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The stock market is swooning. Consumers are stockpiling masks and antibacterial gels. President Trumps response to a global epidemic has done little to quell fears.

In the right-wing media universe, however, the commotion over the coronavirus is hardly a crisis for the White House. Instead, its just another biased attack on a president from the usual haters.

It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host, said on his syndicated program this week, dismissing the disease as a Democratic talking point.

The coronavirus is the common cold, folks, Mr. Limbaugh added, incorrectly. (The coronavirus is more deadly and more contagious than the common cold, and it can cause severe flulike symptoms.)

Viewers of the Fox News talk show Fox & Friends on Friday heard the co-host Ainsley Earhardt introduce a segment by announcing: Lets talk about the Democrats and the media with this coronavirus, and theyre making it political.

Her guest was Pete Hegseth, a Fox & Friends Weekend co-host and an on-air Trump cheerleader who doubles as an informal confidant of the president.

I dont want to say this, I dont relish the reality, Mr. Hegseth began. But you start to feel, you really do watch the Democrats, watch the media that theyre rooting for coronavirus to spread. Theyre rooting for it to grow. Theyre rooting for the problem to get worse.

Ms. Earhardt and her co-hosts, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, nodded along. Their show is the highest-rated morning program on cable news.

The losses in the stock market one of the presidents self-appointed barometers of the nations success are described as a consequence of fears deliberately spread by liberals and biased journalists, rather than a reaction by investors concerned about how the virus has affected economies around the world.

The coronavirus, from this standpoint, is compared to impeachment and the special counsels report, major news events dismissed by Trump allies as hyped-up nonevents.

That view was validated on Friday by one of the federal governments highest-ranking officials: Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff. He told conservative activists that the media focus on the coronavirus was an effort to hurt Mr. Trump.

The reason youre seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to be the thing that brings down the president, Mr. Mulvaney said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. Thats what this is all about.

There is little doubt that a global health crisis suits the relentless churn of 24-hour cable news networks, no matter the ideology of their commentators. Every major news channel has devoted hundreds of hours to examining the contagion.

Inevitably, the demand for disease news can elevate pundits with relatively little expertise. Helen Branswell, who writes about global health for STAT, a health news website based in Boston, said she had heard from many unqualified people hoping to be quoted on the coronavirus.

My inbox is flooded with people trying to get me to interview people who are being passed out as experts, who really are not experts, she said.

In addition, the coverage, presented with the signature flash of cable news, has at times amplified misleading or downright false narratives about the spread of the virus.

Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, for instance, floated the possibility in a Fox News interview that the coronavirus had originated at a Chinese laboratory, a theory that scientists say lacks any evidence.

Jon Cohen, who is among the team of reporters covering the coronavirus for the magazine Science, said anyone exaggerating the likelihood that the virus had been created in a laboratory could leave viewers misinformed.

It reinforces biases people have against China, against government, against scientific research, Mr. Cohen said.

Mr. Limbaugh, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Mr. Trump this month, used his radio program this week to link the virus with the Democratic presidential front-runner, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Just keep in mind where the coronavirus came from, Mr. Limbaugh told listeners. It came from a country that Bernie Sanders wants to turn the United States into a mirror image of: Communist China. (At a CNN town hall on Monday, Mr. Sanders, who identifies as a democratic socialist, described China as an authoritarian country, becoming more and more authoritarian, adding that it had taken more people out of extreme poverty" than any other nation.)

Mr. Limbaugh also advanced a baseless claim that the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, was biased against the president because her brother is Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general who was a target of Mr. Trumps attacks.

Allies of the Trump administration often take a warlike stance toward any issue that poses a threat to the presidents reputation, adopting the language of victimhood and grievance.

Sean Hannity, at the top of his Fox News program on Thursday, attributed the worries over the coronavirus to a fear campaign led by the media mob and the Democratic extreme radical socialist party.

Theyre now sadly politicizing and actually weaponizing an infectious disease, in what is basically just the latest effort to bludgeon President Trump, Mr. Hannity declared. Many on the left are now all rooting for corona to wreak havoc in the United States. Why? To score cheap, repulsive political points. (Mr. Hannity averages more than three million viewers a night, the biggest audience on cable news.)

One Hannity guest had the temerity to dissent sort of. Geraldo Rivera, a Fox News regular, agreed with Mr. Hannitys contention that Democrats had sought to arouse fear. But he told Mr. Hannity that our friend, President Trump, had not handled the situation ideally.

