The Media’s failures during the Pandemic

By Daniela Martins

In the digital age, with the introduction of social media, and the accessible ways of consuming entertainment, media of any kind has become our world. The shift from using traditional sources for information to relying on commentary and opinions on facts and data has changed the way Americans take in information. In a world where Twitter will tell you more than NBC, everyone has become a reporter. The consequences of such an unstable way to distribute the news has created an era of sensationalism. Not only is everyone a reporter, but everything is news. There is no process, double-checking, approval for stories; the digital world moves too fast for that. And with all the differing and conflicting opinions blurring what is fact, the chaos of the media warped the way Americans understood COVID-19.

The way the media handled the virus

The introduction of the virus was a vital moment for the press, a University of Berkeley article described it as “In many ways, it’s a make or break moment for the media…”. The media has the responsibility to put out accurate and reliable information for the public about things like this and throughout the pandemic, many popular news stations have failed to do so. For a significant amount of time, there was no consensus in the public on how COVID-19 worked and what safety precautions should be made and coupled with the already shaky trust the American people have with scientific Institutions, did not lead to anything good. When citizens are lost, they turn to their government for answers. But in the current political climate where more than 20,000 false claims were made by the president, many Americans were wayward in their thinking.  Instead of uniting the country against a deadly pandemic, it disappointingly but unsurprisingly became a politically divisive issue

The impact of media

Media has a very strong impact on people. Movies, TV shows, literature, radio, news stations. These things build our culture. It was the invention of technicolor that made most people start dreaming in color instead of black and white. The media is more powerful than we will ever understand. When people face the unknown they turn to the media to learn about it. Unfortunately for the media as well, the amount of journalists going into the field has dropped by 40% in the last generation according to the Berkeley website. It was even mentioned by the Journal of traveling medicine that the social media panic spread even faster than the virus itself did in their opinion and that it caused more worry for the general public. Media spread is turning into something to dread. The talk of the virus and its impacts spread like a wildfire, even before it came to the west. The virus as well as the now digital elections and social media have been the hot topic recently. Although it may seem ultimately beneficial, that information about serious topics can get around so fast in this day and age, in the case of the pandemic, it has seemed to put people at more of a divide than anything. This division is rooted in lack of understanding, which often came from lack of education, which almost as important as schooling, we would often get from… the media. It was the knowledge that COVID-19 grew in China that led to anti-Asian sentiments and hate crimes, as well as a major financial disruption to Chinese restaurants and small businesses. It didn’t help that the President was as unprofessional as to continuously describe it as “the Chinese virus” rather than its actual scientific name. And with the amount of Americans who readily accept whatever the leader of the executive branch says or rely on Fox News’s complimentary coverage of said leader, this most likely contributed to additional anti-Asian racism.

Media is needed to be used very wisely, especially with a group of people where social media has huge influence on public outcry and sentiment. The lack of responsible media use has led to the fact that, according to an article, only about 25% of the sample of people they questioned about compliance with COVID-19 regulation are in full agreement and compliance. The rest are only partially complaint or even not at all. The fact that there is that much of a divide at all is proof enough that the media has not done its job well.

The pandemic is only one example out of many that have recently shed light on how partisan so many media pages and things like news stations are, even when making serious information public. Media sources with large spheres of influence, being able to put out biased opinions on such serious subject matters, rather than putting out pure fact that’s as neutral as possible, is alarming. Topics that should not necessarily leave room for personal interpretation, due to the consequences it could have, are constantly argued over without any solutions. People use news stations that are tendentious to back up their own ignorant beliefs about subjects as important as human lives. This is something needed to be addressed, and soon.