U.S. government has media restrictions at hospitals, to reduce pandemic images
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
"Before letting journalists inside Covid-19 wards, hospitals needed prior permission from not only the specific patients the journalists would interview, but also other patients whose names or identities would be accessible."
I feel bad that HIPAA and our support for medical privacy is inconveniencing their crisis pornography.
Even people literally dying of it don't believe in it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/11/16/south-dakot...
Let's be clear here. If someone has covid and is dying in a hospital about to be ventilated and awake for the last time in their lives and they refuse to admit that maybe this is serous then watching some Intercept crisis porn would not have convinced them either. Some Americans refuse to admit that mass shootings at school actually happened and no amount of "evidence" will convince them otherwise.
Having journalist hover over the grieving like vultures asking the dying to describe how they feel is gross. Filming them while they die is despicable. Journalists might have become accustom to covering health crisis porn in famine and war zones outside of the USA, but inside we have legal protections against being the subjects of this kind of exploitative journalism and we have protections against the dissemination of health information.
But I'd also argue that such denials are on a spectrum, from people who don't believe in the virus at all, to people who don't believe it's dangerous, to people who think it's only as bad as the flu, to people who don't take wearing masks or other precautions seriously, and even people who believe their youth and existing good health will protect them from harm. This has been exacerbated by both the president and allied media putting out false and misleading information.
Countering those false narratives are exactly what good journalists do.
The journalists, as always, have to have the consent of the patients they are talking to. That's always been the case. They aren't hovering over anyone without consent, and suggesting otherwise takes agency away from people bravely telling their stories, or who consented to have their last moments documented, or whose family consented to their body being shown.
Showing the real effects of disease, violence and death are a powerful element of journalism. Consider Emmet Till's open casket funeral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till Consider George Floyd's last moments.
The issue I see is that, because someone entirely different from the filmed individual has a chart at the nurses station, the government has created a regulation claiming you also need their consent despite that not being shown/viewed.
That seems like an attempt to obfuscate the truth under the guise of medical privacy, despite no harm being done to anyone.
Michael Crichton's point with describing "Gell-Mann Amnesia" is that when you see a news article on a topic you're knowledgeable about, you quickly recognize that it's completely wrong in almost all key aspects. Sometimes they even get things precisely backward. But when you turn the page and start reading about something you're not an expert in--say foreign policy--you strangely forget how shoddy the journalism was just moments ago, and assume that this next article about something you’re not knowledgeable about is probably roughly accurate.