In the aftermath of most national disasters, such as 9/11, the Iraq War, and even January 6, the media typically spends years writing an endless series of think pieces, autopsies, and analyses of what went wrong and how to prevent it from ever happening again. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying lockdowns, we’re not seeing the same thing, and in fact most media outlets seem to want to forget the whole thing ever happened, even though it represented the most dramatic curtailing of American civil liberties in living memory. Matt Kibbe talks to David Zweig, author of “An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions,” who argues that the media wants to hide its own culpability in pushing for lockdowns and censorship of dissenting ideas. Zweig, who considered himself broadly left-wing before the pandemic, was shocked at the persistent illogic of keeping schools closed in the face of evidence that children faced virtually no risk from the virus, and his ensuing investigation led him to question many of his preconceptions about the state of American journalism.
