Lower madrid just been youre watching the listening post working from home this week were breaking from our usual format for months now weve been doing nonstop coverage of the media side of the coronavirus pandemic from the misinformation being spread by government citizens and journalists alike to the war of narratives being waged by great powers but covert 19 has also brought out some of the best in the 4th estate people who are producing vital coverage some of which is designed and delivered in new ways to help us understand a breaking story thats rooted in medical science and laden with complexities we have 4 examples from 4 different parts of the world each using a different media from the United States and brazil countries whose president s have repeatedly misinformed we hear from 2 medical experts turned broadcasters one through his podcast the other over you tube later well take you to europe and an aggregator that gets you around some of Silicon Valleys trouble some algorithms to analysis that you can actually use on covert 19 but we start where the coronavirus story began in china the listening posts i mean are you now on size ship a weekly magazine based in beijing thats proven that even with all those chinese censors watching and the authorities ready to pounce it can produce some valuable journalism on the biggest news story of our time. Donations now to be sure that no one can be truly safe during an epidemic and yet these journalists from thyssen magazine take huge personal risk conducting interviews and gathering information on the front lines i have immense respect for them what they do is extremely valuable. In one of the most controlled media environments in the world session weekly is a dog called out since it was founded in 2009 by investigative journalist who surely the magazine has consistently tested the limits of Free Expression in china. In 2018 citation broke the story of a prominent chinese c. E. O. Who had allegedly bribed an african head of state then in 2019. The bakken exposed critical government failings that led to a chemical explosion in junk so province killing 78 people. Session does all this by walking a funding title 40 percent of its finances come from china Media Capital a government backed Investment Fund it means they have to be hyper careful about the work they do and when they speak when they rejected interview requests from us so we spoke with jon jon a former c. C. T. V. Reporter and Research Fellow at the china media observatory in switzerland she has followed citations output closely especially their work during the covert crisis what she actually took it was in the 1st week of february when tyson published before part investigative series about the coronavirus in china. This was the 1st time i and many chinese got to grips with the details of what was really happening during this epidemic the series was a comprehensive and detailed piece of reporting. Tyson phrase luminous the end outbreak was imminent back to december last year asking what it took so long for the public to be informed. They conducted extensive interviews with hospital patients and their families questioning the official death count and looking at why the production of testing kids couldnt keep up with demand and they drew on the expertise of numerous chinese doctors to hypothesize that enhance what market was not the only source of the virus. Just. That tyson post was the same questions people across the country were asking. The public mood was one of fear and uncertainty and tyson was shouting on their behalf. And what was the reception this coverage received in china from what i understand about session it has a strong journalistic reputation but its not necessarily the most widely read publication so what is the reach of its coverage 19 reporting. Well what you will see a lot. Since audience has always been chinas social elite desertion makers government officials Business Leaders of reporting is not for everyone during this epidemic however tyson listed is paywall on all its covert reporting as a result many more people who would not normally be tyson turn to the publication for the 1st time as the magazine has become more well known however it has been exposed to more public scrutiny in march tyson reported on the outbreak of covert 1000 in the United States and the article itself was objective and well researched but the magazines cover caused quite a stir the implication of the image was that the virus originated in china and was having a knock on effect around the globe. Many people on social media saw this as a betrayal to the country some even accused thai scene of working closely with was the media this incident shows that as tyson becomes an ever more important part of the Chinese Media landscape any added to his slip can trigger a significant social respond to your. Children and we were very keen to speak with someone from section for this piece an editor of porter and we wrote to them through multiple channels now in some cases we got just a polite refusal in others our email and messages just got no response at all now other International Media outlets like the New York Times and the wall street journal theyve reported similar experiences why do you think this is whats behind this policy of silence from session. Which it is going to. Be 3 such a policy of silence is not uncommon among Chinese Media outlets indeed foreign media will face the same problem trying to interview Chinese Companies or individuals. I have experienced this a lot during my time working in china there are 2 factors behind this. On the one hand european and american coverage of china is one sided and paints a picture of a system that is highly fluid found at the level many chinese are convinced the International