I suppose it goes without saying that every newspaper is the product of an editorial decision tree, ranging from cub reporter all the way up to the executive desk. The decision tree dictates what gets covered, as well as what doesn’t: each day, billions of people suffer billions of horrors, but Section A of the Times always has twenty pages. I imagine that — among those who pursue journalism from a sense of duty, and stick it out long enough to ascend the editorial ladder — the job of deciding what’s newsworthy is both intoxicating and intimidating.
That said, American newspapers are ossified nearly to the point of self-governance. The Times1 cannot be held accountable by its readers, because the Times has no competitors. For at least my entire lifetime, the Times has published a newspaper for property-owning Reagan Democrats in Lenox Hill; this demographic does not exist in 2023, and may not have existed in 1980. Joseph Kahn never has to step back and consider how he might better serve a contemporary readership, because so long as the Times prints a newspaper each day, the Times is successful.
The lack of market competition — the absence of any incentive to modernize, let alone actually improve — makes the Times a fat, lazy troll. It’s an extremely paint-by-numbers publication, from the layout to the article format to the gotta-hear-both-sides equivalences. When the president of the United States brands the Times a biased left-wing rag, the Times leans into its new identity as renegade truth-teller, sells subscriptions to millions of scandalized liberals, and goes right along printing Bret Stephens and David Brooks. It doesn’t matter what anyone says about the Times, because it’s the Times.
This air of august infallibility is the most crucial element of the Times’s identity: whatever crap makes its way into today’s edition, the Times is a dispenser of unbiased, no-nonsense reporting. (James Bennet’s cardinal sin wasn’t endangering American civilians, it was reminding readers that someone’s pulling levers behind the curtain.) And that’s what’s most egregious about the Times’s China coverage — somewhere in the decision tree, the directive was made not only to defy reporting standards, but to undermine journalism in service of xenophobic hysteria.
By now it's no secret the Times has seized every opportunity to sow pandemic misinformation, push back-to-office narratives, and launder the record of an administration with 700,000 COVID deaths on its hands. They printed article after article after article excoriating China for its “Zero COVID” policies — for impinging upon the freedom of civilians who must surely crave the death and disablement of a U.S.-style forced-infection campaign. As soon as China relaxed its mitigation policies in line with western countries, the Times changed its tune, decrying the “desperation and misery” of a country besieged by coronavirus.
Well, which is it? The Times spent three years jeering China for daring to protect its citizens from airborne illness, deeming Zero COVID unrealistic and inhumane while failing to note the millions of lives saved. Now that China’s decided to let the virus rip, America-style, the Times’s Asia bureaus have pivoted to breathless dispatches from hospitals, alleging failed leadership and population abandonment. You’d almost think 1.2 million Americans hadn’t died of the same virus.
The December 28 edition is a cover-to-cover assault, lambasting China for a tiny fraction of the carnage America bears on a daily basis. The above-the-fold cover story, credited to Isabelle Qian and David Pierson, is framed by on-the-ground reportage from a short-staffed, overwhelmed emergency unit in Tianjin. It’s a familiar scene for stateside readers who lived through 2020 (or 2021, or 2022), but there’s a tricky sleight-of-hand at work: the reportorial framing assumes American readers hold China to a standard they’d never apply to their own country:
For the past three years, [China] largely suppressed the virus with a costly mix of mass testing, strict lockdowns and border closures. The government could have used the time to bolster its health system by stockpiling medicine and building more critical care units. It could have launched a major vaccination drive targeting the millions of vulnerable older adults who were reluctant to receive a jab or booster. China did little of that, however, plunging into crisis mode again like in the early days of Wuhan.
