Around the world, authoritarian leaders lied about the severity of a plague, claimed their own countries were immune, punished the journalists who got it right, and then used the crises they created to consolidate power. Mr. Trump’s behaviors followed the authoritarian pattern: a denial of reality, the claim of magical immunity, the harassment of reporters, the transformation of a problem he caused into a loyalty test for others, the cultivation of fear as a political resource. Authoritarians will allow people to die uncounted rather than admit that the number of dead in their country was high.
In the United States, we have both the highest death toll from coronavirus in the world (authoritarian disregard for life) and the certainty that it is a severe undercount (authoritarian resistance to facts). We know that that the official American death count is far too low, since people were dying when almost no testing was being done; since people continue to die throughout the country, at home and in hospitals, without being tested; since little counting of cases or deaths was done in nursing homes; since Florida has suppressed data about the number of deaths; and since there are large numbers of unexplained excess deaths every month.
In the end, authoritarians have little incentive to halt a pandemic, since they can thrive in an atmosphere of manipulated fear. The idea seems to be not to count Republicans who die, nor Democrats who vote. Democracy is needed for public health, but a public health crisis in a weak democracy like our own can be used to bring it down. Under the cover of pandemic, voting has been made more difficult. During mass demonstrations against racism, Mr. Trump has called for violence and domination. If fewer people vote in November 2020 this will be a crisis not only for democracy, but also for public health. If lies about illness lead to authoritarianism, we can expect more illness and more lies.
* * *
If we need the truth to set us free, can the internet liberate us? We have been told that big data would rationalize our political decisions. Silicon Valley did nothing to help Americans in January and February 2020. That was a time, it might have seemed, when some rapid data crunching could have saved lives and the economy. That didn’t happen, because big data is not the same thing as the knowledge humans need to thrive. Values such as life, health, and freedom do not matter to machines. Our staggering computer power brought us very little.
The people who ran the data companies understood the mathematics of contagion and sent their own employees home. But on the day that they did so, did they advise others to do the same? Did your feed ever remind you to wash your hands and to clean your phone? It did not, because doing those things would interrupt your session. The business model of social media companies is to keep eyeballs on screens and hands on touchpads so that emotions can be tracked for advertisers. The human body is most trackable when inert. The internet age is the age of obesity; a third of Americans are obese, and obese Americans are most at risk of dying from the coronavirus.
The word data does not mean what it used to. Now it means the things that we don’t know. Social media companies know about you, but you do not know about them—nor do you know what they know about you, nor do you know how they learned it, or what they intend to do with it. Big data is generally about how your mind can be manipulated for profit, rather than how your body might better move through the world. It can reveal our particular cravings and fears, but not our common needs.
For that reason, big data did not tell us what we should have acquired in early 2020: tens of millions of tests, and a large stockpile of protective gear and ventilators. Big data was admittedly good at establishing which people wanted to hoard which thing and putting them in touch with Chinese vendors. When life was at stake during the coronavirus outbreak, big data could not discern whether an individual was infected. Only the testing of humans by humans gives us the knowledge that we need. The facts we need are about one body at a time. We get them only if we believe in the science and care enough to work together. No machine can do this work for us.
No social platform can improve health, since any algorithm with such a goal would alert people to shut down their computers, wash their hands, and get some exercise. No social platform can promote freedom, since social platforms aim at addiction. No social platform can promote truth, because truth, as Euripides realized twenty-five hundred years ago, is about human daring. We care about free speech not because a machine can dump endless garbage into the maw of our worst instincts, but because an individual human being can say something true that others do not know and that power wants hidden.
* * *
Reporters are the heroes of our time; and like all heroes at all times they are too few. What we always need in a democracy, and what we needed desperately in early 2020, was not invisible big data but visible small facts: local news, reported by local people for local people, for the betterment of all. One reason why the novel coronavirus spread silently across America is that our country lacked the early warning system that we once took for granted: reporters who could have noticed new illnesses in their communities.
Reporting, like medical testing, is a way to produce facts. The reporter aims to be objective, getting close to an event while keeping emotions at a distance. A local newspaper conveys a sense of a shared world; the knowledge gained is credible. Like medical testing, reporting can tell us the things that we need to hear. Freedom of speech becomes meaningful when we have something to talk about.
Journalists saved American lives in early 2020 by forcing an unwilling president to confront, if fitfully and belatedly, the reality of the coronavirus. Fatally, many Americans saw the confrontation between Mr. Trump’s witchcraft and reporters’ fact-checking as a partisan disagreement. Coronavirus seemed abstract because Americans had little or no local information about it. Since people did not know that the virus was already loose in their communities, that hospitals were already dealing with unexpected respiratory ailments, that nursing homes were already piling up bodies, the conversation in the White House seemed to be about politics rather than health, ideology rather than epidemiology.
Coronavirus was a local news story that could not be adequately covered because we lack the local reporters. Most American counties no longer have a proper newspaper. First, media was centralized in larger groups. Then the financial crisis of 2007–08 destroyed the livelihood of many reporters. Since then, the rise of social media has just about finished the job. Facebook and Google take the advertising revenue that newspapers once shared, though Facebook and Google do not report news.
Where social media has extinguished local journalism, distrust and ignorance reign. It is not simply that the facts are absent; it is that social media spread wild falsehoods, including about the pandemic, that never would have passed muster in a newspaper. The work of reporters affirmed the values of truth and well-being, and so helped to create trust. As local journalism fades, American attention shifts to national stories, ideology, and conspiracy theories designed to do harm.
Most of our country is now a news desert. News deserts kill us by depriving us of the information we need in our daily lives, and by leaving us confused at crucial moments when we need to act to protect our health and freedom. A familiar example is pollution. In the absence of local reporters, no one checks for unseemly relationships between politicians and companies. Projects that pollute the water or air simply PR their way into existence. If there are no local reporters, no one follows up on health complaints, or tests the water and air.