I joined a few of my fellow IA Scholars for a news update and trivia Zoom! It was so nice to reconnect with a few friendly faces and talk about what we’ve been up to while staying at home. Mostly all of the news stories were directly related to Covid-19 and it’s impacts over that last few months. We spoke more in depth about Russia, The Netherlands, Hungary, Turkmenistan and Sub-Saharan Africa. We did discuss the United States’ handling of the crisis, but mainly focused on or compared ourselves to other countries.
We learned that Turkmenistan had not reported any cases (as of April 9) and whether or not we actually believed that to be the case. Turkmenistan is known for censoring the media and reporting unreliable information. It has gotten to the point where simply saying the word coronavirus is illegal. They had not changed life internally, but did close off their boarders to prevent travelers from bringing the virus to their people. This topic brought up an interesting discussion about the media right now. Many of us were appalled that they were (most likely) providing false information to their people, but I posed the question: Is it really that much different than our situation here?
We have received a lot of misdirection and false information from the president, and many people actually believe it. I would be interested to discuss the media’s challenges during this time, and how they sought to provide the most accurate information, and if they received backlash for doing so.