'We Need to Not Just Slow Down the Disease, but Stop It'
Janine Jackson
Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR’s Jim Naureckas about COVID-19 for the March 20, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: A public health crisis will bring many things to light: It sinks in how important just having a doctor is, or a computer at home, or neighbors to check on you; it highlights the interwoven nature of our lives, and our utter reliance on people not generally accorded much social capital. If you're looking, you see the need to protect all of us in order to protect any of us.
For others, a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic means an opportunity to grab something or to blame someone. Some seem to feel that they can fit the reality of the crisis to suit whatever ideological point they'd like to make. In New York, the mayor and the governor can't decide who's in charge of the city.
Meanwhile, people want—not a guarantee that every piece of information they're getting is perfect; people understand what an evolving story is—but they would like to feel that the space where this life-or-death conversation is taking place is free of concerns other than getting up-to-date, health-protecting information, from people who have reason to know, not just reason to talk.
So how are news media handling their responsibility in this critical time? Jim Naureckas is editor of FAIR.org and FAIR’s newsletter Extra!. He joins us now in studio. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jim Naureckas.
Jim Naureckas: It’s good to be here.
JJ: We're recording on March 19. Things are changing all the time in terms of the pandemic, our knowledge of it and the responses to it. Everyone's learning on their feet, and we can expect that what we heard a week ago might not hold. But reporters, as we say at FAIR, should not be gamblers. Their job is not to bank on things going a certain way, report from that assumption, and then just change course if they don't go that way, and act like nothing happened. It matters too much, to put it simply, for people to be speaking beyond their actual knowledge, shall we say, offering what sounds right to them, or what some are saying.
You see some of that confusion affecting the core data, if you will, about what the US should be doing right now.
JN: Yeah, this is a brand new disease. We are still learning about it, and there's a lot we don't know. But there are things that are apparent from the course that the disease has taken so far, and I think we do know enough to make some assumptions about what kind of danger we're in.
And when you put this information together, you quickly see that you can't allow a disease to keep spreading exponentially, because we don't have hospital beds for 20% of the population; we don't have hospital beds for 1% of the population. So we need to not just slow down the disease, but stop it, if we're not going to have a health crisis like we haven't seen in our lifetimes.
And yet, that advice, that we should try to slow down the course of the epidemic, is the advice that a lot of media outlets have been trying to give people, what they seem to think is reassurance.
JJ: Yeah, Charles Ornstein, a longtime health reporter, had a piece saying, “Stop comparing it to the flu.” People keep saying, it's kind of like the flu. He said no public health experts are saying that, but that seems to be a go-to media analogy. I understand the need to have a frame of reference, but sometimes you just have to say, “This is a new thing. This is just itself,” and we need to pay attention to what it actually is.
JN: Yeah, the flu puts 0.05% of people in the hospital, and this puts 20% of people in the hospital. * So yeah, it is quite more serious.
JJ: Well, we're seeing Democrats refusing payments to folks, being outflanked on the left by Republicans. It's not just this deficit obsession. There's this idea of wasting effort, of wasting largess. It's like a magical thinking: If we keep our response small, maybe the problem will be small. Like, let's just be moderate about it. And it's just not appropriate, right?
JN: I think that a lot of the advice that is being issued about the epidemic, and a lot of the assumptions that are being made about how the epidemic can be fought, are based on the idea that you just can't shut down the economy, that the economy must go on, that business must go on, no matter what. And you start from that assumption and then, well, what can we do?
That's why people are talking about slowing down the epidemic, is that unless you keep nonessential people from going to work, there is no way to keep the bulk of the population—there does not seem to be any substitute for physically separating people to keep the epidemic from multiplying and multiplying and multiplying.
JJ: It’s just too big an answer. It's like they're working backwards from what they're comfortable doing...
JN: Right.
JJ: ...to what they will do.
I did want to say, you don't have to be corny to think how far some leadership could go right about now—not paternalistic sanguinity, but a sense from officials of calm and of compassion.
What we have instead is Trump (no surprise) lying, denying, looking out for No. 1, and you have the surgeon general admonishing the press to have “no more bickering. No more partisanship. No more criticism or finger-pointing” in news coverage. So obviously the White House is not going to be the gold standard for information on coronavirus, or even a clearinghouse for useful information.
How do we think about sources? What are you looking at, or what are you looking for, as all these various reports come at you?
It's very difficult to do solid, double-blind research in the face of a global health emergency. But I think that the people who are on the front lines, they have to try to get a handle on this. They have to know what they're dealing with. And we can look at their tentative answers, and make some decisions about what we have to do as a community in order to stop this pandemic.
JJ: We heard that in Italy, along with grocery stores and pharmacies, they're keeping newsstands open, because information is seen as a staple. I have mixed feelings about that with regard to US media, but no, no, there's been some excellent reporting, we should acknowledge.
But I think it's showing us, this crisis again is showing us, how media, outside establishment media, are sort of getting in front of the press corps in some ways. You know, Italians uploading videos to themselves 10 days prior, as well as videos to other countries, including the US.
It seems like another reason, were one needed, to care about Facebook and Twitter's weird management and censorship rules, and our ability—which we see at times like this—how crucial our ability is to talk to one another around the establishment media.
JN: Yeah, I do think that it's been very valuable to have social media, which is why it was so disturbing when Facebook started informing people that their posts about the coronavirus were spam, and pulling them down. Then it seemed like this was a result of the social media companies’ being short-handed, because they're largely based in the Bay Area or in Washington State, places that have been hit particularly hard by the coronavirus and have imposed shelter-in-place rules. And so they're short-handed, and have had to turn over their moderation systems to autopilot, and the autopilot is making some weird decisions. Though then Facebook's vice president for “integrity,” as he's called, announced that that wasn't it, but he didn't explain what it was; he said it was a bug. A weirdly timed bug, I guess.
It does point to the vital necessity of these systems of communication that we've developed, and the danger of putting control of these systems in a few private hands.
JJ: Just finally, there's so many stories here beyond even the science of it. When you see Jeff Bezos telling Whole Foods workers to share their medical leave, you realize, these capitalists really mean it; this is the system they support all the time, this is what that system looks like at a time like this. And I kind of wonder how people are going to go back to accepting, like, “Well, OK, you can die in the street, as long as you're not contagious.” You know, “Paid sick leave? What’s that?” “Debt forgiveness? Who told you that?”
That's assuming we come out the other side, but I do think problems are showing up that aren't going to disappear, and reporters are going to have their work cut out.
Jim Naureckas: "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." (cc photo: Eden Naureckas)
JN: I feel like part of how modern capitalism works is creating an artificial sense that everyone is on the edge of disaster, and that you had better show up for work, because otherwise you'll lose your healthcare, you won't be able to make your mortgage payments or your rent payments. And that is how salaries are kept low, wages are kept low, and profits are kept high.
And now, faced with a real disaster, we're going to have to feed people and we're going to have to leave people in their shelter, we're going to have to provide medical care, regardless of whether people have jobs or not, because unemployment is going through the roof.
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.
And so we're going to have to provide food for people; we're going to have to provide medical care for people, and the demonstration that that can be done, without the handholding of the business owners, I think will send a powerful message to people that maybe those business owners are not so crucial as they would like us to believe.
JJ: We've been speaking with Jim Naureckas. He's the editor of FAIR’s newsletter Extra!, as well as our website FAIR.org. Jim Naureckas, thank you for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
JN: Thanks for having me on.
* This is actually an apples-to-oranges comparison: The 0.05% figure is for the entire population, not for people who have the flu. Coming down with the flu gives you between 1–2% chance of being hospitalized. —JN return
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