ACTION ALERT: As US Covid Deaths Reach 800,000, Atlantic Essay Asks: Who Cares?

“The virus simply does not factor into my calculations or those of my neighbors,” boasts Matthew Walther (Atlantic, 12/13/21).

A second Delta wave of Covid-19 is hitting parts of the country hard at the moment, as public health experts anxiously keep an eye on the newest variant, Omicron, to see what impact it might have on the pandemic here. On a day when some outlets (e.g., New York Times, 12/13/21) soberly reported that the recorded US death toll is about to surpass 800,000—a number greater than the entire population of Seattle, Denver or Washington, DC; greater than the US toll from the Spanish Flu or the Civil War—the Atlantic (12/13/21) gleefully marked the occasion by publishing a glib piece headlined “Where I Live, No One Cares About Covid.”

One could imagine value in a sociological piece attempting to explain why, despite the fact that case rates have gone up by 49% over the past two weeks, with nearly 1,300 Americans dying of Covid per day, people in some parts of the country deny the reality of the pandemic, resisting vaccination and other public health measures that would reduce those numbers and their attendant suffering.

This is not that piece.

Author Matthew Walther (of Catholic magazine the Lamp and the American Conservative) turns his lens not on those who don’t care, but rather on those who do. His point is not to enlighten readers about the pandemic, but to tweak the Atlantic‘s largely liberal audience by mocking their “relentless adherence to CDC directives,” which he compares to other “silly novelties—no-fault divorce, factory-sliced bread, frozen meals and, of course, infant formula—[that] are adopted enthusiastically by the upper middle classes.”

Matthew Walther

Walther describes being gobsmacked by news articles untangling what behaviors might be safer than others at family holiday gatherings and brags about his “hundreds of hours” of maskless time spent in bars, restaurants, travels and weddings during the pandemic. He finds those “still genuinely concerned about this virus” to be “almost absurdly overrepresented in media and elite institutions.” Readers are apparently to understand that in publishing Walther, the Atlantic is just doing their part to correct the bias.

“In my part of America,” Walther writes condescendingly,

the only people one ever sees with masks are brooding teenagers seated alone in coffee shops, who seem to have adopted masks to set themselves apart from the reactionary banality of life in flyover country in the same way that I once scribbled anti-Bush slogans on T-shirts. The survival of such old-fashioned adolescent angst is, at any rate, deeply heartening.

Or, perhaps those teenagers have more interest in reality and more regard for others than Walther does, knowing that their adherence to public health measures helps protect not just them, but their vulnerable neighbors, from a deadly pandemic. He wears his disregard as a badge of honor:

Covid is invisible to me except when I am reading the news, in which case it strikes me with all the force of reports about distant coups in Myanmar.

I thought about searching the Atlantic‘s archives for pieces with titles like “Where I Live, No One Cares About Slavery” or “Where I Live, No One Cares About Child Labor,” or, more recently, “Where I Live, No One Cares About the Opioid Crisis.” Perhaps they would indeed publish such things as well. Beyond the clickbait shock value of the sentiment is a truly sociopathic contempt for others’ lives, a narcissistic dismissal of neighbors both near and far who, through age, health condition or simple bad luck, have been devastated by Covid, or live knowing they are at high risk of such devastation—as well as a blithe indifference to the overworked, burned-out and emotionally traumatized health professionals who treat them.

Walther lives in Michigan, which is among the hardest hit states in the country at the moment. He acknowledges only parenthetically that the case rate in his county is currently at its highest level of the pandemic, as if this is largely irrelevant information. Meanwhile, hospitals in his state are at their breaking point, not accepting transfers, canceling elective surgeries, and asking for emergency staffing help from the Defense Department (CNN, 12/10/21; Bloomberg, 11/23/21). (Walther dismisses this by saying that “hospitalization statistics…are always high this time of year without attracting much notice.”)

Michigan is currently the state with the highest death rate from Covid-19, with an average of 120 people—1.2 people per 100,000—dying daily. Since the start of the pandemic, more than 1 in every 400 people in Michigan has died from the virus.

Why would the Atlantic, which counts among its staff reporters Katherine Wu and Ed Yong, who have been leading exponents of illuminating, science-based coverage on Covid, also lend its prestige to those driving this crisis and unwilling to critique their own behavior? (The Atlantic did publish a piece the next day by staff writer Clint Smith, headlined “800,000 Deaths,” making the point that 800,000 is indeed a large number of deaths—a piece that does not mitigate but underscores the recklessness of publishing a piece that will increase the number of deaths to the extent that readers take it seriously.)

On December 14, 2021, the top three articles on the Atlantic‘s website were either examining or celebrating the rejection of public health measures to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.

That the Walther piece is currently ranked the site’s most popular—presumably a combination of hate-clicks and Covid denialists looking for confirmation—no doubt has something to do with why it was published. But the Atlantic‘s opinion section also seems to take a particularly aggressive approach to the magazine’s branding as “fearlessly questioning the assumptions of the moment.” (See, e.g., its solidarity with bigots and transphobes and “not taking offense easily.”) They ought to pay more attention to another “core principle” of their mission: that “ideas have consequences, sometimes world-historical consequences.”

As NPR recently reported (12/5/21), attitudes like those disseminated in the Atlantic have increasingly deadly consequences. As political ideology has become inextricably linked to pandemic behavior, the most Trump-loving counties now have the highest Covid death rates:

People living in counties that went 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.73 times the death rates of those that went for Biden. Counties with an even higher share of the vote for Trump saw higher Covid-19 mortality rates. In October, the reddest tenth of the country saw death rates that were six times higher than the bluest tenth.

NPR (12/5/21) reported that counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 had both lower rates of Covid vaccination and much higher current rates of Covid death than counties that voted for Joe Biden.

Statistically, many Americans will not personally know someone who died of Covid; it doesn’t mean hundreds of thousands—millions, globally—haven’t been lost. It’s the critical job of news outlets to help people see the big picture that’s not always obvious from one’s narrow individual perspective. Writers ridiculing attempts to mitigate a deadly pandemic as “parochialism” are barbaric trolls, and they shouldn’t be treated as brave truth-tellers by news outlets worth reading.

ACTION ALERT:

Please ask the Atlantic not to publish articles urging people to spurn public health measures during a pandemic.

CONTACT:

You can send messages to the Atlantic here (or via Twitter: @TheAtlantic).

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

The post ACTION ALERT: As US Covid Deaths Reach 800,000, <i>Atlantic</i> Essay Asks: Who Cares? appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

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