I know a lot of people don’t think it’s a valuable exercise to discuss issues in how the media have covered #coronavirus, given the much larger importance of the outbreak itself.

A few thoughts, threaded below, on why I think their frustration is mistaken. (1/7)

First off, obviously this discussion is secondary. What matters most is coverage of the virus. No one is debating that.

But I & many others have thought the coverage of coronavirus has been uniquely bad. This matters because we’re far from out of the woods on this thing. (2/7)

This will be a story for months - if not years - to come. Getting it right down the road is predicated on getting it right now, and getting it right now means (in my mind) a reckoning over how the coverage came to be so bad. (3/7)

If we don’t expose the faults in the current coverage - & the underlying factors/blind spots/biases that give rise to them - then we’ll keep seeing consistently bad coverage.

These aren’t one-off errors. The problems are endemic & intractable & aren’t going away otherwise. (4/7)

And not to put too fine a point on it, but when it comes to getting accurate information to people during a global pandemic, it isn’t histrionic to call it a matter of life or death. (5/7)

So, yes. It’s absolutely worth our collective time to fight these battles, assuming we’re doing it in good faith. I’ll concede that I can be better about that good faith component. Not doing so - beyond just being lousy - undermines the impact of the message. 6/7)

Besides, I’m far from a medical/economic expert. You don’t want my two-cents on a lot of this stuff related to disease progression, re-opening an economy, or treatments that will or won’t work.

But media accountability...that I can, and will continue, to do. (7/7)