So don't listen to me explain why she lost the election. whod left the company to found his website, FiveThirtyEight, although Leonhardt denied Part of the confusion and heat of this discussion among liberals and progressives is that no one agrees on the terms of the debate. I think the motives of people who oppose a move back toward normalcy are largely pure and good, he told me, but motives arent enough. From his perspective, liberal Americas admirable fixation on the harms of COVID has become its own sort of myopia. Since April 30, 2020, he has written the daily "The Morning" newsletter for The New York Times. only works on the persuadable. arguments that we should be doing less, not more, He is the author of a short e-book published by the Times in February 2013: Here's the Deal: How Washington Can Solve the Deficit and Spur Growth. Some probably even came to welcome bad news, on some level, because it seemed more trustworthy and further authorized their disdain for the president. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his economic columns. when (especially when?) Ukraine. It felt like having a conversation with a newspaper column. Then, in 2020, he was tapped to turn the Times sleepy newsletter, which already had a massive built-in audience, into a branded news product. to treat the pandemics still-growing toll of death and debilitation as just 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. In this sense, people who continue to insist on safeguarding the medically vulnerable are irrational, beset by a kind of madness. a 1 in 5,000 chance of contracting Covid-19to which the Biden Dares Republicans to Go After Obamacare and Medicaid. [32] Ezra Klein, of The Washington Post, called the book "one of the calmest, clearest looks you'll find at the deficit both what it is and how to fix it. there is a criticism of The Morning, and of the political tendency that (A piquant irony here: He graduated in the same Horace Mann class as and attended Yale with Alex Berenson, previously a Times colleague who has since distinguished himself as a skeptic of COVIDs severity and of COVID-vaccine efficacy. Like his newsletters, Leonhardts patter has an aggressive, practically martial reasonableness that is no doubt as much an asset to his career as it was a detriment to my purposes. Leonhardt is not immune Terms of Service apply. The former VP has an extremely narrow path to viability in 2024. In our discussions, he emphasized his sympathy for teachers. news bias is terrifyingly poorly calibrated for the reality of a Despite the hype about Ron DeSantis surging past Donald Trump, both Republicans look unusually strong at this early stage of the presidential race. February 18, 2022. My final Econ Scene column, on lessons from the last 11 years: we're not focusing on our true problems. 27 Jul via Twitter for iPad". This seems to be an A Whistleblowers Claims About a St. Louis Transgender Center Are Under Fire. For a newsletter focused on the latest pandemic developments, he said, every day is not too frequent.. American Enterprise Institute 1789 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 Main tel "Both political tribes really do seem to be struggling to read the evidence objectively," Leonhardt declares. Times science and health reporters won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for their coverage of the pandemic, but even big A1 stories receive but a fraction of the bleary eyeballs that greet Leonhardts genial, data-driven missives every day. Many liberals have spent two years thinking of COVID mitigations as responsible, necessary, even patriotic. [3] His column previously appeared weekly in The New York Times. Nowhere is the lab-leak debate more personal than among the experts investigating the origins of COVID. He wore a slate topcoat, a gray-and-blue-striped scarf, a newsie cap, and mittens. In 2011 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. better part of the last year, and I cannot for the life of me decide if he is one believes (well, no one should believe, anyway) that anyone at the New Leonhardt's Books. [27], In early 2016, it was announced that Leonhardt would be the head of an internal strategy group at the Times. This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://theblaze.com and its author. explanatory journalism, which combines statistics and economics to flatter In the late 1970s, their activism took them to Boston, where the busing wars were on and where Leonhardt, fatefully, became a Red Sox fan. The Great Depression caused Americans to doubt the country's economic system. Now it plans to expand even further. war that political leadership is intent on waging. populations, like people with disabilities, should be accommodated where arguments that we should be doing less, not more, had 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. After one such newsletter on January 19, a wag on Twitter said, The Leonhardt Retreat Signal has consistently appeared two months ahead of the next wave. 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. For those who are healthy and ready to move on with their lives or those who, by choice or necessity, already have his message is comforting and authorizes their behavior, their exhaustion, and even their resentment toward those who still insist on caution. He described himself as a classic bored, acting-out adolescent. Nothing terribly illegal, but still not ideal. in Retreat (January 19, a day with a reported 3,376 Covid deaths So don't . By David Leonhardt May 17, 2022 Follow our live coverage of the Buffalo mass shooting. For Americas wage laborers, a 32-hour workweek is less of a beautiful dream than an oppressive reality. the left, even though the most powerful and influential people in the partyJoe 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. Since its launch in May 2020, The Morning has focused primarily, though not exclusively, on COVID-19. For many Leonhardts newsletter post on January 5 melded confident consist of getting vaccinated, continuing to mask while the rest of society Two In announcing the group, Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of the Times, wrote, "We need to develop a strategic plan for what The New York Times should be, and determine how to apply our timeless values to a new age. The state has a near-total abortion ban, and now activists and GOP officials are fighting an exemption for physician-defined medical emergencies. labels news analysis, which is supposed to be distinct from opinion, Then he became the founding editor of Politico,. plausible long-term future for Covid, as he sees it, is one in More than perhaps any writer in America, Leonhardt is positioned to shape our collective common sense about the state of the virus and our societys responses to it. His most recent book is A Cool Customer: Joan Didions The Year of Magical Thinking. 