4 Ways the Media Can Rise to the Challenge of Covering the COVID-19 Pandemic
When Chanel Rion, a television personality who attends White House press briefings on behalf of the One America News Network, asked President Trump this week whether the term “Chinese food” was racist, someone left a passive-aggressive question on her desk in the press room.
The jab made the rounds on social media, creating an opportunity to vent frustration about what passes as journalism these days. However, the question posed by the anonymous pamphleteer is actually a good one that should be top-of-mind for all journalists these days. Every journalist ought to be asking herself or himself,
How does our coverage of COVID-19 help halt the spread of the virus?
What follows are four suggestions to help news organizations ensure their coverage is meaningful and worthy of these trying times.
1. Approach the news like PBS, even if you’re CNN.
Before I begin, I need to deal with the structural elephant in the room. The news cycle these days is dominated by the 24-hour news-talk networks, and 24 hours is a whole lot of time to kill. That’s why over the decades the cable networks have increasingly supplemented news coverage with opinion shows and partisan bickering. In normal circumstances, that talk-show format might be what’s needed to attract enough viewers to attract enough advertisers to keep a network afloat. At the moment, though, we’re living in a global pandemic. Almost all of us are freaked out and homebound; we’ve got nothing but time on our hands. We’re watching cable news-talk more than ever, but we’re doing so in search of the latest information rather than the latest hot takes. The same is true for print and digital news outlets; traffic is up, and the reason is that people want to know about the coronavirus. At a time like this, news outlets can afford to be sober and fact-based; they can afford to be “boring.” People don’t need fluff. Nor do they want it. They want facts.
2. Differentiate between bad behavior that matters and bad behavior that doesn’t matter; ignore the latter.
To go back to the kerfuffle referenced at the top of this piece, I cannot for the life of me understand why my senior senator, Chuck Grassley, felt compelled to take time out of his day this week to tweet the following:
Besides the impressive density of inaccuracies in a single run-on sentence, this tweet is remarkable because it suggests Grassley imagines that people actually care what he thinks about this topic. I feel quite confident in stating this was not, in fact, a pressing issue to most Americans, much less the Iowans of whom Grassley is one of only two representatives in the United States Senate.
Here’s why it doesn’t matter: Senators from Iowa don’t get to name illnesses resulting from infectious diseases. Nor do presidents, for that matter. The job of naming pandemic illnesses belongs to the World Health Organization. Grassley openly pondering why we can’t assign a nationality to a virus is bad behavior, but it’s meaningless bad behavior. I’ll return to this in a moment, but first let’s talk about the inverse — bad behavior that does matter.
This week, NPR published weeks-old audio of North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr giving a stark and frightening warning to a group of Washington insiders even as he, and the president, were publicly urging people to remain calm amid the spread of the novel coronavirus. A few hours later, Pro Publica reported that Burr’s private warnings coincided with the senator’s decision to sell off hundreds of thousands of dollars worth or stocks. Soon, reporters and watchdogs started looking at other senators’ financial disclosure forms and found that four senators in total had sold stock following briefings on the coronavirus.
Senators using their positions to profit at a time when millions of Americans have been thrust into economic insecurity does matter. It matter because it suggests public service is not their priority, and because it suggests they may be making decisions based on mixed motives. In other words, it matters a lot.
There are a couple of key reasons why focusing on unimportant bad behavior is a problem at a time like this. For one, focusing on unimportant scandals sucks oxygen from scandals that matter. For one, it makes it easier for bad actors to claim that they’re being constantly persecuted (Burr, for instance, claimed publishing audio of a speech he made was tantamount to a “tabloid-style hit piece,” by that notorious tabloid… NPR.)
There’s another reason the media should avoid meaningless scandals — by promoting them, the media risks actually creating negative consequences where few would otherwise exist. If the president and Grassley use an unserious, unscientific nickname to describe a global pandemic, they might well inspire a few people to repeat the label and possibly even use it as the basis to attack racial minorities. However, when the media report heavily on the issue, when they corner senators and ask them whether it’s bad to say racially insensitive things, the end result is that the politicians whine and feign persecution, and people on their side of the political aisle feel emboldened (compelled, even) to spread the racist trope far and wide. Here’s one of many examples:
There’s zero chance Trump and others are going to stop using terms like “Chinese virus” as a result of heckling or tough questions from the media. And, given the risk that more people will use the term if they perceive it as a means to strike back at “politically correct” culture, the solution that presents itself is simple: the media should ignore it. The people who use these terms are crying out for attention; the media shouldn’t give it to them. Instead, the media should focus on holding people like Sen. Burr to account.
3. Have a forward focus and be willing to wait for data.
There’s a lot of fear and concern out there, and there’s significant evidence that missteps in the United States and elsewhere have allowed the virus to spread more rapidly than it otherwise might have. On the other hand, there’s still so much we don’t know. A lack of testing in the United States, for example, is evidence of a slow response, but it is also a cause of a lack of data. It’s exceedingly difficult to quantify the scope of the COVID-19 problem in the United States in part because the lack of tests has made it impossible to know how many people are actually infected with the coronavirus here.
There have been no shortage of op-eds and news articles lambasting the president for a long list of apparent failures with regard to his handling of the coronavirus crisis. However, we need to be able to differentiate between things that can be fixed and things that can’t. We also need to be able to focus on things that can be fixed now, and things that can only be fixed once this is all over and we have data to better understand the missteps.
For instance, in 2018 the president famously disbanded the unit of the National Security Council charged with preparing the nation for pandemics. That would certainly seem to have been a very serious mis-step. However, there’s nothing we can do about that now. The virus is already here.
On the other hand, the president has consistently given overly optimistic projections of how many coronavirus tests would be available, and when. By keeping track of his projections and then holding him to account when they prove incorrect, the press can hopefully encourage Trump and Vice President Pence to move more quickly and be more careful with their projections. This is an example of forward-focused accountability journalism.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting the media should ignore past missteps. I’m saying that the press should be focused on what can and should be done at this moment. There will be plenty of time after this is all over to examine past mistakes and their consequences. Furthermore, once this is over we ought to have better data, and that data can inform how we learn and grow from the mistakes that have been made.
4. Ask tough questions.
The press needs to ask tough questions. This is always the role of the press, but it’s especially true right now. As noted above, the media ought to hold the powers that be to account with regard to issues like testing supplies. However, they also need to question specific containment and mitigation strategies. The media must be vigorous about reaching out to experts outside of government, including people with contrarian points of view. It’s a major problem, for the first amendment and for public health, if the majority of questions at presidential press conferences are about racist terminology and obvious mistakes that can no longer be rectified. Reporters need to ask about things that can be done now, and their questions should be informed by input from experts with a variety of viewpoints and competencies.
There’s a lot going on. Things are changing quickly, and it’s difficult to know how best to act and respond. However, at a moment in history when we face a challenge of a global proportions, the press must willing and able to rise to the challenge. If they do, they have an opportunity to make a positive impact, help save lives, and reaffirm the centrality of a free press.