Media were only ever patrik china in a negative light on. The misconceptions imbeciles and anyone looking for a chinese perspective is likely to be refused an interview. Given that tyson sits at the very center of public discussion in china right now its not surprising that they would choose to be extra cautious about who they speak with. We only need Media Outlets like tyson and thankfully it is not alone in the Chinese Media landscape. Critical outlets like these are absolutely essential. Ill be honest with you as a former Health Commissioner every day i wish i were on the front lines of response and i know that the podcast is an extremely Important Public Service in a moment like this and we hope that were moving information to people but you know every day i wish i was leading the charge and in a place like detroit it sometimes feel like a general missing the war. This is america the 2nd and im your host dr abdul also. Dr phil is not like most part cost is covering the coronavirus he offers a unique perspective hes a trained physician a former city Health Commissioner and a political hopeful who ran for governor of michigan in 2018. Thats a time when the amount of information is overwhelming and misinform takes frequently have the airwaves elsei it is attempting to bridge the gap with his podcast america dissected. Americas conflict has now surpassed every other country on earth and its President Donald Trump to talk. On the podcast as twice weekly and in each 30 minute episode else play it blends his own incisive commentry with interviews from high profile politicians and medical experts many of whom hes for for nation ships where throughout his career. On the product or under american dissected coronavirus has adapted to the age of quarantine pretty creatively previously produced from a state of the art studio 3 a its now takes his audio equipment down into his mother in the us basement where her Womens Clothing boutique makes for a surprisingly good place to hide away and report a podcast absolutely you start to america dissected to analyze the wide ranging challenges facing the u. S. Health care system now the podcast is dedicated exclusively to examining the medical crisis we find ourselves in what did you want to provide for your audience that you felt was missing. That dr low the whole goal of this podcast was to go beyond the headlines and some of the more familiar stories that people had heard about with respect to how one cope in 1009 we realized that this was a perfect space to get down to the science in the policy that matters most but our capacity to test people skills remains one of the most important things we have to be able to do let me break down why what we want to do is is find those contours of the conversation that really do need more shading the more nuance more understanding and then really dig deep and find really great experts who can help us to understand whats going on can you give me a few examples of the kind of experts youre talking about the conversation that we shared quite early on with John Auerbach was really informative important we cannot continue to. Nickel and dime the Public Health system and expect that its going to be able to protect the public john is somebody who has been a city Health Commissioner a state Health Commissioner and worked at the highest level to see these the and so he was able to really break down how the c. D. C. Works how these Different Levels of Public Health interact with each other i also thought our conversation about the congressional response with representatives from legit and all was really critical one of the things thats happening right now is states are literally bidding against each other for the very limited supply of essential equipment that we need this is somebody who is living it day to day asking what is it that we need to do want to federal level to deliver and a lot of your friends and colleagues are actually on the front lines right now what have you learned from speaking with them. Had a sense of what it might be on the wards but it wasnt until i interviewed my friend the caution who is an emergency doctor but i got a real sense of exactly what the challenges are on a day to day basis weve already seen what feels like thousands of cases to nearly are now iraqs role as being converted into an i. C. U. With a long rows of young and old. On ventilators. Episode just to really get inside look on what folks doing this work are experiencing every day this is youll see. Them beyond access to a range of voices how do you use your previous career is to your advantage look i am not a journalist and i dont have a very particular viewpoint and im not hiding it but as a as a practitioner somebody whos worked in the Health Care System rebuilt a Health Department in one of the poorest cities in america and then finally engaged in politics i try to bring a lot of that for all of it into every episode of the podcast to help our listeners understand that from a different perspective. How weve got strong randomized control trial about the safety and efficacy of hydroxy when. President trump should stop promoting was that in mind do you think this moment right now requires medical professionals to really be leading the charge disseminating information and educating the public. The hard part about a moment like this is that its extremely scary and were facing it down in real time and the hard part of that is that information about them its not always good information and so i do believe that we need to be leading with science and leading with expertise we may not always get it right every once in a while we get folks who are like i just simply cant seem to take and im like you know were trying to get you straight and that is always the hope with this