It’s the “could haves” for me. China could have done a lot of things, I guess, but fact is they have the lowest per-capita death rate in the world, with just over 5,000 total deaths to the U.S.’s 1.2 million. Labeling their testing program “costly” strikes me as a fraught assessment (Costly for whom? Would millions of deaths have been less costly?). Only fourteen percent (fourteen percent!) of eligible Americans have received a bivalent booster shot. Is a Times reader to assume that the United States — a non-representative democracy with one of the highest per-capita death rates — could not have bolstered its health system or launched a vaccination drive? Is the U.S. dysfunctional, or do we just prioritize personal liberties over human lives?
An inconvenient statistic is buried eight paragraphs into the article: in the three weeks since “pandemic rules were relaxed” on December 7, the official Chinese death tally was…seven. The reporters dismiss this stat with a round of hand-waving, citing “anecdotal evidence from across the country” and casting aspersions on data quality. (Online, the piece links to an earlier article disputing China’s data in similar fashion.) Just as a benchmark, though: the CDC’s count of American deaths across those dates was 8,274, with a number of U.S. states proudly burying their case and death totals.
Qian and Pierson make another bizarre claim which wouldn’t have stood up to a fact-check:
The country’s inadequate vaccination levels as well as the lack of herd immunity have raised fears that death tolls could reach those seen earlier in the pandemic in places like the United States, Western Europe, and, more recently, Hong Kong.
Is a Times reader to understand that, three years into the global pandemic, the United States and Western Europe are protected from high death tolls by “herd immunity”? Reinfections are mounting across the western world, with even vaccinated individuals contracting separate infections within three weeks of one another; the U.S.’s soup of mutating variants has obviated any faith in natural immunity, making “herd immunity” an utter and absolute fantasy. Again, the Times leans on slippery vagueness. The reporters don’t actually state that herd immunity exists in the U.S. and Western Europe, but the sentence implies that if China had foregone mitigation in the first place, it might have come to pass.
Let’s proceed to the op-ed page. The featured editorial, penned by Shanghainese freelancer Jianan Qian, is headlined “I’ve Had Enough of My Parents’ ‘No Pain, No Gain’.” It’s a typical anti-lockdown grievance, bemoaning the protection of vulnerable lives over short-term economic output and attributing China’s public-health strategy to a masochistic culture.
Citing the November protests in Beijing and Shanghai, Qian writes, “Those brave citizens who took to the streets were rejecting not only the smothering pandemic restrictions they had endured, but also our ingrained idolization of pain and sacrifice.” False equivalences aside (in Times-speak, “lockdown” is synonymous with “any institutional attempt to suppress a deadly virus”), I confess this one left me a bit speechless. China’s population is nearly four times the size of the United States’, yet the United States has 240 times as many COVID deaths. When it comes to the ravages of COVID, what can Qian possibly tell western readers about pain and sacrifice? The Times’s value judgment is implicit yet clear: antigen testing and periodic stay-at-home orders are threats to freedom, whereas mass death and disablement is merely the cost of commerce.
Still the strangest piece in the December 28th edition fronts the Business section: “With ‘Zero Covid,’ China Proved It’s Good at Control. Governance Is Harder.” This one strikes me as unprecedented in a few ways. For one, it’s an unvarnished opinion piece, which the section doesn’t run. It also has virtually nothing to do with business. The author, Li Yuan, discusses pivots in China's pandemic policy, citing a lack of mask mandates, inaccessible testing, shortages of over-the-counter medicine, and people showing up sick to work. Sound familiar? Like Qian and Pierson’s front-page article, Yuan’s is structured around a series of “could haves”:
[China] could have spent its resources on increasing vaccine coverage among older people and adding I.C.U. beds. Instead, it spent money on mass Covid testing and enormous quarantine camps. It could have communicated scientific facts about symptoms and death rates of the Omicron variant. Instead, it fanned fears about Covid. […] Its main advice to the public: “You’re in charge of your own health.” The slogan has been repeated by state media and local governments since the reopening. But the pandemic is a public health crisis, and such crises are part of the reason governments exist.
