A New Era of Pandemic Anniversaries

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Five years ago today, I was supposed to fly to Malaga, in Spain, for a vacation with my girlfriend, but—as you can probably guess, given the timing—that didn’t happen. Instead, I stayed at home and wrote for CJR about a pressing journalistic issue of the day—China expelling reporters from US newspapers, part of a broader diplomatic tit-for-tat with the first Trump administration—and how poorly timed it was, disrupting, as it did, urgent reporting on the novel coronavirus that had emerged in China a few months previously and was now sweeping the world at an alarming pace. The same day, Kyle Pope, then CJR’s editor and publisher, pointed to some early lessons of the virus for the media, while acknowledging the difficulty in doing so. “Advice and analysis that seemed pressing a week ago is quaint and complacent today,” he wrote. “The impossible has become commonplace before our eyes.” 

A year or so later, as much of the world’s media looked back on those early days of the pandemic and tried to pinpoint key moments whose anniversaries it would be appropriate to mark, I argued that the task was a fool’s errand; “milestones can be useful if we use them to interrogate our memories,” I wrote, and yet the start of the pandemic was in many ways a subjective phenomenon, with everyone remembering different key moments that were personal to them. (Even a year out, I couldn’t remember what #TheMoment, to borrow a hashtag circulated at the time by an NPR journalist, had been for me, though it was certainly prior to March 18, canceled vacation or not.) Some anniversary dates were subject to more consensus than others—March 11 was a popular one, reflecting the World Health Organization’s official declaration of a pandemic and, more authoritatively, Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, announcing that they had contracted COVID—though even these were highly arbitrary. (Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s widely followed chief medical correspondent, preempted the WHO’s pandemic declaration by a couple of days; Hanks and Wilson, of course, caught COVID before they noticed.) Indeed, as I wrote in 2021, marking the “coronaversary” on any date in March was arbitrary—one could just as easily commemorate the earlier spikes in Iran or Italy or, of course, the very first indications that a mysterious new pathogen had emerged, which were visible even before 2019 had turned to 2020. It was perhaps most useful to think not of one COVID anniversary but, as Gupta put it at the time, of “an era” of anniversaries. 

Fast-forward to now, and the media industry is working its way through another era of anniversaries, capitalizing on journalists’ love of milestones in general and those that attach to a round number (or half of one) in particular. A flurry of coverage has resulted. We’ve seen sweeping takes on how the pandemic changed America, and smaller takes on how it changed, say, the Las Vegas sports scene or the fortunes of a Philadelphia burrito business. There have been stock takes of the pandemic’s ongoing impact on everything from education to entertainment—via the news media, from direct effects like the lingering trauma facing journalists who covered the devastating early surge in Italy and the explosion of conspiratorial thinking that has complicated journalists’ jobs to less direct suppositions, like the idea that the pandemic set in motion Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. (CNN’s Brian Stelter had a good roundup of coverage centering COVID’s impact on the media industry in his newsletter on Friday—the five-year anniversary, for him, of an email that he sent to his wife predicting only “a bumpy couple of months” to come.) The debate as to whether COVID leaked out of a Chinese lab has been reopened for the anniversary. Just kidding: that debate was never closed.

Other articles remembering 2020 have tackled the nature of remembering itself. Le Monde reported yesterday (the five-year anniversary of France entering lockdown for the first time) that a combination of the virus itself, the ongoing stress that it caused, and the dynamics of lockdown may have altered the very mechanics of human memory like no other contemporary event, afflicting everyone from people with unusually excellent memories to Alzheimer’s patients; on a social and historiographical level, the paper wrote, “COVID-19 only happened five years ago, but the memory surrounding it is hazy, and the time for archiving has already begun.” In an essay for the Washington Post that was highlighted in Stelter’s newsletter, Kate Cohen wrote that the pandemic “is almost perfectly designed to be forgotten,” due to trauma that is too painful to fully revisit but also the humdrum quality of lockdown life, which resists memorialization because it was so monotonous. Laura Spinney, a science writer, told Cohen that the sheer inescapability of pandemics also makes people want to put them in the past. “Because you’re not allowed to forget it in any waking minute,” Spinney said, “there is this greater pressure to want to leave it behind as far as you can.”

