COLUMBUS, Ohio — If you’ve been following Gov. Mike DeWine’s coronavirus news conferences the way that New Yorkers follow Andrew Cuomo’s, you know Jack Windsor: He’s the reporter asking about creeping Marxism among contact tracers and suggesting that Ohio is double counting virus cases.
Mr. Windsor, a 44-year-old with credentials from a small Mansfield TV station, is a new kind of media star, the local face of Covid contrarianism.
“You are a very lonely voice,” a Cleveland radio host, Bob Frantz, told Mr. Windsor in May, because “everybody else just wants to kowtow to the dictator.”
Mr. Windsor had come out of nowhere to fill an unsettling opening in the market. He left a job selling ads for a local website in 2019, not long after his then-wife won an order of protection against him. This April, he was running a wedding venue. Statehouse reporters were stunned at his sudden emergence at news conferences, and at how quickly he parlayed those appearances into testifying in June for a Republican-backed bill to make the virus data less scary. So were people who had known Mr. Windsor in Mansfield.
“It’s absurd to see scientists and medical professionals disparaged by some guy I went to high school with who has no credentials or qualifications,” one of them, Melanie Ganim, told me.
If you’re not in Ohio, you probably haven’t heard of Jack Windsor. But you may have heard of Alex Berenson, the Twitter and Fox News figure who is as credentialed as Mr. Windsor is self-made. Mr. Berenson, a former reporter for The New York Times, pumps tirades against lockdowns, school closings and even masks into the central conversation on Twitter. His avatar shows a mask dangling mockingly from his jaw. “Masks are useless,” he had tweeted at 1:40 last Thursday morning; he was back on around 10 a.m., accusing The Atlantic of “panic porn.”
Mr. Berenson lives on a hilltop in a tony Hudson Valley town. When I went to interview him on Thursday afternoon, he opened the door without a greeting or a mask, and led me to his small bright attic study, where I wore a disposable mask (in theory for his protection, not that he was asking for it) while we shared the sweltering air for more than an hour. He stands 6-foot-4 and looks younger than his 47 years, but his mood — harried, angry and reveling in the fight — matches his voice on Twitter. When I arrived, he was in the midst of the chaos of three roving young children and two high-energy dogs.
They say that the best thing about working for The New York Times is that you get to call yourself a “former New York Times reporter” forever. Mr. Berenson trades hard on that credential. It’s the first line of his Twitter bio and his calling card on Fox News. But he earned it. He wasn’t just a Times reporter; he was a good one. His reporting on the accounting scandals of the early 2000s produced a furious newsroom visit from Tyco’s chief executive, Dennis Kozlowski, and helped send Mr. Kozlowski to jail. He reported on the health risks of a schizophrenia drug, and was rebuked along the way by a federal judge for his hyperaggressive pursuit of documents. He was a contrarian with a big ego and some problems with authority, “a talented, bristling, swashbuckling character,” Roger Cohen, a former Times foreign editor, recalled. During an internal Times crisis in 2003, Mr. Berenson was the one who stood up at a staff meeting and asked the executive editor, Howell Raines, whether he would resign.
Mr. Berenson was also a talented writer. He left The Times in 2010, after his muscular post-9/11 spy novel, “The Faithful Spy,” had become a breakout hit. It was the first of a 12-volume series.
His career was impressive even by the standards of his group of friends, or former friends, who include elite business journalists like Andrew Ross Sorkin and David Leonhardt of The Times, Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica and Felix Salmon of Axios.
And they had always laughed off his excesses — like the time he accused the writers of “Homeland” of stealing his characters. Now, they “all wonder what he’s doing, because some of the things he’s doing are dangerous,” said another member of his circle, Craig Geller, who works in advertising.
Mr. Berenson’s road to his new cause began last fall with the book, “Tell Your Children,” which was inspired by conversations with his wife, a psychiatrist who worked with the criminally insane. The book moves from studies linking marijuana with psychosis to a broadside against the drug’s safety. Advocates of legalizing marijuana accused him of steering nuanced science to simple and unfounded conclusions. In an afterword added this February, he wrote that the book was shunned by mainstream reviewers, darkly complaining of a media “blackout.”
“When serious journalists write serious nonfiction books, they usually receive substantial coverage,” he wrote. Though his book was the subject of a major New Yorker article, “not one major newspaper reviewed it, not even the Times, where I had worked for a decade.”
Former Times journalists are often stung when their books aren’t featured, given the paper’s outsize influence on book buyers. But the reasons are often prosaic. A Times editor said the galleys arrived late, so they featured it atop the Book Review’s “New and Noteworthy” section, rather than giving it a full review. A Washington Post editor said it simply hadn’t made the cut.
By the time the coronavirus arrived, Mr. Berenson was primed to believe that public health voices and the media that covered them had been politicized — and were perhaps out to get him. Flawed early pandemic coverage set off his contrarian side. Reporters, sometimes parroting public officials, first suggested that the virus wasn’t a major threat and that people at the beach would surely spread it. They overstated how much we knew. They overhyped anecdotes.
The coverage soon flowed into the deep political grooves of American life, turning every public health measure into a partisan battle.
“It’s important to have journalists who are asking questions and who are skeptics — it’s important to have a backstop against groupthink,” said Charles Ornstein, a deputy managing editor at ProPublica and a past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists. He has drawn Mr. Berenson’s ire for an article on Houston hospitals being overwhelmed with coronavirus patients. Mr. Berenson has been dismissive not only of ProPublica’s reporting but also of Houston hospital officials’ public statements.
