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Journalists are first responders too: We need…

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Journalists are first responders too: We need reporters on the front lines gathering information about coronavirus in real time

Shawn Inglima/for New York Daily News
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The New York Public Library is one of the popular tourist attractions in Manhattan that will face temporary closure due the coronavirus outbreak on Friday, March 13, 2020.

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On Friday, my husband and I leaned out the window of our Manhattan apartment and joined our neighbors in applauding medical professionals, first responders and all the essential workers who are keeping food supplies, electricity, medicine and other necessities running while most of us do our part to stanch the spread of the Coronavirus by staying inside.

In my head, though, I was also applauding another group of first responders: journalists.

From the earliest days of the pandemic, when Chinese journalists — who face grave threats at the best of times — voluntarily rushed to Wuhan and exposed themselves to an entirely unknown disease to document the outbreak, to The Seattle Times journalists who snapped into action as the city became the first U.S. epicenter, reporters have played a vital role in helping the public understand this danger. Indeed, many state and local governments have recognized local news outlets as “essential services.”

Back on March 17 — a small lifetime ago — The New York Times published an opinion piece by John M. Barry, a historian who has written about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. Barry described “the most important lesson of 1918, one that all the working groups on pandemic planning agreed upon: Tell the truth.”

In a moment of such uncertainty and alarm, people are hungry for honesty. Yet just as in 1918, it is all too evident that many public officials are failing to speak the truth — and not just in secretive authoritarian states like China. President Trump’s response to the coronavirus has been nothing more than to spread a series of falsehoods, punctuated by attacks on journalists, even when they ask the most innocuous of questions.

Thus, the role of truth-teller has in many cases fallen to journalists themselves. And they have been on the frontlines giving us the facts, even when those are hard to hear. The first article I read that really hit me in the gut was a late February Atlantic piece entitled “You’re likely to get the Coronavirus,” by James Hamblin. No U.S. politician had yet stated that fact so clearly.

And now, living in a shuttered New York City, I am painfully aware that journalists are still out on the streets and in the hospitals, telling the stories of those affected, while I am fortunate enough to stay at home.

We are generally conditioned to think of war correspondents as heroic for putting themselves in the line of fire to document violent conflict. Marie Colvin, Daniel Pearl, James Foley — the names of journalists who died covering conflict stay with us, their courage and sacrifice recognized and unquestioned. But the U.S. is facing a new kind of war in our own towns and cities. We need to start viewing the journalists covering the crisis as we do war correspondents. In this battle, information is our greatest defense.

The media have spent the last three years being battered by the rhetoric and actions of a president who disrespects the fundamental value of a free press in a democracy. Blaming the media was his first instinct in the face of this crisis, as it so often is. And many Americans have bought into the president’s slander of journalists who courageously and doggedly continue their jobs in the face of his attacks.

If we come out of this crisis with a deeper appreciation of the doctors, nurses, paramedics and other medical professionals who are on its frontlines, and of the grocery workers, restaurant employees and delivery people who are keeping life moving in its face, then we should also emerge with a recognition that journalists are first responders, too.

As doctors rush to save us from the virus itself, journalists are fighting to save us from the flood of deliberate falsehoods and misinformation spreading in its wake. In at least some small sense, we who survive will all owe them our lives.

Summer Lopez is senior director of free expression programs at the literary organization PEN America.

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