I have always focused on fairness and balance in journalism, recognizing that many news outlets, such as Fox News and CNN, have a tendency to lean one way or the other. Newsy and PBS tend to be more balanced in their coverage of issues. That being said, I am also aware of what is known in the media as agenda setting. By definition, it means: the creation of public awareness and concern of salient issues by the news media. The study of agenda-setting describes the way media attempts to influence viewers, and establish a hierarchy of news prevalence. Nations with more political power, like the United States, receive higher media exposure.
Agenda setting has prevalence in the age of perceived police brutality, massive racism and the Covid-19 pandemic. In other words, the media tells people what is important and what is not.
Once upon a time, when I was completing my Master's Thesis in journalism, I chose to focus on how agenda setting led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon. In the 1974 book All the President's Men, and the 1976 movie starring Dustin Hoffman, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, then reporters at The Washington Post, whose very masthead reads "Democracy Dies In Darkness," reported on the Watergate scandal on an almost daily basis, eventually leading to the resignation of Nixon.
Bob Woodward recently released a new book, titled Rage. which could, if history repeats itself, lead to the downfall of another president. The title of the book dates back to March 2016, when then-candidate Trump was asked about “angst and rage and distress” in the Republican Party. Trump latched onto the middle word. “I do bring rage out. I always have,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do.”
When the book was released, rage is exactly what greeted the first major revelation from the book: Trump acknowledged that the Coronavirus would be deadly as far back as February, only to downplay its threat in public. A portion of that rage rebounded onto Woodward. The reaction also seemed to channel a linked, yet distinct, set of emotions: grief. Since Trump’s two-faced February, we have faced an unrelenting wave of American death, and still, Trump does next to nothing to stop it. The collective death count is arbitrary - it never adequately expresses the weight of its accumulated singularity - but we mark it anyway, especially when it reaches a round number. A recent cover of Time magazine, by artist John Mavroudis, marks the impending confirmation that there have been at least 200,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States.
The true total is higher.
The cover, which charts the confirmed death count for each day between late February and early September, is ringed by a black border - only the second time in Time’s history that that has been the case. The first was in response to September 11, 2001, the 19th anniversary of which was recently mourned.
The anniversary is always an occasion for visible, pointedly-unified public grief; this year, some commentators observed that we, collectively, have not yet come to mourn the victims of the pandemic in the same way, even though there have already been many more of them than on 9/11. “Whatever shared national spirit existed in the first weeks of the pandemic has been fractured beyond repair,” wrote Garrett M. Graff, in The Atlantic, another media target of Trump in recent weeks. “The sadness and fury are still present, but in 2020 they don’t galvanize; they paralyze.” Graff offered several explanations for the discrepancy: the fact that the virus resists easy visualization; our inability to mourn together physically; the endlessness of the pandemic.
Writing in The Intercept, Jon Schwarz added a sharp reflection on the conduct of leaders who - post-9/11 and, as Woodward proved, pre-Covid - sought to plant different “illusions” in the national psyche. “Bush wanted a pretext to do a lot of things that were unnecessary, such as invading Iraq, while Trump wanted an excuse to do nothing,” Schwarz wrote. “Our lives have value insofar as the powerful can use them to create whatever ‘panic’ they desire.”
Assessing the national expression of grief is always complicated, perhaps never more so than right now. It can feel, at times, as if we have collectively normalized the pandemic and the immensity of its human cost, yet many of us try constantly to push back on that feeling. And, whichever way one looks, the national news cycle is unavoidably drenched in grief -about police brutality and its ending of black lives; about our crisis-stricken climate and its consequences, most recently the enormous, devastating fires on the West coast, about the natural deaths of guiding moral lights - that differs in its particulars but is all wound up together.
Writers have published prominent, poignant reflections on their personal grief following recent family deaths. “Grief is a cruel kind of education,” Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote in the New Yorker. “You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.” Such reflections exist within an information ecosystem that, still, features much bloodless, mechanical noise about national politics, business, and so on. Listen carefully, though, and you notice, sometimes, that there is grief there, too - a quieter yearning for the way of life we all lost to the pandemic.
Grief is messy and contradictory. Everyone experiences it differently, which makes its collective expression hard to grasp. But trying to grasp it - or at least asking how we might begin to try - is a useful endeavor. Most journalists are not counselors, but the media, as a shared expressive apparatus, does inevitably channel collective feeling, and so it is worth exploring the form that feeling is taking at the moment, and may take in the future. In his Atlantic essay, Graff, drawing on the collective civic erasure that followed the pandemic of 1918, raises the prospect that America may also try to memory-hole the coronavirus, as “an embarrassing chapter in which our government failed us and we failed our fellow Americans.” To me, the opposite also seems possible - that we will come to regard this traumatizing moment with a clarity that currently, in the midst of the fog, eludes us. The most profound personal grief I ever suffered only hit me 18 months or so after the fact. Before that, my energy went into putting one day in front of the next.
Again, everyone experiences grief differently; journalism can usefully document individual reactions that resonate, or that simply inspire empathy, but it should not try and impress a uniform, sanctioned template on people’s feelings. That said, it is and will be the job of writers like myself to chart and interrogate the form our collective grief takes. Grief can trend toward acceptance and “closure”; it is the job of writers to ensure that that never means collective amnesia or repression. We cannot forget the failures - individual, institutional, and structural - that the pandemic, George Floyd, and the fires have illuminated. Under the weight of horribly big numbers, we cannot forget that each victim had a story and a family. Politicians will try and fuse the act of memorialization with their own agendas; that, too, will demand careful scrutiny.
What will all this look like? As I have found before with grief, I do not have useful answers yet.
We are still, all of us, grasping for language.
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