[caption id="attachment_32520" align="alignleft" width="190"] MD 2020/4[/caption] Media Development 2020-4 Communication in a Time of Crisis The Covid-19 pandemic burrowed its way deep into the human psyche. It fractured family and community. It negated social behaviour. It isolated. It made some people more selfish and others more aware. It...
Fifty-five years after the death of the French author Albert Camus, and at a time when Ebola was raging in West Africa, the British journalist Ed Vulliamy wrote a glowing tribute about one of the writer’s best-known books first published in 1947. “Of all Camus’ novels, none described man’s confrontation – and cohabitation – with death so vividly and on such an epic scale as La Peste, translated as The Plague.”1
By Philip Lee
A paradox was evident during the coronavirus pandemic. People turned to digital technologies to be in communication and yet felt increasingly out of communication. Self-isolating people became distanced from the socio-cultural environment in which they were accustomed to live and it began to appear alien. To adapt the well-known saying from L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953), the present became a foreign country, where they did things differently.
By Marites N. Sison
A sampling of news headlines, five months after the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic, shows media and institutions finally catching up to the gender dimensions of the novel coronavirus: Covid-19 crisis could set women back decades, experts fear; Why Covid-19 is a disaster for gender equality; Decades of progress on gender equality in the workplace at risk of vanishing; Women essential in fight against pandemic.
Par KPALLA Mathilde
Le 11 mars 2020, l’Organisation Mondiale de la Santé (OMS) déclarait de pandémie la maladie de trouble respiratoire à coronavirus, Covid-19 Déjà le 06 mars 2020, le Togo a déclaré son 1er cas de contamination et le 28 mars, son premier décès, à l’instar de plusieurs autres pays africains et du monde entier. Toute la planète se retrouve ainsi face à une crise sanitaire dont les effets pervers ont rapidement affecté tous les secteurs de la vie plongeant tous les pays dans des lendemains sans précédent, pleins d’incertitudes.
Por Leonardo Félix
Del sesgo de supervivencia y de dónde poner nuestras miradas y acciones.
Las pandemias y sus efectos colaterales no son nuevas en el mundo, así como tampoco son nuevas las acciones que se toman a fin de hacer prevalecer una supervivencia para quienes sufren los efectos devastadores de nuevas enfermedades ya sea de origen bacteriano o viral. Lo que sí es nuevo evidentemente, es el modo o los distintos modos en que una “gran aldea” globalizada como consecuencia de los grandes multimedios, que concentran información, así como los modos en que la misma se distribuye y es valorada, aparecen en escena en este último cuarto de siglo.
Por Marie-Pia Rieublanc
A pesar de que muchas fronteras cerraron en el continente americano a raíz de la pandemia de Covid-19, México siguió recibiendo a miles de personas inmigrantes después de marzo. Pero estas personas fueron excluidas de las comunicaciones de prevención oficiales y las medidas de distanciamiento social limitaron sus oportunidades de encontrarse y organizarse para ejercer su derecho a la comunicación contrarrestando los discursos xenófobos que aumentaron durante la pandemia.
By Christina Pazzanese
When a disease outbreak grabs the public’s attention, formal recommendations from medical experts are often muffled by a barrage of half-baked advice, sketchy remedies, and misguided theories that circulate as anxious people rush to understand a new health risk.
By Glory E. Dharmaraj
The dual shadow cast by the Covid-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by police brutality has made many of us in the USA “see” things which often go unreported or underreported in the media landscape. The dual pandemic has unveiled social inequities as never before. News media have been relentlessly capturing impact stories of Covid-19 as well as systemic racism.