COVID-19 Challenges Update 10

June 17, 2020. New York. – COVID-19 continues to present a global challenge for citizens, governments, healthcare professionals, scientists, corporations, and the media.

While the disease creates new challenges, it also highlights long-standing ones in terms of policy, communication, and societal awareness of key issues and how the media reports on these issues.

Access to non-biased information is necessary to make qualified decisions. Yet much TV news showed relatively balanced – even positive – coverage of hospitals, even as there were high death rates and questions about hospitals’ ability to operate effectively during the COVID-19 outbreak. This type of coverage was seen in Italy, Spain, and the U.S., and while it’s understandable that during the heat of the crisis journalists were hesitant to cover the reasons for the extremely high number of deaths, the situation has improved since April. The question, therefore, is whether the reporting has.

Meanwhile, the mortality rate for Indigenous people from COVID-19 (9.7%) remains significantly higher than for non-indigenous populations (5.7%) and Indigenous populations around the world are moving to protect their communities by restricting visitors to their lands and making coronavirus-related information available in their languages.

As people work to recover from COVID-19, so do corporations, but many face media negativity they may struggle to shake due to their responses to the pandemic and other business concerns they have no managed to address in this landscape.

Large scale societal changes from the COVID-19 crisis are likely and there is a desperate need to improve health literacy. Luckily, an overall frame for dealing with these challenges and treating all lives as dignified and valuable already exists and has been accepted by 193 heads of state in the form of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals with their 169 clear targets.

To see our complete findings this week on COVID-19, please visit https://www.ungsii.org/sdg-cities and click to and select your language.

These findings are produced in partnership with the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the African Union, the Universities Network, UN Academic Impact, and diverse faith communities as we need better data and reporting on solutions for tackling the pandemic.

For over 21 years Media Tenor's mission has been to contribute to objective, diverse, and newsworthy media content by bringing together the diverse parties. Media Tenor's global research projects include analyses of election campaigns, investor relations, public diplomacy, corporate communications and other topics critical to news makers and news audiences.

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