The extent to which media reporting on covid-19 reflects as a Democratic society
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In a democratic state the media should accurately reflect the news and broadly cover it so that voters are informed enough to hold politicians accountable. The whole idea is that if we don’t like a politician(s) then we can elect someone else. However, politicians cannot be held accountable by their voters if the voters don’t understand the issues and how their representative government handled the issues.
So for example, the poor health of the US democracy is reflected in poor news coverage and inaccurate news coverage. Here’s an example, in the runup to the second Iraq War, National Public Radio coverage of the US troop buildup had a show with and expert commentator. The subject was the history of the region. This is the kind of thing that is very useful to understand because it is telling us how the Middle East came to be in the state where the US has to spend trillions of dollars invading Iraq. However, something weird happened during the show. When the subject came to Iran, Iraq’s next door neighbor, the expert commentator, a college professor, started to mention Mossadegh and abruptly his Microphone was switched off in mid-sentence and NPR went to a break. When they returned from the break the expert commentator was gone. This is on NPR! This happened a second time with another commentator on another show.
Why did this happen? Why would NPR cut this guy off? Because he was about to mention the singular most important defining event concerning US relations in the Middle East. He was about the open the can of worms, that the 9/11 and the Iraq War are blowback from US mistakes and boy, the US government doesn’t want that discussion, especially as we are going into war.
Another great example is the coverage of Donald Trump during the primaries for the 2016 election. Donald Trump turned out to be a ratings bonanza for the big networks. The constant stream of controversy that he generated made news ratings very high when the news covered him. Because of this, other Republican candidates got little or no coverage. We are talking several billion dollars worth of free publicity for Trump. Could Trump have won his party’s nomination without the free publicity? I would say it’s unlikely. The networks greed for the higher ratings bringing in more advertising revenue did far more to elect Trump than the Russians could dream of doing.
The coverage of the networks on science and specifically environmental issues like global warming is non-existent. Coverage of the health care issues are almost non-existent. Most people don’t even know what Obama Care is and that is really called the ACA. It’s pathetic.
The health of the US democracy is totally reflected by the news media and the health of the US democracy is not good.