The president was too cool for school, Mr. Rivera said. I think it would have been better if he were more energetic, more pointed and forceful

Before he could finish his thought, he was interrupted by Mr. Hannity and another guest, the Trump loyalist Dan Bongino, who quickly rebuked his colleague.

Thats a horrible analysis, Geraldo, Mr. Bongino said.

See the article here:
Right-Wing Media Says Virus Fears Were Whipped Up to Hurt Trump - The New York Times

The courtroom often pits adversaries against each other, and that was the case in the recent Jeremy Christian trial in downtown Portland.

The competing principles in conflict? Fair trial vs. free press.

A defendant has a right to a fair trial. The media have a First Amendment right to report freely. While those rights are not inherently adversarial, they can come into conflict during high profile cases that attract extra media attention.

That was the case in the trial of Jeremy Christian, who was convicted in the killings of two men on a MAX train. The crime drew national attention, and Multnomah County Circuit Judge Cheryl Albrecht knew the trial would be packed with reporters and photographers.

Well in advance, she prepared an order outlining rules about coverage inside the courthouse. While the government cannot tell the media what to report and what not to report, courts can place restrictions on the use of things such as cellphones and laptops inside the courtroom. For the privilege of using a cellphone, which typically is forbidden, the media is restricted in how they can use phones and the cameras in the phones.

Albrecht also took the extra and welcome step of inviting interested journalists to meetings ahead of the trial to go over the rules and to answer questions. These were well attended by print, radio and television reporters and editors who had a chance to ask questions about where to put their equipment and where to station microphones and cameras.

A judge focuses on ensuring a fair trial, avoiding a mistrial and making the right decisions so an appeals court doesnt undo everything years later. The defense and prosecutors similarly are focused on their jobs.

While philosophically the media may agree they play a role in ensuring a fair trial, that rarely is front of mind for most journalists in their day to day work.

We want information, we want lots of it, and fast. We also want access, which helps provide thorough and accurate coverage, as well as compelling images. We are vigilant and outspoken if we think something is happening in secret that should be in the view of the public. And we are vigorously independent, chafing at any attempt to control or shape our journalism.

Despite all of the advance work on the Christian trial, not everything went smoothly, as is often the case when events unfold in real time and the stakes are so high.

The judge told the media she was very concerned about seating a jury. In fact, a much larger than usual pool of potential jurors was called to the courthouse for the trial.

Albrecht said she didnt want the questioning of jurors to be reported by the media. We couldnt agree to that, and voir dire, which was held in open court, was reported on.

Over our objection, the judge also did not allow The Oregonian/OregonLives reporter to sit through jury orientation, although she did release a copy of the questionnaire prospective jurors were asked to fill out. We believed the orientation should be public.

Because the requests dealt with the process of jury selection, my initial inclination was to protect juror privacy and shield jurors from invasive scrutiny, Albrecht told me. Jurors are asked to relinquish their work and personal lives for weeks at a time and endure highly emotional testimony and exhibits. It is imperative that they be able to do the important work of deciding a case without fear of recourse or reprisal.

Jurors, typically addressed by name, were instead referred to by letters and numbers. This was done both to protect jurors from possible intimidation and also for their privacy. We did not object.

Journalists sometimes organize themselves into a pool, where one reporter stands in for all. We understood a pool reporter and photographer would be able to watch the jurors visit a MAX light rail train similar to the one where the attack occurred. On the morning of the visit, we were told no media would be allowed.

The Oregonian/OregonLives attorney filed a letter of objection with the judges clerk but it was too late. The visit occurred outside of the medias presence. (We later were told that TriMet, not the judge, had said no media could attend the visit on its property.)

Albrecht noted that media requests often arise in the moment, unlike other decisions before the court. They are not raised in advance and there is usually no hearing, no authorities provided, and no briefing of the issues. Some of the requests affected the rights of the parties and there simply was not sufficient time to allow the parties to weigh in and for me to make a ruling, she said.

The biggest conflict occurred when Albrecht directed the media to not report on a witness testimony if, at days end, she had not finished. The judges decision was intended to ensure reporting about a witness testimony would occur only after the witness had finished, in order to avoid witness tampering or intimidation.

