“Leonhardt is one of the key pundits leading the charge of those who want to declare unilateral surrender to COVID-19,” Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, told me. This position has enraged some readers - doctors, scientists, and journalists among them - who believe it’s absurd to call for a return to normal when, according to the Times, around 2,000 people are dying from COVID each day. Leonhardt, who has described his journalistic colleagues as having a “bad-news bias,” sees his role as being an implicit corrective to some of the more alarmist coverage showing up elsewhere in traditional media and even in the Times itself. But thanks to vaccination and the cresting Omicron variant, the costs of liberal caution - he cites “mental-health problems, anger, frustration, isolation, drug overdoses, vehicle crashes, violent crime, learning loss, student misbehavior” - have begun to outweigh the benefits. This was a good thing earlier in the pandemic, leading to high vaccine uptake, masking, and compliance with social distancing and lockdowns. This attitude has become part of their identity,” Leonhardt told me. “Many liberals have spent two years thinking of COVID mitigations as responsible, necessary, even patriotic. Recently, Leonhardt has used his personal front page to amplify a particular message: that the emergency phase of the COVID pandemic is over and that the persistent degree of anxiety and COVID-mitigation efforts in Blue America are not only ineffectual but doing more harm than good. Sulzberger has begun to refer to the paper as having not one but four front pages: the print edition, the website, The Daily podcast hosted by Michael Barbaro, and The Morning. It’s a huge platform and a huge responsibility, both of which he takes seriously (as he takes most things). More than perhaps any writer in America, Leonhardt is positioned to shape our collective common sense about the state of the virus and our society’s responses to it.

According to Politico, even President Joe Biden reads Leonhardt. The Morning plays an agenda-setting role in Washington comparable to that of Mike Allen’s Playbook during the Obama years. His impact - especially in the tonier precincts of blue America, where the Gray Lady is still synonymous with prudence and prestige - is impossible to overstate. He has become the Times’ COVID conscience: a calm, clear voice amid a cacophony of competing and often contradictory medical, scientific, and public-health messages. Times science and health reporters won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for their coverage of the pandemic, but even big A1 stories receive but a fraction of the bleary eyeballs that greet Leonhardt’s genial, data-driven missives every day. For a newsletter focused on the latest pandemic developments, he said, “every day is not too frequent.” As Leonhardt recently told me, COVID turned out to be “the perfect story” for a daily newsletter “because people are desperate for information.” The audience, he found, was insatiable. Since its launch in May 2020, The Morning has focused primarily, though not exclusively, on COVID-19. That figure makes Leonhardt one of the most influential writers at the most influential paper in the country. Approximately 5 million people start their day with David Leonhardt, the author of the New York Times’ morning newsletter.

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