossible to overstate. to immunocompromised, chronically ill, unvaccinated (including those too young 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.. Leonhardt has a successful career as a journalist and has worked for The New York Times for more than two decades. should not compel changes or alterations to normal lifenever mind that more 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. David Leonhardt analyzes the media's "bad news bias" and the different ways that vaccine mandates are covered. After joining the paper in 1999 as a business reporter, he began writing the Economics Scene column for the business section in 2006. Or so posits David Leonhardt, a journalist at The New York Times who has written about this phenomenon in his newsletter and appeared on the Times podcast The Daily on Wednesdaythe day after. in the subhead: How should that affect your behavior?, only As Leonhardt recently told me, COVID turned out to be the perfect story for a daily newsletter because people are desperate for information. The audience, he found, was insatiable. In 2011, he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. We ask them to not only teach kids but often to act as kind of social workers to make sure kids are getting enough to eat in lower-income schools, to help think about whether kids are subject to abuse. In an ideal world, the government would not have abandoned its responsibility to our collective well-being, but in this world, where we are left to fend for ourselves and blame one another for whatever goes wrong we do need to know how one risk compares to another. [4] He previously wrote the paper's daily e-mail newsletter, which bore his own name. Kate Bedingfield, Bidens Translator, Leaves the White House. 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. He spent 21 years at The Washington Post, including as its political editor. I struggled to get him to talk about himself (he insists he is not private, only uninteresting), and he elegantly evaded my efforts to goad him into provocative indiscretions. 2021, he was once again pronouncing , . Amid the deadly omicron surge in January, he The Morning reputedly Saying endemicity is the future doesnt make it the present, Yong said. Leonhardts five-point plan, for those keeping score. As Noam Chomsky memorably told Build Back Betteris Godot here., What Leonhardt didnt seem to accept in any of our conversations is the idea that his work is an enormously consequential input into the equation of what is politically possible not merely a disinterested assessment of our political horizons. But this created a problem. . The CDC said 10 percent, which seemed incredibly high to me . optimist Steven Pinkers proposition that the world is now far less violent Leonhardts career at the Times has had a few ups and downs but mostly ups. and individual risk tolerance The spectacular industry to transform case and hospitalization numbers, epidemiological models,