In this post “COVID-19’s General Blindness is Also a Journalistic Failure“, Frederic Filloux explains the reasons for a lack of anticipation of journalism on the epidemics.
The observation is that while the possibilities of a pandemics were exposed in many scientific publications and widely available, journalists have not raised the alarm early. Of course this blindness is not limited to journalists, but they could have played a significant role.
According to Frederic Filloux this can be explained by loss of in-house expertise due to newsroom shrinking in the current economic situation of the press. When there is a situation, external experts are asked to help, but the very possibility of detecting a situation is lost.
According to him “Newsrooms harboring experts — in house, or more realistically, on retainers — would have been more likely to read low-noise signals or even connect the dots of apparently unrelated facts, to put together a true picture of what is unfolding.“
It is well known that it is always difficult to detect low-noise signals and raise the awareness of a wider group. But in that case, the low noise signal was apparently not even identified, which is a concern.
What could be the solution? Frederic Filloux is currently supporting the development of an AI-based content editor, and is quite confident that such solutions could help. In my mind, in an ever-accelerating world, keeping more emphasis on memory and long term approaches is also important: countries that had been exposed to SARS 15 years ago did remember what had to be done.
Lack of memory and general loss of expertise in groups that could relay the issues we are facing are certainly important culprits.
