About the impact of COVID-19 on broadcasting/media industry.

Question

what is the impact of COVID-19 on broadcasting/media industry? and the possible solutions to overcome it?

Answer 1

From what I can tell there is little impact of COVID-19 on the broadcasting/media industry; besides the obvious of reporters reporting from home, social distancing in the studio, and wearing masks out in public. What COVID-19 highlights though is the general myopia of the broadcasting industry in general; they rarely report the big picture (perhaps the general public doesn't care about the big picture?). All the networks will tell you how many people have contracted it and how many people have died in this or that state, country, or in the world, but they never tell you out of how many. Doing so makes it a lot less dramatic.

For instance, today [link on Wikipedia: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 ] it's reported that there are 24,011,502 confirmed cases and that 821,909 people have died, world wide. There are about 7.8 billion humans on the planet (just web-search "Current Human Population of the World" there are multiple sources), so 821,909 / 7,800,000,000 * 100 = 0.0105% of the human population has died. Less than 2/100 of a percent. Not so dramatic anymore. That's a mortality rate of 821,909 / 24,011,505 * 100 = 3.42%.

Lets say, for the sake of discussion, that deaths due to COVID are under-reported by half, that the mortality rate is really 7% and that every human on the planet contracted it; there would still be over 7 billion humans on the planet (7,800,000,000 * .07 = 546,000,000 subtracted from 7,800,000,000 = 7.25 billion people.

I'm not discounting anyone's personal tragedy! If you have lost a loved from this I'm really sorry. I, myself, am in a category of people at greater risk of dying from this. I'm just saying, once in a while you should take a step back, take a deep breath, and look at the big picture. COVID is not that bad.

The broadcasting industry could overcome their myopia (at least for a moment) if a brave, prime-time reporter, backed by a brave network, compared COVID-19 to the ongoing, human-caused mass extinction, called the Holocene Extinction [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction ] or at least The Black Death [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death ]. The Holocene extinction is the most under-reported news story at the planetary scale of our time, in my opinion. It's really bad.

Answer 2

Hi Vic,

This is a very good and broad question.

Basically, like every pressing, timely topic of discussion, COVID-19 has sparked a series of controversies and conspiracies constituting an ongoing clash of facts vs. opinions across the media spectrum. Online via social media: everyday discussions occur among everyday people with varying degrees of knowledge and expertise, strong opinions with little to concrete evidence to defend their reasoning (whether officially scientific or non-scientific/more general in tone). Published articles written from both opinionated and factual perspectives of thought, respectively, span the web and thoroughly dictate the thought process and ensuing logical (or illogical as the case may be) reasoning among the (high percentage of the) more gullible, less-educated public nationwide. News reports on different networks feature information in chunks large and small, with very little to high levels of details accordingly. When experts are called in to shine light on this darkening cloud of the pandemic, they can provide the vulnerable public with hardcore facts and figures in an ongoing attempt to truly educate the viewers currently walking the tightrope of internal stability and susceptibility to the virus itself based on their own chosen regular practices of (non-) mask-wearing etiquette when out and about in the world on foot.

When focusing on notable celebrity figures in the areas of leadership and wherewithal, respectively, you get the horn-locking between Donald Trump and Dr. Fauci in an all-out war of power versus wisdom. Some people believe one side while others lean more towards the opposition. In the end, it comes down to everyone's own instinct and willingness to accept the contributions of others to the pandemic plaguing our everyday conscience and consciousness worldwide, but especially in the United States of America.

As for solutions: the more educated people are (or become), the more levelheaded and logical individuals will be in the long run, and the fewer battles we will have over issues large (in the case of COVID-19) and small going forward within humanity. And the more cooperative and less selfish people become when it comes to the overall well-being of the human race at large, the safer and smoother everything and everybody will progress accordingly eternally.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any further questions or would like my tutoring assistance, Vic.