By Casey Bukro
Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists
At a time the Covid-19 death toll tops the fatalities in the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, the nation’s news media workforce is something like 40 percent diminished from a generation ago.
This is something for scholars and medical historians to chew on. How many covid deaths can be linked to a lack of trusted, reliable community news sources when they were urgently needed? A pandemic qualifies as a time when life-saving information is needed.
CNBC reported in September that Covid-19 is officially the most deadly outbreak in recent American history. On October 1, Johns Hopkins hospital reported 699,010 covid deaths in the U.S. The estimated U.S. fatalities in the 1918-19 influenza pandemic is 675,000 Americans.
This comes when the news media complex is probably 40 percent weaker than it was a generation ago, said Ed Wasserman, dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, at a 2020 discussion on the role of journalism in a global pandemic.”In many ways, it’s a make or break moment for the media,” he said. The intensity of interest in the story is massive.
The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists reported in 2020 that just about every generation worries about an existential threat, and lists some of them.
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The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was founded in 2001 by the Chicago Headline Club (Chicago professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. It partnered with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2013. It is a free service.
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