‘Solidarity reporting’ urged as remedy for pandemic desensitization
Most of you, if not all of you, have probably experienced reading a lot of number-heavy accounts that can start to desensitize us to what’s going on — even when what’s happening has a very real and immediate threat to each of us.
— Anita Varma, assistant director of Journalism and Media Ethics, Santa Clara University
The sheer volume of COVID-19 reporting can have a numbing impact on the news consumer. It’s a pitfall of pandemic reporting that journalists around the world need to be aware of to combat public indifference to the historic tragedy that’s unfolding in the age of COVID-19.
That was the central message conveyed Thursday by Anita Varma, assistant director of Journalism and Media Ethics at Santa Clara University, during a panel discussion on media ethics at Carleton University’s Journalism in the Time of Crisis virtual two-day conference.
Varma’s warning about desensitization amid the deluge of pandemic reporting was echoed by her fellow panelists Stephen J.A. Ward, Distinguished Lecturer in Ethics at the University of British Columbia, and Pat Perkel, executive director of Canada’s National NewsMedia Council.
The panel was moderated by Carleton journalism professor Aneurin Bosley, who teaches the main ethics course at the university’s School of Journalism and Communication.
Varma said the overdose of numbers in media reports — daily coronavirus cases, death counts, job losses and more — can make audiences on all news platforms feel overwhelmed. This sense of helplessness can turn people away from stories that may be important to them.
The U.S. scholar acknowledged that energetic news coverage of the pandemic is meant to convey the magnitude of the crisis, but she noted that three things tend to happen as the public confronts an information overflow.
“Number one, people will grow distressed,” she said. “Number two, people start to try to emotionally regulate. The third piece of this process is that people will go numb and they’ll turn away.”
According to Varma, this is important to consider in the context of “pandemic fatigue” as, every day, people are exposed to an unrelenting barrage of stories about COVID-19.
But there’s a solution, Varma said. One way to address desensitization is through what she refers to as “solidarity reporting.” This approach prioritizes coverage of communities that are most severely affected by (in this case) the pandemic.
“A solidarity approach is not about putting a happy spin on a global pandemic,” she said. “But what it is about is locating hope in paths forward, articulated by the communities most adversely affected by the status quo.”
Varma called the facts gathered in these kinds of stories, a “public cultural truth,” a term she attributes to Robert White, a fellow journalism ethics scholar.
“It’s about arguing that the standard for truth is that a claim cannot be true if it somehow denies or destroys another person’s lived experience,” said Varma.
Varma’s fellow panelists also addressed the desensitization issue. Perkel said it’s important for journalists to develop sources in their community and engage them in news coverage. That way, she said, journalists are more likely to have people volunteer to discuss their experiences, which leads to more authentic journalism.
“Media ethics is open and participatory — or it should be,” added Ward, who has written and edited 10 books on media ethics, including the award-winning Radical Media Ethics and The Invention of Journalism Ethics.
He emphasized how ethical media practices can instill a spirit of collective action advocacy among audiences around issues such as the pandemic.
Varma said the media could benefit by focusing more on the truth experienced by marginalized communities, and by asking them what they think rather than how they feel. This way, she added, media can gain access to a truth rooted in an “embodied experience” rather than a “preferred truth”, which can energize advocacy.
Said Varma: “With a solidarity approach, we can find paths forward not by ingeniously learning to solve global problems alone, but instead listening to people with the most experience, based on what they’ve been living for these last several months.”
A video of the full panel discussion can be found here.