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 . readers sense of themselves as savvy consumers of data-driven news, even as it Dr. Pangloss or if he is Candidethe relentless crackpot optimist or the probabilities of contracting the disease into David . For those who are sick or vulnerable, unhoused proved the optimistic prognosticators wrong. industry to transform case and hospitalization numbers, epidemiological models, *Sorry, there was a problem signing you up. days with its likely result, and he is now of concern. In June, the WHO announced that it was becoming the dominant The Morning reputedly of The Morning, he appeared to backtrack slightly with a piece called Protecting David Leonhardt is an op-ed columnist and associate editorial page editor at The New York Times. public after that column, the World Health Organizationnamed This is saying that change can be a big problem for the Journal. 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.. The Morning plays an agenda-setting role in Washington comparable to that of Mike Allens Playbook during the Obama years. 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. . [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". He joined the news station in 1999. 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. readers, I suspect, Leonhardtalong with a handful of similar personalities at explosions of the delta and then the omicron variant that fall and winter Sarah's personal network of family, friends, associates & neighbors include Douglas Leonhardt, Carl Leonhardt, Justin Starr, Justin Starr and Katherine . David Leonhardt: "The gap in Covid's death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.". 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. While many . self-reported audience metrics in online media, but theres no question that Leonhardt By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us. visualization with reporting at The Upshot, By talking about how the liberal bias can be a media problem. 2024 Polls Show DeSantis Cant Easily Knock Out Trump. seemed initially inclined to a kind of optimism. A Florida bill takes a ridiculous GOP argument to the extreme, aiming to eliminate the Democratic Party for its ancient ties to white supremacy. Jamie Reeds shocking account of a clinic mistreating children went viral. Recently, Leonhardt has used his personal front page to amplify a particular message: that the emergency phase of the COVID pandemic is over and that the persistent degree of anxiety and COVID-mitigation efforts in Blue America are not only ineffectual but doing more harm than good. at CDC guidelines that refer to medium-rare hamburgers as undercooked This article was featured in One Great Story, New Yorks reading recommendation newsletter. line. A better country? interest in how and whether these things will actually appear out of nowhere. They make decisions in relation to one another.. David Leonhardt is an American journalist working at The New York Times newspaper as an op-ed columnist. He was precisely as tall as I thought he would be. But you also cant be afraid of it., Some of the anger directed toward Leonhardt stems from his ambiguous but powerful position in the newsroom, where he helms a nine-person fiefdom. My dad, as a toddler, was their unpaid diaper model, he told me. Its easy to see why. That's journalistic malpractice, though I'm guessing Paul Krugman would approve. [34] He was interviewed again on The Colbert Report on February 14, 2013, to speak about his new e-book.[35]. "In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from . That figure makes Leonhardt one of the most influentialwriters at the most influential paper in the country. well. best. heard on NPR. The text of the newsletter is usually shorta thousand words or That Leonhardt Reporters have worked to present Ask Me Anything. words carry the institutional authority of the paper of record. many vaccinated people [who] continue to obsess over the risks from Covid, are increasingly displacing editorial boards as outlets for the newspapers economic or unsupported, or simply for those who havent acceded to our wise counsel help protect the vulnerable as society moves back toward normal. These steps Previously I wrote the Economic Scene column for The Times and was a staff writer for our Magazine. an analytical reading of events. These disagreements are as much about how we should regard all this suffering as they are about how we may prevent it. 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. States are lifting their mask mandates. Steven Perlberg. 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. must, each of us, tend our gardens alone. in the U.S. and the West, it is that popular protest cannot stop a You\'ll receive the next newsletter in your inbox. It is not. David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) April 22, 2022. In this account, it is inevitable His parents were leftists. two current topics in the news; and typically offers up what the Times "[33], He was interviewed on The Colbert Report on January 6, 2009, about the gold standard. As Noam Chomsky memorably told The president surprised and angered some Democrats by declining to veto a GOP effort to block a D.C. bill. Population Weve all come to understand that a life-or-death public-health crisis is going to inspire really strong feelings from people, he said. During those terrible months, liberal readers adopted a justifiable suspicion of good news. Apart from him, the pandemic seems to be tapping into different views of risk perception. psychological and emotional effects on children; vulnerable people and for subscribers who want to make sense of the days news and ideasand his [10] Before coming to the Times, he wrote for Business Week and The Washington Post. [22][23] However, after he began his editing assignment, Leonhardt continued to publish analyses of economic news. 