A 2018 Gallup poll found that 62 percent of Americans believe the media is biased. Did such bias affect coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic? I run a research team in the department of epidemiology at the University of California–San Francisco. In our report, the first to analyze a newspaper systematically, we found significant evidence of bias in the New York Times, considered by some to be the newspaper of record, on pandemic coverage—skewed toward overstating the threat posed by the virus.
Our study examined all corrections issued by the New York Times to articles relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. Between 2020 and 2024, the newspaper issued 576 corrections for 486 articles. Naturally, in times of crisis, facing uncertain and evolving information, reporters will get facts wrong. Sometimes they may, for instance, over- or underreport the number of children who have died or misstate the effectiveness of interventions like lockdowns. If news organizations are unbiased, one would expect such errors to occur with relatively equal frequency.
That’s not what we found. Instead, the paper’s errors tended to exaggerate the harm of the virus (or the effectiveness of interventions). Corrections were made for such errors nearly twice as frequently as for errors that downplayed harms. Fifty-five percent of errors overstated the harm of the virus, while only 24 percent understated (the rest were equivocal). In other words, when the New York Times got things wrong, it tended to do so in a way that falsely stoked fear and encouraged harmful social restrictions.
In October 2021, a particularly notable correction read as follows—inviting questions as to how such a remarkable mistake could make it into print at all:
An article on Thursday . . . misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children. It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic.
Glad they could straighten that out.
Not all reporters were equally culpable; some required more corrections than others. One in particular, Apoorva Mandavilli, was responsible for 7 percent of all corrections. When the “science and global health reporter” erred, she tended to exaggerate the risk of the virus:
This same reporter is known for inserting her feelings into her content. In 2021, she tweeted the following: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” To my knowledge, the New York Times has not reassigned any reporter on the Covid-19 beat for getting things wrong—even when those errors appear to be byproducts of the author’s underlying prejudice.
Over the last few years, the newspaper has faced more scrutiny of its ideologically skewed coverage. Opinion editor James Bennet, dismissed for publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton in the summer of 2020, wrote a lengthy article in the Economist documenting how progressive ideology has captured the newsroom. Don McNeil was dismissed as chief science reporter for comments he had made years before. McNeil, it's worth noting, was open to the possibility of the lab-leak theory, having published essays that reignited mainstream interest in the subject—in contrast with his successor, Mandavilli.
In any event, the newspaper’s distortions are skewed in the same direction as its political bias. When it came to Covid-19, Republicans tended to be more skeptical of sweeping governmental and public-health interventions like lockdowns, masking young children, and closing schools, and more concerned about their negative consequences. Florida governor Ron DeSantis reopened his state’s schools in the spring of 2020, against the advice of experts like Anthony Fauci, and opposed masking kids. Democrats, meantime, came to embrace stronger government policies, such as vaccine mandates. The Biden administration enforced the masking of toddlers in Head Start programs. The New York Times’s tilt on these matters appeared consistent with its traditional political sympathies.
It should concern all of us that legacy media displayed such a strong bias during an unprecedented pandemic. Perhaps our research can prompt an internal audit at the Times to assess the paper’s role in intensifying fear and legitimizing harmful social policies. At a minimum, newspapers should implement more substantive checks and balances to ensure more balanced coverage—and avoid unduly promoting panic the next time a crisis strikes.
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