FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Corporate media coverage of the global race for a coronavirus vaccine marginalizes the most effective and safe route to discovering one quickly: eschewing corporate profitability and intellectual property rights in favor of international cooperation through open and shared, publicly funded research.
The reality is that it’s very hard to hide an epidemic. Stopping a virus requires identifying and isolating cases of infection, and if you pretend to have done so when you really haven’t, the uncaught cases will grow exponentially.
The more that news reports focus on parsing the words of elected officials rather than going to the sources who can tell us what science says is really going on, the more they do a disservice not just to readers, but to the cause of stopping a pandemic.
“The first thing that the CDC tells you to do to help prevent the spread of disease is to wash your hands. But if you don’t have water at home, you can’t take that simple action to protect yourself or your family or your community.”
Given the blasé response to the market’s inability to deliver life-saving equipment to those who need it, because it’s not “sufficiently profitable,” it is perhaps not surprising that the view that profits are more important than lives has been treated as a reasonable opinion by corporate media.
Right-wing US media—led by Fox News, Donald Trump’s main press cheerleader—joined the Trump administration in minimizing the dangers of a global pandemic.
Choosing to keep cameras trained on the president necessarily means devoting less time to other stories that might actually inform viewers about the course of the pandemic and how to fight it—whether it’s talking to infectious disease experts on what measures are necessary to limit the death toll, or reporting on other nations’ successes and failures.
Election Focus 2020: Particularly in times of crisis, when executive power tends to expand dramatically, media should be holding the powerful to account, not settling for “better than Trump.” And there is plenty to hold Andrew Cuomo to account for.
Please tell the Associated Press to include a serious warning about the dangers of Covid-19, based on CDC guidelines, in its standard description of the coronavirus.
Election Focus 2020: After the CDC on March 15 advised the public to cancel all gatherings of more than 50 people, a senior adviser to Joe Biden went on CNN and claimed the CDC had deemed in-person voting safe. And not a single major media outlet reported on it.
Along with many other things, Covid-19 has underscored the individual and communal harms of a water affordability crisis in this country that usually remains hidden.
The course of the recovery will depend on what happens with the progress in containing and/or treating the coronavirus, and anyone who cannot speak authoritatively on that point has no clue what the recovery will look like.
The IMF loan rejection as the deadly coronavirus spreads underscores that the US government’s concern was the opposite of what it claimed: It always wanted Venezuela’s humanitarian situation to get worse, not better.
“The economic system has got to shut down. It is not an option to leave the economy running while we fight this virus; that is not a possibility.”
corporate media have accepted Trump’s premise that China is uniquely to blame and must be “held accountable” for its sins,
Reporting on Trump’s statements ended up soft-pedaling the dangers of the economy-first approach, and denying readers important information on what will likely happen if the White House tries to lift restrictions too soon.
Election Focus 2020: With projections that the COVID-19 crisis isn’t going away any time soon, what will this mean for voters’ access to the polls, and the very legitimacy of the November 3 election?
It’s vital to provide accurate information, particularly about the outbreak’s growth, and especially when you are one of the outlets that officials and opinion-shapers are likely to look to for guidance when making decisions and recommendations about the drastic measures needed to halt the coronavirus.
when you read about what “companies” are doing, remember, there’s no “company”: There are workers and owners, and their interests are not the same.
As we now sit, eyes glued to every media, journalists carry a great responsibility: to translate evolving information, projections and recommendations into accessible news that reflects appropriate gravity without being unhelpfully alarmist.