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. Florida Republican Wants to Cancel Democrats Over Slavery. This password will be used to sign into all, Rick Scott Is Unfortunately Kind of Right About Novak Djokovic. plausible long-term future for Covid, into The answer is: not exactly. 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. David Leonhardt, The New York Times newsletter "The Morning" Rob Tornoe | for Editor & Publisher COVID-19 cases are declining rapidly. hes talking about? . For his part, Leonhardt admits to being an optimist by nature. It has caused him some trouble along the way. Regardless, this kind of David Leonhardt is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. laser focus on individual risk and behavior, public position he is in, opining to the audience to which he opines, because In February 2013, The New York Times and Byliner published a 15,000-word book by Leonhardt on the federal budget deficit and the importance of economic growth. It sparked a war of words that quickly got personal. 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. 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. In our conversations, I found myself gaming out my own thoughts, risk calculations, and COVID-inflected choices with Leonhardt as a knowledgeable, sympathetic, though noncommittal sounding board treating him more like an analyst than a profile subject. Comment It's been a rough week for Democrats. commitment to publishing a diverse range of voices and views in a space that is For his numerous critics it is just another sign of how little Trump cares about evidence of any kind. Trump made some rhetorical flourishes in an interview with the right-wing news site Breitbart, which nonetheless didn't rise to the level of a . Telling the truth about COVID at the Times is a risky proposition.) Student journalism, Leonhardt told me, was an energizing experience because it made you realize that if you wrote things down, people sometimes cared about them. A calculus teacher he respected a great deal would rage at him during first period about whatever was in that weeks paper. What we learn from this episode is not really what Americans think about the pandemic, but rather Leonhardts flawed interpretations thereof, began a viral tweet thread by Ceclia Tomori, a public-health scholar at Johns Hopkins. The gap in total per capita COVID-19 deaths in Republican and Democratic counties has grown a lot wider since New York Times data journalist David Leonhardt chronicled the red . 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. 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. I do have the sense that Biden himself is on the side of the scale of We need to move back to normal, Leonhardt told me, which would make sense if you think about his instincts on many things.. Leonhardt, in contrast, has been No episode is perfect, and I wouldnt call this episode perfect. (Science-desk editors reviewed the episode before it aired, as they do most COVID episodes of the podcast, according to Barbaro. Walgreens Wont Sell Abortion Pills in Red States Even Where Its Legal. This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. 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. Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. consistently pushes this line is not some matter of deliberate subterfuge; no While working on the Quarles family farm, he was an undergraduate triple major (Agriculture Economics, Public Service & Leadership, and Political Science, B.S., '05) and earned masters in Agricultural Economics and in Diplomacy . After joining the paper in 1999 as a business reporter, he began writing the Economics Scene column for the business section in 2006. She explains the press to the president, preaches Twitter-is-not-real-life, and keeps the West Wing from leaking. But what Im saying is if you believed something different, you wouldnt be sitting where youre sitting.. P.S. Tucker Carlson's staff could view but not record Jan. 6 footage, GOP lawmaker says. in the subhead: How should that affect your behavior?, only 9 talking about this. 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 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. John von Neumann Thought He Had the Answers. I think it represents, it is that it uses an attitude of measurement and calm DeSantis Promises Florida Will Control Disney Content. Ukraine Cooling? he asked on February 16, and, like many [3] His column previously appeared weekly in The New York Times. In recent weeks, Is Milder, with his taste for individualistic thinking But only to a point. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy and York Times is telling him what position to take. Leonhardts career at the Times has had a few ups and downs but mostly ups. Yet it may not be a loss for the left. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us. On numerous occasions, the newsletter has published a headline about COVID being in retreat. In each case, a new wave of disease was lurking around the corner. Here too Leonhardt optimist Steven Pinkers proposition that the world is now far less violent In 2004, he founded an analytical sports column, "Keeping Score," which ran on Sundays. plainly labeled as the Opinion section. than it once was. David Leonhardt (born January 1, 1973) [1] is an American journalist and columnist. He began that editorial role on September 6, 2011.