In a deep dive for a special 2022 issue of CJR’s magazine focused on how the media covered the pandemic, I ended by asking how journalists might look back on it in the future and quoted from Pale Rider, an excellent 2017 book by Spinney about the 1918–20 Spanish flu outbreak, which was much deadlier than the overlapping First World War but is much less well remembered. “Wars and plagues are remembered differently,” Spinney wrote. “Collective memories for war seem to be born instantly, fully formed,” whereas memories “of cataclysmic pestilence build up more slowly.” From today’s vantage point, it would, if anything, seem an understatement to say this process is still ongoing when it comes to memories of COVID. As far as mainstream media coverage is concerned, it’s not like the pandemic has been literally forgotten—it gets mentioned all the time—and yet, across a whole range of beats, it often seems to lurk in the background of stories that have in reality been shaped by it in profound, root-and-branch ways. In part, this reflects a structural problem for the news media, which tends to dwell in the weeds of the day-to-day and thus often misses the roots and branches for the trees. The vagaries of pandemic memory have surely exacerbated the problem; journalists are, after all, people. The pandemic is clearly a—if not the—defining news event of the modern era. And yet sometimes, when I look back on other seismic stories from the time, they initially float into my consciousness detached from that critical context. (I’ll never forget imbibing days of CNN election coverage while under lockdown in the UK, but that’s mostly due to the ads.)

This being said, the news media as a whole is clearly more than a collection of individual humans; it’s an apparatus for collective expression and information exchange, and, as I wrote in my “era of anniversaries” piece in 2021, “at some point, individual memories—those of powerful elites, especially—ossify at the level of a given community, and reproduce in that community’s media.” In my 2022 deep dive, I predicted that the process of collective memory formation around COVID would be politicized. This wasn’t a bad thing, I wrote, so much as it was inevitable since science is political; the best thing journalists could do was prepare to reckon with that fact going forward rather than fight over the past. From today’s vantage, it’s hard to conclude that this happened. Indeed, those determined to fight over the past appear to have overwhelmed us; as Spinney put it in a recent op-ed for The Guardian, the narrative that “it wasn’t the virus that ruined our lives, but the response” has moved from the fringes to the mainstream, “turbo-charged by the recent successes of its political champions who typically gravitate towards the populist right.” In the US, this fight is still very visible, encompassing everything from daily denialism on social media to more insidious acts. On Saturday, the Post reported that the new Trump administration has pulled down a mural of Anthony Fauci—the most visible figure of the public health response to COVID in the US, who is now reviled on the right and in its media—that had adorned a wall at the National Institutes of Health. Before leaving office, President Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci, while stressing he hadn’t done anything wrong, to spare him trial-by-Trump. On Sunday, Trump suggested (spuriously) that that pardon and others were invalid. He didn’t mention Fauci by name in doing so, but some right-wing boosters did.

All this can be seen as specific to COVID, for sure, but also as part of a much broader politicization of history and memory that is hardly novel, in conceptual terms, but feels particularly acute at this moment. In 2017, Spinney contrasted the slow-forming process of memory formation around pandemics with the more instantaneous forming of memories about war, but today, even the latter process appears murky; the US might not be at war in any direct sense, but the Trump administration is now effectively claiming that it is—in order to invoke archaic wartime powers to expel alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process, in apparent defiance of a court order—while also aggressively pushing various narratives about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. It has been suggested that the latter may itself have been a consequence of COVID, with some observers positing that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s intense self-imposed isolation during the pandemic altered his mindset. (He at the very least forced world leaders who came to Moscow to discuss the impending war to sit at the other end of a comically long table.) Recently, Trump and his allies have basically endorsed Putin’s stated, warped rationale for invading Ukraine while trying to broker a peace process. (Trump and Putin are set to talk today.)

The formation of collective memory, always contentious and often painful, has ultimately gotten caught in our chaotic information environment. And yet the traditional news media still plays a role in such processes, even if we can’t—and shouldn’t—dictate the terms. The way we frame things (or don’t) continues to matter, in big ways and smaller ones. This certainly applies to the COVID pandemic. As I wrote in 2021, US outlets’ organizing anniversary coverage around a couple of weeks in March wasn’t just arbitrary, but implicitly legitimized an insular perspective by pegging the “start” of the pandemic in the US to a response time that was unjustifiably late in light of what was going on elsewhere in the world—a consequential matter, since learning the lessons of this pandemic will be essential to how we respond to future ones. Even the act of looking back at the pandemic is a contestable choice. As Cohen and Spinney suggested in the Post, pinpointing when the pandemic ended is just as subjective as trying to nail down a start date, perhaps even more so. Amid this wave of anniversary coverage, various outlets have published articles stressing that the pandemic is not over—for those with long COVID, for the immunocompromised, for those still dying.