Revisiting the concept of an editorial decision tree — the newsiness of these items hinges on their profundity or uniqueness. Yuan harps on China’s administrative dereliction, suggesting leadership should be held accountable. Yet each of these phenomena — communication failures, low vaccine uptake, the privatization of public health — has defined the U.S.’s COVID response. It’s worth remembering that, at the outset, China’s plan was effectively the U.S.’s plan: to curb transmission via non-pharmaceutical interventions, and eventually with vaccines. The U.S. failed miserably on both fronts, so now we pretend mass infection was the plan all along, even though natural immunity is a fairy tale.
Some other highlights from Yuan’s article:
The local governments haven’t been doing much, either. Many officials are probably waiting for guidance from their superiors. “Zero Covid” could be quantified so everyone knew what to do. In a top-down system like the Communist Party, the underlings are often at a loss for what to do when the big boss doesn’t set a goal.
For weeks, Mr. Xi said nothing about the end of the country’s “zero Covid” policy, which was considered his signature campaign. On Monday, in his first public comment on the dismantling of “zero Covid,” Mr. Xi was vague, saying China’s epidemic prevention and control was facing new situations and tasks. He urged the public to “develop good personal hygiene habits” and “practice a civilized and healthy lifestyle.” His remarks didn’t mention either the high infection rates or the death counts.
Paralyzed local government? A head of state refusing to acknowledge the pandemic he’s unleashed? Just imagine!
The December 28th edition isn’t an outlier — in ensuing days, the anti-China coverage has assumed the tone of gleeful propaganda. A front-page headline on January 3rd proclaimed, “China Yielded On Lockdown, But Woes Last,” focusing on a struggling retail sector and trickle-down effects of viral mitigation on China’s economy. That same day, the Business section ran a strange piece on China’s “monotonous” civil service sector, blaming Zero COVID for slow employment growth. “Some say their days are ruled by rigid hierarchies and involve monotonous chores,” Claire Fu wrote. “Others, while saying they enjoy their jobs, complain that their responsibilities often sprawl beyond normal work hours.” Interesting! Wait until you hear about…every American job.
It’s not just that this stuff is blinkered, jingoistic, and crumbles upon a moment’s interrogation. America’s COVID tally is a shame and a tragedy, but most of all, it’s news. The U.S. has suffered thousands of deaths per week for three years running; China has not. Yet every week, Times journalists twist themselves into pretzels writing about China’s depraved COVID policies. They hammer China for reining in private enterprise, as if the Western insistence on uninterrupted commerce weren’t to blame for a global-historical death event. They deplore China’s restrictions on trade and travel, as if civil liberties outweigh the right to life. They report on China’s Zero COVID reversal as if the U.S. hadn’t done the same thing, only earlier and more disastrously.
An outlet with the Times’s resources could hold Xi Jinping accountable through sound reporting. The U.S. maintains a hands-off attitude regarding the ongoing Uyghur crisis; there’s no shortage of actual atrocities the Times might grant front-page real estate. The journalistic imperative is to spotlight China’s malfeasance, without downplaying or apologizing for the U.S.’s. Instead, the Times flattens the two superpowers into economic rivals, carrying the home team’s water with a melange of selective dispatches, op-eds, and horse-race analysis. China has outpaced the U.S. in terms of COVID mitigation and economic performance — there’s no honest way to spin either outcome in the U.S.’s favor.
It’s no coincidence that multiple reporters across sections are staffed to the “China could have” beat. A newspaper has finite space, and any assignment is made at the expense of other subjects. Across sections and bureaus, the Times is committed to a vision of affluence as permitted by free markets. But these reporters must glance at the scoreboard once in a while. A citizen is exponentially more likely to suffer or die due to government negligence and economic policy in the U.S. than in China; as ever, the enemy is inside. In the wake of the infamous “Incalculable Loss” headline, Times brass opted for rah-rah patriotism instead of reporting the news.
Disclosure: I’ve happily written for the Times Magazine and the Book Review, and would love to again. We at Tosiello Review contain multitudes.