“Alex cherry-picks individual data points that fit his narrative that things aren’t as bad as they actually are. That’s dangerous,” Mr. Ornstein said. “Clearly, across the country, things are getting worse, but to hear Alex’s version, they’re not that bad.”
Critics sometimes play down Twitter’s importance; it’s not, the saying goes, real life. But it is the real public conversation. As Lili Loofbourow wrote on Slate, Twitter is really what we’re talking about when we talk about the toxic “climate” for debate.
And Mr. Berenson’s presence there became both Twitter at its best — wide open for an argument and information as well as putting into perspective statistics like the relatively small risk to children — and at its worst — a sneering confirmation machine, reflexively amplifying facts and claims that support a preordained conclusion. Mr. Berenson believes that the impact of the coronavirus is regrettable, mostly inevitable and overstated: That lockdowns are useless, masks don’t help and politicians are too worried about the deaths of old people who were going to die soon anyway.
Mr. Berenson plays down counterevidence — even when it is firsthand or expert. He breathlessly warned that a quarantine for visitors to New Zealand amounts to “indefinite confinement,” and stuck by the claim even after his original New Zealand source described him as “confused.” Last week, Mr. Berenson gleefully tweeted about a study he framed as discrediting mask use, and, in response, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci accused him of spreading “misinformation.”
I found the study confusing, and emailed its lead author, C. Raina MacIntyre.
“We do not recommend cloth masks for health workers, but believe a protective cloth mask for the community is possible if some basic design principles are followed,” she said.
Mr. Berenson had swept the researcher into his anti-mask campaign. But she had been studying medical masks for keeping health care workers safe, and the paper showed that cloth masks did not work nearly as well as medical masks in protecting those workers. It had not addressed the reason that Americans are now being asked to wear masks — to protect others. In fact, Ms. MacIntyre co-wrote a paper in April backing the use of masks to stop community spread.
Mr. Windsor, in Ohio, has built his base out of conservative anger at the government’s role in enforcing lockdowns and mask mandates. Mr. Berenson sees himself on “Team Reality,” fighting “Team Apocalypse,” which in his telling includes everyone from political leaders to former colleagues to public health experts blasting him in Vanity Fair.
“I’m doing this because I believe this is the worst public policy mistake of our lifetime. It’s worse than Vietnam,” he told me. “It’s driven by media hysteria. It’s driven by this belief that we can eradicate death.”
But when you pull away from the fire and fury of Twitter, Mr. Berenson’s tirades against the media don’t explain why he finds himself standing nearly alone against most public health experts and world governments. The pandemic and its response are global. The American media hysteria he decries can’t account for the lockdowns and reopenings in places like Greece and China and South Korea. It doesn’t explain the global public health consensus, or why Ms. MacIntyre, who runs a biosecurity program at the University of New South Wales, would be in on the pro-mask scam.
Playing devil’s advocate works on Twitter, though, and on Fox’s powerful shows, and has helped Mr. Berenson sell more than 100,000 copies of his self-published booklet, “Unreported Truths about Covid-19 and Lockdowns.” Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, helped shame Amazon into allowing the booklet onto its platform in June, and the two men have also discussed starting a new publication. Mr. Berenson even began preliminary conversations about hiring reporters, an associate of Mr. Berenson’s told me, but did not pursue the plan.
“Alex and I basically just agree that there’s room for a fiercely nonpartisan news company,” Mr. Musk said in an email.
Perhaps the most jarring thing about Mr. Berenson’s presence on Twitter is not his relentlessness but his lack of empathy. When a marijuana policy figure he’d clashed with died last July, Mr. Berenson tweeted, “Here’s where I’m supposed to say that even though we disagreed he was smart and cared deeply about public policy.” Instead, he followed with a Latin phrase about not speaking ill of the dead. When Mr. Berenson learned that one of his Twitter foes, the Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie, had lost his grandfather to the virus, he just kept arguing, writing that he had dead grandparents, too, and “the world didn’t stop for them either.”
This coldness about death is at the heart of Mr. Berenson’s bigger-picture policy view: that we simply need to accept the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans from the virus, and that the social and economic damage of the lockdowns is wasted. It’s a bloodless argument, but an honest one. And he makes it in the final page of his booklet, doing back-of-the-envelope math to project a worst case of an extra 600,000 American deaths. (The number is roughly in sync with other projections, though there’s not a consensus on how many more years virus victims may have otherwise lived.)
“Over the course of a year or two, the coronavirus is likely to have little if any impact on the overall number of Americans who die,” he writes, describing it as a mere 3 percent bump.
That math is at the heart of any serious argument about the trade-offs between the disease and the lockdowns, even if you accept the global public health consensus that lockdowns are effective (which Mr. Berenson doesn’t). But even public figures who oppose lockdowns rarely say that out loud. President Trump isn’t shrugging off deaths. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom Mr. Berenson cheered when he resisted locking down, doesn’t wave off daily death tolls that have sometimes climbed past 100. Mr. Berenson suggests that the reason no political leader has made this case is a reflection of media hysteria. I think it may reflect ordinary human politics, which puts a high value on the lives of citizens, even old ones.
The pain caused by the lockdowns is real, too. And that means that Mr. Berenson, Mr. Windsor and, of course, President Trump, will keep finding an audience.
“I am done with your constitutional infringements and taking my economic producing capacity,” the desperate operator of a wedding venue wrote to Ohio’s lieutenant governor on Facebook in April, in a message I obtained under the state’s public records law. “The order for May 1 better damn well have provision for wedding venues.”
The author of that Facebook message was Jack Windsor. A week later, he had gotten a small independent television station to give him a press pass, and he became the media.
Lucia Walinchus contributed reporting.
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