The media’s job, and not just at anniversary time, is to try to look backward, sideways, and forward all at once—to assess how the pandemic changed society, yes, but also to gauge its ongoing effects, both direct and indirect, and to keep one eye on the threat of pandemics yet to come—while establishing a solid factual basis for memory- and policy-based debates. An impossible task, probably. But we can do better than just give up. Projecting forward in 2022, I wrote that “science should never again be siloed from other beats or pushed off the front page by shallow politics coverage until the next crisis has overwhelmed us already,” and that we should instead use COVID as an opportunity to engage the public in science as a messy process in which we all have a stake; I didn’t necessarily expect this to happen, but I didn’t expect, three years later, that even flagrant assaults on science, including at the highest levels of government, wouldn’t reliably make the front page. Further back—five years ago to the day—Pope’s early pandemic lessons for the press included the importance of robust local news and the dangers of obsessing over Trump in coverage. Neither feels quaint or complacent today, and the same is true of Pope’s final word: “We are in one of the darkest moments in our national history,” he wrote, but “journalism is among the few lights we have left.” In this new era, the impossible is still becoming commonplace before our eyes.

Other notable stories:

• Fallout continues from the Trump administration’s deportation of the alleged Venezuelan gang members, who were sent to El Salvador under an agreement with that country’s president, Nayib Bukele, as well as a video—posted online by Bukele and amplified by Trumpworld—showing deportees being marched off a plane and their heads being shaved; Stelter described the video, which was set to “dramatic music,” as “a made-for-TV and made-for-social portrayal of a popular Trump policy in action,” and noted that critics characterized it as fascist propaganda. At a press briefing yesterday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, encouraged undocumented immigrants “to actively self-deport to maybe save themselves from being in one of these fun videos.” (She also took an, erm, interesting shot at France.)

• Yesterday, Dan Bongino, the former Fox host and right-wing podcaster, took up his new post as deputy director of the FBI, serving under Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist who has previously threatened to “come after” people in the media. Bongino has some law enforcement experience but has never worked as an agent for the bureau; indeed, NBC’s Ken Dilanian said on air yesterday that, on his podcast, Bongino has “been a purveyor of conspiracy theories and disinformation” about the FBI’s work. In his final show, Bongino said that he would retain a social media presence but not post about politics, claiming that he won’t be a “partisan” at the FBI. Cumulus Media, which distributed the show, has tapped Vince Coglianese to inherit Bongino’s time slot.

• For CJR, Theodore Amey and Seth Stern report on the case of an incarcerated journalist in Texas who claims to have faced retaliation from local prison officials in response to his work. (The officials deny this.) “Incarcerated journalists tell stories no one else can,” Amey and Stern write. “Prisoners are often held in deplorable conditions.… Missing out on those stories is a major loss, not just for the incarcerated but for anyone who wants their government held accountable for how it treats their fellow citizens. When the public entrusts and pays for correctional agencies to care for those who are incarcerated, it deserves to know what’s going on.”

• Also for CJR, Sheila S. Coronel reflects on the stunning recent arrest of Rodrigo Duterte, the press-bashing former president of the Philippines, who has now been sent to The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity. “Duterte’s arrest is a fluke”—the result, above all, of a falling-out with the current president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr.—and yet “it would not have been possible without years of difficult, dangerous, painstaking work,” including on the part of journalists, Coronel writes. It is also a reminder that it “takes a nation to hold a president to account.”

• And in London, the Sunday Times dug into the unsolved assassination of David Holden, a foreign correspondent at the paper, in Egypt in 1977—and concluded that he was actually a spy who was first recruited by the Soviet KGB but later became involved with the CIA and was, perhaps, a double agent. The paper’s investigation suggests that Egyptian agents likely killed Holden because he worked for the KGB, a result of “the moving sands of the geopolitics of the Middle East at that time.”

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