Journalism education ‘truth’ challenges in an age of growing hate, intolerance and disinformation

 

Four months ago Papua New Guinean journalists had been warning about increasing tensions over misinformation about COVID vaccines and a lack of clear communication from health authorities.
IMAGE: Screenshot Guardian Pacific Project

By DAVID ROBIE

IN RESPONSE to the escalating COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in mid-February 2020 came a warning by the World Health Organisation (WHO) Secretary-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom, who declared that “we’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic”. He added that fake news “spreads faster and more easily than this virus” .

The following month, in March 2020, UN Secretary-General António Guterres identified the “new enemy” as a “growing surge of disinformation”. However, the term “disinfodemic” – which I much prefer – was adopted by the authors of a policy brief for UNESCO to describe the “falsehoods fuelling the pandemic”.

This disinfodemic has been rapidly leading to upheavals in many countries – including in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand in the weeks with protests, civil disobedience and attacks on health officials, medical staff and frontline workers.

Such assaults and violent confrontations have taken particular nasty turns in some of our neighbouring microstates of the South Pacific – notably Fiji and Papua New Guinea, the largest countries and biggest economies in the region.

How the ‘chief covidiot’ has blocked world health unity with WHO freeze

President Donald Trump ... deflecting the blame for the US coronavirus pandemic crisis onto WHO.
Image: Al Jazeera screenshot

PACIFIC PANDEMIC DIARY: By David Robie

Donald Trump’s sabre-rattling freeze on funding for the World Health Organisation at a time when many countries are pulling together for a global response to the coronavirus pandemic has surely earned him the epithet of the “world’s chief covidiot”.

The US President’s efforts at deflecting the blame for his country’s national public health crisis by pointing the finger at WHO and announcing that Washington would pull funding as the largest donor has shocked the world, triggering widespread condemnation from leaders and public health experts.

The impact of this shock decision is bound to be felt in the Pacific region with some countries and territories clinging precariously to their Covid-19-free status, while others – such as the US territory Guam, New Caledonia and French Polynesia – have already become hotspots.

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American funding to WHO provided more than 15 percent of the international body’s 2018-19 budget of $4.4 billion.

While Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, denounced Trump’s decision as “a crime against humanity” and an “appalling betrayal” of every scientist, health worker and citizen – and of global solidarity, the second largest WHO donor, Microsoft’s Bill Gates of the Gates Foundation, described the move “as dangerous as it sounds”.