A devastating COVID surge takes a fresh toll on Indian journalism

More than a year into the global pandemic, the coronavirus has exploded across India. The spread has been fueled, in part, by possible new variants and the recent holding of mass public events, including political rallies and religious celebrations; vaccination rates, meanwhile, remain low, even as Indian manufacturers have busily churned out doses for residents of other countries. Hospitals have run low on beds and oxygen, and crematoria are overflowing; steel pipes at one such facility in Surat, in Gujarat state, melted from overuse. India has recorded more than three-hundred-thousand new daily cases for six days in a row—smashing the daily record for a single country several times over—and that figure is likely a substantial undercount. So, too, is the official daily death count, which yesterday came close to three thousand—a function of factors ranging from familial shame to political pressure. “It’s a complete massacre of data,” Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told the New York Times. “We believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.” News outlets, from the local to the international, have sent journalists to cremation and burial sites to try and collect more accurate death data, among other perilous assignments. “Some of the best journalists in India covering the COVID devastation are not on Twitter, Insta, etc.,” Rana Ayyub, a prominent Indian journalist, noted overnight. “Away from the din of... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'

[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2021-04-27 12:34:53 UTC ]
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Egypt's telecommunications blackout crushes citizen journalism

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Responding to widespread civil unrest, the government of Egypt on Thursday evening ordered all private network operators to shut down their services, both wired and wireless.At around 12:30am local time, Egypt's outbound connections to the Internet hit a brick wall,... Continue reading at Betanews

[ Betanews | 2011-01-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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