This seemed to The Oregonian/OregonLive to be an unconstitutional muzzling of the press. Any person in the courtroom that day could walk out and tweet, update Facebook or text their friends but the press could not report? Charles Hinkle, the attorney who has represented us on First Amendment issues for many years, drew up a motion and headed over to the courthouse.

For many years, I have been a member of the Bar-Press-Broadcasters Council, a volunteer group of lawyers, media, judges and other interested parties. The council is independent and helps work through these inevitable conflicts that arise during police investigations and court trials. Albrecht also has been a member of the council, and she took many steps to communicate with reporters and to be accessible when questions arose.

I can only imagine how difficult it is for a judge on a high-profile case with intense scrutiny, a volatile defendant and so much at stake (my sister, Leslie Bottomly, also is a Multnomah County judge).

These conflicts are difficult in the best of times, but journalists are loath to intervene on the morning of a stressful day in court. Yet the principle of a free press is fundamental for us, and we cannot sit by quietly and accept limits on our reporting of events that occurred in public view.

Judges can and do govern when and whether we can send information out of the courtroom on our laptops or phones. Thats the price we pay for being allowed to use phones and laptops, which by rule typically cannot be used in courtrooms. Those rules are intended to limit disruption, ensure fair trials and protect jurors and witnesses.

As Albrecht told me, The Oregon Supreme Court has said judges have broad latitude to control their courtrooms, including taking steps necessary to protect the rights of participants in judicial proceedings.

But judges cannot limit what we report once we leave the courthouse. We did not have to file our motion because, ultimately, Albrecht agreed with us after she was able to research the matter.

Its an important guarantee, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and at the end of the day, it is the reader who benefits.

Therese Bottomly is editor and vice president of content for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her at tbottomly@oregonian.com or 503-221-8434.

Read the original post:
Letter from the Editor: When fair trial, free press rights collide - OregonLive

The SNP is demanding a review of BBC Question Time. It comes after the show amplified the views of a racist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon supporter on its social media. But the SNP is not messing around, saying that the flagship show is now out of control. Meanwhile, the audience members somewhat dodgy past has also come to light.

As the National reported, Question Time was caught up in controversy after its programme on Thursday 20 February. An audience member made some pretty racist and xenophobic comments about immigration. But the shows social media feed decided to share her comments, anyway:

But as HuffPost neatly pulled apart, her arguments had no basis in fact. So, people were rightly angry that Question Timehad not fact-checked the womans claims before sharing them on social media:

Even the man sitting next to her is now gaining recognition:

Also, Sam Bright claimed the shows social media post violated BBC guidelines:

But now, the SNP has weighed in.

As the National reported, Tommy Sheppard MP has called for the show to review its social media policy. He wrote to Question Time bosses, saying:

I was deeply disappointed that the audience member was not challenged on these plainly incorrect assertions, but even more surprised that Question Time then clipped this contribution and posted to their Twitter site without any fact-checking or context.

Question Time used to use their social media outlets to live fact-check contributions from panellists and the audience, as well as giving context to each question asked by the audience. Rather than carelessly clipping these inflammatory contributions on immigration, I suggest that Question Time looks to reinstate the more informative and engaging fact-checking as part of their social media strategy.

The informing and educating seemed to be lacking from this flagship current affairs programme this week.

A senior SNP source went further. They told the National:

This latest incident shows Question Time is out of control and its high time the BBC got a grip of it.

The BBC did not respond to the Nationals request for comment.

But this isnt the end of the story. Because many people on Twitter are claiming the woman was no ordinary audience member.

In short, people have dug into the womans background. As Zelo Street reported, they claim that she is a Yaxley-Lennon supporter and also connected to Britain First:

But moreover, the woman is allegedly a former National Front MP candidate:

All of this makes Question Time look extremely bad. As Zelo Street noted, if the accusations are correct:

that puts Mentorn Media (the company that produces Question Time, and also The Big Questions) in one of those Very Difficult Positions. It puts the BBC in a yet more difficult position.

If the programme becomes the story, it is finished.

Sadly, that ship appears to have already sailed. And as the SNP rightly point out, Question Time and its audience selection process are clearly out of control. The BBC needs to take action, and quickly.

Featured image via BBC iPlayer and Wikimedia

Read the rest here:
The SNP just said BBCQT is now out of control and needs an urgent review - The Canary

A post on Facebook claims that, in 1949, Albert Einstein warned that the time would come when the very rich so controlled the means of communication that it would be almost impossible for ordinary people to make informed decisions and so democracy would then be broken.

