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On @ReliableSources on @CNN just now, I told @brianstelter: "As Andy Slavitt (President Obama’s former head of Medicare and Medicaid Services) has said, this is the greatest public health failure in 100 years." /1
"Moreover, the bumbling and chaos continue, with real questions about who is in charge at the White House, is it the Task Force led by VP Pence or Jared Kushner?" 2/
"Where are the tests, the ventilators, the personal protective equipment we need?" 3/
"Can the Administration effectively implement the provisions of the recent $2 trillion emergency/stimulus act?" 4/
"This may be a public health crisis, but as someone who watched the AIDS epidemic unfold over 30 years ago, I recognize this as a political crisis first and foremost." 5/
"Other countries have done much better than we have and it is a colossal management & leadership failure that has brought us to this precipice. Where is the deep, investigative reporting on all of this? We had a great piece today in @washingtonpost but that's just a start." 6/
"We get too much of what Joan Didion called 'the deferential spirit' in a piece on the DC political press corps 30 years ago, where she saw DC reporters then marked by 'a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented.'" 7/
"...to them by our leaders, with a 'rather eerie aversion to engaging the ramifications of what people say to' them. It’s still true today. We have to get to the bottom of the failures that are still happening in real time." 8/
"We don’t need to know that 'governors disagree' or 'experts are concerned' about remarks made by the President or his actions, or that his 'tone' has changed and now he’s greeting the epidemic with a new level of seriousness." 10/
"We need to know what’s going on, how and why our response is still failing, who is responsible." 11/
"We all want to get through this and want this to be over sooner rather than later, but the status quo is going to make this far worse and make it drag out far longer than it should." 12/
"If you look at states that have refused to put social distancing order in place or crafted them with too many loopholes, at states where pre-COVID and current daily travel hasn’t really changed, they are states, most often with Republican governors..." 13/
"...who are largely parroting what the President has said at one point or another about the pandemic." 14/
"This isn’t simply because everyone in these states has Fox New on 24/7, it’s because more often than not, most of the media give Trump ample airtime or print space to spread information, by covering the daily briefings live..." 15/
"by running stories where the President’s misstatements or lies are given equal time with the facts, which leaves basic public health recommendations & other information on the epidemic as open to debate, the very way in which the stories are covered makes them controversial."16/
"This amplifies misinformation in a pandemic. @jayrosen_nyu has put out a piece on his website this weekend entitled: 'Today we are switching our coverage of Donald Trump to an emergency setting.'" 17/
"'This means our journalism will work in a different way, as we try to prevent the President from misinforming you through us.'" 18/
"In it he says, in the voice of a hypothetical editor, we will now be asking 2 questions: 'In addition to ‘does this fairly represent what he said?’ we will ask: is what he said something we should be amplifying?' Jay offers great advice for all journalists in this crisis." end/