podcast i dont know that we always get it right but we always try. Who in brazil are stupid warning formed about the seriousness of what is happening there are many people who question social distancing they ended up contracting covert and dying so people are now forced to acknowledge any misinformation and accept this Scientific Consensus with that in mind i focus on communicating the science without attacking political ideologies or. Actually i am not a no a trained microbiologist and virally just is a dominant force in brazil social media landscape a decade ago he was destined for life in the lib oratory with emory no quickly realized he could make more of an impact as a science communicator online thinks are part of what is in a short few years he built a massive following especially on you tube the stilling complicated scientific topics into comprehensive easy to digest videos and live streams. Which are part of the work for top how quick or how and that was all before that 90 after the outbreak yammering no dedicated his work to informing brazilians about the virus what appears shock or not were getting here to what would a poor quality decrease be used to punish his stature has soared as millions in the country have turned to his videos for answers answers that have been sorely lacking in the brazilian media mix which tends to focus more on the numbers less on the Science Behind them. But when youre taking on a president like share your goal so narrow the free market preview for everyone but if you need to be pretty confident about the facts which they know is that when you look out of my preparation for talking about covert turning this information into something comprehensive this video comes from more than 10 years of experience in scientific communication online is may use you found a home on you tube but you already only trained as a scientist and a professor so what makes you swap your lab coats for the what can i mean the focus was very few people were doing scientific communication in brazil and thats still the case there are great people doing research on covert here hes developing treatments vaccines testings but very few experts are talking publicly about coronavirus the ones that are. I dont really have to experience that i havent find all edgy hes used so it was easy to decide between being one more average scientist or a strong online science communicator seeing how big the audience is i see now it was the right decision you wish to see took you 4 more to spoil it can you give us an example of the kind of content that your viewers are tuning in for and what makes your coverage different from the rest of the brazilian media. Policy commitments on what im able to do which the traditional media cant because of lack of space or expertise is to analyze the situation as a researcher so what causes the virus or why is it so difficult to do enough tests here in a more straightforward translations of the Scientific Research you know way that people can understand but my most watched video is where its a good study done by Imperial College in the u. K. Which projected how bad it could get in the u. S. In england and i have applied a model to brazil to be seeking to ask a precious talking shop. But as you could hear. More. He saw. That life stream she was a very important to show people the seriousness of the problem in the need for urgent action just so. That life stream went viral but it was quite controversial wasnt. Alive human beings. It was very tense i spent an hour explaining the details of the projection what made it go so viral was people thought i had made a prediction of where depend demick is headed in brazil but that wasnt the objective of the videos at all when you reach such a big audience you cant control how people are going to interpret what youre saying we do can you be sure that people will watch the whole hour to fully understand our own text. So i lost control which has made me rethink my role since then ive taken on the role of an educator not only reports and figures like the media but also preparing and educating my audience for what could happen. What about the. Very thing. You know. The hardest part is not actually dealing with the president or his followers but rather the whole politicized. Science topic such as vaccines or Global Warming i treat it as identity politics if you believe what you. Saw information people. Consensus which many times goes against the scientific information my challenge is to keep talking about the science without feeding that political tribalism i just try to talk about whats important whats recommended. Independent. Well we started the syllabus knowing that something was broken in the digital public sphere worked a lot of really high quality. Created by people after weeks and months of work would just not be seeing by those who need to see it so what we are trying to do is the syllabus we change the economics how. Distributed and how does the stubborn. Evgeny morozov his spent his career critiquing Silicon Valleys internet giants his 1st book the net delusion published in 2011 took aim at the digital utopianism of the time the talk of social media platforms as engines of emancipation against repressive regimes. Big tex recent history from googles hand in drone warfare to facebook and twitter helping with or tarion governments to silence dissidents makes the book read more like a prediction last year more of his originally from bellaver us no its the syllabus a multimedia multilingual newsletter now with a daily cover 19 edition is target audience is people looking to be educated rather than entertained what sets the syllabus apart though is the way that it selects information privileging the quality of the content over its appeal to advertisers in