This is a largely accurate summary of an article written by Einstein in 1949.

In the inaugural May 1949 edition of socialist magazine Monthly Review, Einstein argued that private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, resulting in an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.

Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education).

It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The Facebook post suggests that Einstein was warning that this is what would happen in the future, rather than commenting on the present as he was actually doing, but it is still largely correct in its summary of his point.

(The post also argues: We live in the time Einstein warned about, which is an opinion and not something that we can fact check.)

This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about thisand find out how to report Facebook contenthere. For the purposes of that scheme, weve rated this claim as true as it is a broadly accurate summary of an argument made by Einstein in 1949.

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Albert Einstein did argue the rich control the means of communication and this damages democracy - Full Fact

Eighteen months ago, I was combing through the Apollo 11 mission logs, looking at the timelines and events for something unique that we might focus on to celebrate the 50th anniversary of humankinds first landing on the moon. Last year, that idea became the BBC World Service podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon.

As the series drew to a close, it became clear that there was unfinished business. Some of the flight controllers who had been present for the Apollo 11 landing had also worked on another, arguably more dramatic, endeavour the ill-fated flight of Apollo 13.

That mission was crippled by an explosion while en route to the moon and nearly 200,000 miles from Earth. The story was popularised in 1995 in a Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks, but I knew that there was much more behind the narrative than the movie had managed to tell. So for the new series of the podcast I wanted to get under the skin of the thing and focus not just on the crew who flew the mission, but also on those who saved it the incredible team of flight controllers who worked round the clock in shifts for 87 hours.

We were after more than the story, gripping though it is. I wanted to understand what lessons we all might learn from what became arguably Nasas finest achievement: the recovery from catastrophe in deep space and the rescue of a crew from what looked like certain death. How do you lead a team through that? How do you keep yourselves going in the face of something so hopeless? It felt to me like there should be something all of us might learn.

Apollo 13 was the United States third mission to land humans on the moon. Launched on 11 April 1970, it followed less than a year after Neil Armstrongs successful first lunar landing and famous small step. Commander Jim Lovell, a former US navy test pilot and spaceflight veteran, led a crew of two rookie astronauts, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise. Things had gone awry even before launch. Swigert was a late inclusion in the crew, having been swapped in at the last moment to replace his colleague Ken Mattingly who had been exposed to a case of German measles. But this drama in the buildup to the mission drew only moderate interest from the media.

To the American public, sending people to the moon, a feat that had existed only at the limits of their imagination just 12 months earlier, had now taken on the air of something almost routine. There was much less press hoopla about the launch itself and television networks across America declined the opportunity to interrupt their schedules and include live inserts of Apollo 13s early inflight broadcasts. The view of the editorial teams back on Earth was clear: astronauts had landed on the moon not once but twice already and, with much of the novelty gone, the Apollo 13 mission deserved little attention, or so they thought.

Fifty-six hours in, with the crew nearly 200,000 miles from Earth, an explosion in one of Apollo 13s two oxygen tanks left the command module Odyssey fatally damaged. Coasting in space, with alarms flashing all around them, bleeding oxygen and losing electrical power, Lovell, Swigert and Haise were suddenly in deep trouble.

The lunar landing was called off and over the next four days, the crew and mission control would find themselves fending off deadly threats over and over again. They would solve problems one day, only to discover a host of new complications that might kill the crew the next. But they kept working together, across hundreds of thousands of miles of empty space, with everything against them, until they got the crew all the way back.

On 17 April 1970, with the world watching, Apollo 13 reached Earth again. The capsule, surrounded by an inferno created by the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere, became impossible to contact by radio. At mission control, they watched and waited in silence.

We tend to mythologise these stories of outrageous survival to the extent that it becomes difficult to tease fact apart from fiction. This is doubly true of Apollo 13. The popular retelling goes something like this: Apollo 13 was rescued by an elite team led by flight director, Gene Kranz, for whom failure was not an option. The rescue was executed calmly and deftly without any doubts that it would succeed.

But you only have to listen to the opening hours of the mission control recordings and the space-to-ground radio transmissions to know that was not the case. After the rupture of the oxygen tank, both the crew and their flight controllers struggled to make sense of what was happening.

