Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

What’s News in a Bad Year?

Interesting how many of the news outlets abandoned their “best of” and “worst of” lists in 2020. That’s probably because they didn’t have anything to add to their non-stop coverage of COVID and POTUS fighting for another term.

Some media, such as the New York Post, came up with a chronology of top stories that included abandonment of the Royal Family by Prince Harry, the Harvey Weinstein verdict and Trump’s positive COVID test. Really? Seems like they missed most of the important stuff.

In fact, a good case could be made for naming the media themselves as best and worst of 2020. Their undisguised joy in finding problems with government response to COVID meant that departments of health and the Centers for Disease Control were constantly playing defense rather than planning and administering. Pitting blue governments against red governments on the state level did nothing toward solving the problems of fair distribution of personal protective equipment at the beginning of the pandemic, but I guess it sold advertising, so the media kept it up and covered all the unfair practices in every state up to the current disarray in vaccine distribution. And our inability to corral new variants of the virus.

Rather than fight Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations that kept photographers out of hospitals, the media stepped back. They might have been pro-active in getting permission from families and sick ones so that we could see the devastation going on behind hospital walls. That kind of photographic evidence has a shock value that makes believers out of the most stubborn of us.

But, the COVID party continued as disease ravaged first the black communities, then the immigrants. And, again, media, with rare exception, stepped back. Did you see any coverage of families dealing with the deaths, unemployment, hunger while COVID was ripping the black communities apart? Did you hear interviews with houseless people trying to protect themselves and their families?

Me, neither. Really, we saw just the entirely predictable scenario of nursing home deaths (mostly white folks) that got the coverage.

Besides nodding approval and gratitude to essential health workers, there’s been little to applaud about media coverage in 2020. For a few pre-COVID weeks, all sides were obsessed with the election, under the guise of informing America for the big vote, but in reality stirring the fires. But, beyond those few headlines, after March 15, the real ink was spilled over COVID-19.

And as we suspect that COVID has changed everything for years to come, there are other important stories that need to be followed. And I mean more important than Harry and Meaghan. Here are a few:

Education. On most of the planet, school years have been disrupted if not cancelled. Take a moment to ponder what this means. For some lucky kids, with access to private schools, fast internet, involved parents, it’s been a year of growth unlike any other. They’ve been able to pursue interests that schools might not have ever exposed them to. Schools, after all, have to teach skills and histories useful to the majority of citizens. For the lucky few, this has been a year to learn more about their own interests, to read widely, practice art and music. For others, stuck at home with little entertainment, this has been a year to watch TV. What will teachers have to deal with when things get back to normal?

Climate. According to all climate watchers, from the World Meteorological Organization to Greenpeace to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 2020 is on-track to be the hottest, stormiest, most carbon-dioxide producing year on record. Pick any one indicator, from fires to hurricanes to arctic ice melt and you’ll see what this means for the weather near you. For farmers, it’s obvious that crops have suffered from record droughts and record flooding. And the derecho that blew down thousands of acres of crops and buildings in Iowa—what’s that about? Will we see more of these in the future?

There are more threads we could unravel: Sports, food supplies, the soaring use of plastics as petroleum prices fall—and, how much money has POTUS raised with his campaign to overturn the American people’s choice for leadership? Will he use it to launch more campaigns? To start a TV network? To re-remodel Mar-A-Lago?

And, in the good-news-for-the-planet department, human birth rates in wealthy countries continue to fall. Women in the 18-to-34-year-old category are postponing or canceling plans to have children as the pandemic exposes the complexity of raising them in an unfair world. Requests for birth control have risen in the United States and Europe. We can hope that in the future the demand for workers will open borders to more immigrant flow; in poor countries women have had less access to birth control due to the pandemic.

At any rate, it looks like the world will not run out of people. Or viruses. Or news. If we’re lucky enough to find it.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. She also is a co-founder of CAFOZone.com, a website for people who are affected by concentrated animal feeding operations. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History.” Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2021

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