other words it aims to subvert the Silicon Valley model evgeny in march you started a spin off of the syllabus called the politics of covert 19 how does it work and what can people expect to find. So essentially its a combination off a daily newsletter and not cry for working in tandem back by human and ill get it inclination so johnny can walk us through some of the selections that you have marked today so we have centrally half scripts and algorithms which generate the shortlist of some which than our traders samoans here are city view in their dislike of language us and that every evening we circulate newsletter which contains just the high life like a search for articles weve had this really you know our system that mentions calling it so we ready to spend a lot of time finding all the basque blogs city them by putin all exists and today at and a podcast on some of the psychoanalytic affects actually what it means higher psyche this crisis there was a dear good video was a very interesting caller a little bit earlier probably one korean especially if were origin in the capitalist system built over between while not human populations and nice rural areas. Im interested in how the idea behind the syllabus links to your critique of Silicon Valley can you explain what you see is the problem with how we access information at the moment while the informal motto of the syllabus as high quality is already here its just not even the distributor so much of it gets lost in the stuff often. To disturb actual clicking paper 18 of which is there are mostly to satisfy the business imperatives of. Twitter that are no incentives built in today a lot of those forms do essentially make those regions and those are the girls easier to discover because they do not bring any advertising revenue but that doesnt anyhow diminish the importance of this article so that the public debate of our so from what i can tell the selection criterion is quite heavily on your own opinion about what information is important how can people trust that by signing up and not just entering yet another online echo chamber. Yes well from the very beginning of the syllabus. Decided we want to be a subjective as it can get so even though its a combination of algorithms and human editors its the human editor is who called the shots but beyond doubt we also have a certain biases and we dont want hide them you know so our edition about the political economy is called the progressive well do this thing you know a lot of the more standard and of conservative traditional positions are so well represented in that additional media discourse that he no featuring another conservative white man than what he has to say about the future of the world after all that 19 put out by origin is i would rather you know woman from. Colombia. And the feature her blog post that i didnt feature and yet another from the wall street journal and the hope that people who are fed up with this kind of the same thats the ideas that i do circulate and the public media and public sphere of the day they will appreciate our base your choice and. One of the points you have getting more as often makes about human editors calling the shots as opposed to algorithms gets at a fundamental short counting in the way the digital news is distributed our own biases along with the imperatives of advertisers shape what we see and rather than being informed we just end up with those biases and those beliefs reaffirmed thats not good enough on any news story let alone one a serious and as dangerous as cover 19 youve been watching a special edition of our program on Media Projects helping us make sense of the coronavirus pandemic well see you next time here at the listening. As the world fights the corona pandemic were learning more about this every day its a new path that your new join our global community. How we come together to fight im sorry your questions and i just recently directly thats coming on on you tube as youre saying im concerned about the front line for nothing or a question that keeping you up to date and weve seen countries retreat back and beating back the street on 00. Beleaguered out of 5 paying the price for his political maneuvering never to now desperate for american recognition and absolutely denounce. Studies how did the p. L. O. Find strength and support from their only lifeline oppressed palestinians living in the occupied territories chronicling the turbulent story of the struggle for a palestinian homeland p. L. O. History of a revolution on aljazeera. Award winning documentary is from around the world. On aljazeera. Hello im Maryam Namazie in london quite look at headlines now the u. N. Mission in libya has condemned the attack on tripolis only functioning apple by forces loyal to warlord 25 at least 80 rockets were fired at the facility a Libyan Airways plane was hit although no one was on board and 3 civilians also died from shelling out. There have been more than 10000 coronavirus related deaths in brazil the worst affected nation in Latin America Amazonas state has been the hardest hit hundreds of coffins have been sent to the regional capital now swith war funerals expected to take place or russias president has led scaled down celebrations to mark 75 years since the end of world war 2 in europe traditional commemorations were postponed because of the pandemic. Day on how small. Instead of a military parade on moscows red square russians marked 53 day in solitude covered 19 has changed everything the streets routinely used to display russias military power are empty no tanks no music no marchers. President Vladimir Putin placed flowers at the eternal flame near the kremlin walls and for the 1st time in recent years western delegates who were due to attend the event cancel it