That the mission control team was caught flat-footed in the opening phase of the accident is strangely reassuring. Nobody, not even the exhaustively drilled Nasa flight controllers, is able to glide swan-like through chaos like that. Initially there was no structure. There were misdiagnoses and mistakes. The vehicle had failed so totally that it fleetingly crossed the mind of at least one flight controller that he should simply pack up and go home.

Exemplary leadership is what got them through that first hour. Kranz kept his team and the vehicle together masterfully, buying time enough to start solving the problem. When reviewing the response to sudden crises, we often overlook that chaotic period, simply because it has little real structure and doesnt appear to move things forward. But preventing a team from disintegrating in the face of an apparently overwhelming challenge is a feat in itself. The average age of the flight control team was 27; some were freshly graduated from university. During routine mission operations you would never guess that; their statements are so clear and confident, their knowledge so deep. But immediately after the accident there are times when, listening to the mission audio loop, you hear a hint of fearful youth.

Nasa had learned to be wary they knew that plans hatched in theheat of the moment often harbour flaws

After a torrid hour of failed troubleshooting, a new shift of flight controllers arrived, as well as a new flight director, waiting to take their turn. They were at this point still in the thick of the fight and the temptation for Kranz to keep going and refuse to relinquish control must have been enormous. Nevertheless he passed the baton to the incoming team, recognising that fresh eyes and minds were what was needed. This is the true spirit of teamwork the ability to know when your part is done, when someone new can bring something better than you can.

That ability to relinquish control and delegate authority didnt stop there. The Apollo missions were complex endeavours. Nobody could be across it all and Nasa knew that in mission control it had a team of people who, as a whole, were far greater than the sum of their individual parts.

In approaching this crisis, their delegation of authority and deference to expertise is almost total. In the face of high-stakes scenarios, it is tempting to wrest control from more junior colleagues. But in 1970 the approach of mission control was quite different. They empowered their most junior team members, giving them total ownership of their specialist stations. They would interrogate their recommendations but not second-guess them. It is a lesson that industry and wider society has largely failed to heed.

The other aspect of the Apollo 13 mission that I found fascinating during our interviews with the team was the depth of Nasas preparation. I had always imagined Apollo 13 to be a feat of wall-to-wall improvisation. After all, the rupture of the oxygen tank had torn the heart out of the command module, leaving it dead, forcing the astronauts to use the lunar module as a lifeboat and means of propulsion.

But what surprised me was how little of the response to the accident demanded improvised solutions. Nasa had learned to be wary of creativity and inventiveness in the heat of the moment. That doesnt mean it refused to improvise, nor that it wasnt capable of doing it well only that it knew plans hatched in the heat of battle often harbour hidden flaws.

Incredibly, Nasa had already rehearsed many of the contingency and fallback plans required to rescue Apollo 13. In earlier missions, it had experimented with using the lunar modules engines to drive both it and the command module. It had a checklist ready to manage the sudden powering down of the command module that was required to save dwindling battery power. Nasa even had a procedure for flying the spacecraft without their primary navigation and guidance computer. And then, when finally it had no choice but to improvise, it did it with same obsession and attention to detail it brought to everything else.

Finally, we should turn to the things we think we know about the mission through retellings in popular culture. The best quotes are often misquotes. For example nobody ever said: Houston, we have a problem. The precise words were: Houston, weve had a problem. That is just a glitch in tense.

More significant is the missions other catchphrase Failure is not an option which we have taken to characterise Nasa as the sort of steel-willed organisation that steadfastly refuses to entertain the possibility of failure. But in truth nobody uttered those words during the mission. The quote itself derives from a line of script in the 1995 movie and Kranz then borrowed it as the title for his autobiography, published in 2000.

And while the flight controllers enjoyed regurgitating that particular strand of mythology to us, it was clear that the possibility of failure remained very real throughout the mission. Fifty years later, several of the flight controllers were still moved to tears when describing the moment when Apollo 13 finally reappeared after the communications blackout.

Despite their protestations, it became obvious that they all must have known how perilous the scenario was. But, importantly, what they didnt do was devote any time to contemplating disaster. As flight director Glynn Lunney, who relieved Kranzs first shift told me: If you spend your time thinking about the crew dying, youre only going to make that eventuality more likely.

The second series of 13 Minutes to the Moon starts on the BBC World Service at 11.30am on Wednesday 11 March. It will be available on BBC Sounds from Monday 9 March

Originally posted here:
50 Years on how Apollo 13's near disastrous mission is relevant today - The Guardian