A Gate Unkept

One of the common clichés one hears about the Internet is that it "Democratizes" things. It removes "gatekeepers" so that "anyone" can be a fill-in-the-blank. And one of the most common words to go into the blank space is "journalist." And this expansion of the ranks of "journalists" has lead to an expansion of the definition of "media" to pretty much anything that bills itself as some sort of news and/or commentary site.

Which is all fine and good, but it makes criticism of "the media" a lot like shooting fish in a barrel. One simply waits for someone to present something stupid, inaccurate or un-sourced, and the pounces. Which is my basic gripe with the NPR opinion piece: "Media coverage of monkeypox paints it as an African virus. That makes me mad". To be sure, I understand Dr. Nsofor's irritation. The stories people read about things can quickly shape opinions that then become very hard to dislodge or change, and it's common for people to seek to protect themselves from perceived threats by attaching those threats to people visibly different from themselves and avoiding (or attacking) those people. There's a reason why the World Health Organization considers naming diseases after the places where they're first identified to be a bad idea.

But I think that it's worthwhile to be at least somewhat selective in whom one anoints with the title of "the Media." Here's something that Dr. Nsofor took special exception to:

Here's how a story from the publication "Voice from Europe" described the first case of monkeypox in England in 2018: a "horrible Nigerian disease called monkeypox spreads in the United Kingdom for the first time."

I'd never heard of "Voice from Europe" before, but the construction of the headline left me with an immediate suspicion that the author was out to make a racist/nationalist point. So I decided to find the article in question. And couldn't. In fact, the only reference I could find to the article was the paper: "Lay media reporting of monkeypox in Nigeria," co-authored by Dr. Nsofor, which notes "A European headline (from the Voice of Europe) was ‘Horrible Nigerian disease called monkeypox spreads in the United Kingdom for the first time’." Aha. So now I had a more accurate rendering of the name. And that enabled me to find an article titled: "Voice of Europe closes down following Big Tech censorship and ad service ban," on a site call ReMix. Of itself ReMix says: "Remix offers news and commentary from Central Europe, the Visegrád countries of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia." And it doesn't take long to understand where it stands, politically. The headlines lay it out pretty well:

• Almost 2 gang rapes happen every single day in multicultural Germany, and cases more than doubled in just 3 years
• Turkish migrant dad chokes out teen football player and pulls knife on playing field named after George Floyd in Berlin
• Macron tries to silence non-conformist media in France, but French MSM only worries about lack of media pluralism in Hungary
• US: Google employee admits company manipulates search results in favor of Democrats in Project Veritas video
• Big Tech censorship: YouTube blocks Polish conservatives
• YouTube removes video criticizing LGBT ideology

In any event, ReMix had this to say about Voice of Europe in June of 2020.

In a farewell note posted to its website, Voice of Europe stated that it was ceasing operations due censorship on social media and a decision from ad networks to pull all ads from the site, leaving the publication unable to generate revenue to continue operations.

The publication was widely read for its reporting on Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis, but also covered topics related to the culture wars, economics, and other global news topics.

Despite having been "widely read" there is no immediate trace of the site today. It's apparently been taken down, and mostly lost to history. A direct search on the text of the headline brings up only two pages of Google search, with all of the results being either the paper or Dr. Nsofor's op-ed. Not even an archived copy of the original article pops up. Of course, that might be because I live in the United States, and Google presumes that I'm not interested in European Internet archives. (I also tried Bing, but Bing seems not to understand that placing text in quotes means "search for this string exactly as presented," and I wasn't going to sift through page after page of unrelated Monkeypox stories to maybe find what I was looking for.)

I don't disagree with Dr. Nsofor's impression that Voice of Europe's headline was designed to cast Africa in a bad light. But I do disagree with the good Doctor being willing to grant Voice of Europe a status equal to that of "BBC, the Independent, CNBC and ABC News" and labeling them all as simply "Western journalists." Sure the stock photo of a Black African covered in blisters from the disease doesn't help people understand that other people have it, and can spread it (albeit with some amount of difficulty). But a stereotypical choice of stock photo does not rise to the same level as intentionally attempting to create a link in people's minds between Nigeria and Monkeypox. It doesn't count as the "echo" that Dr. Nsofor says it is. Voice of Europe set out to create a "Blame Africa" message. As far as I'm concerned, the biggest problem with using a few stock photos of infected Africans in Europe and the United States is that it likely doesn't give an accurate expectation of what people should expect to see, should they somehow encounter someone with Monkeypox.

"Colonialism" is a convenient villain, but "thoughtlessness" is a more likely culprit in many cases. And one worth calling people out for. Not that it's likely to do any more good. The media is drawn to drama; and people who are suffering from severe, untreated cases of the pox make for more dramatic images than people whose infections are under control. A few angry op-eds is not going to change that. So rather than a passive-aggressive missive on racism in the media, I suspect that a crash course on medical media literacy would be more helpful. But anger drives more clicks. (Guilty as charged.)