A pat or a slap for media coverage of Covid?

About this Event

What can the pandemic can teach us about the place of international coverage within UK media?

Fri, April 30, 2021

12:00 PM – 1:30 PM BST

A year into living with Covid 19, it’s time to take stock of how well our media has served us. While news consumption has skyrocketed, and TV news bulletins have seen record numbers of live viewers, have UK audiences truly been equipped to understand the global character of the pandemic?

With a full domestic news agenda, and travel restrictions on foreign correspondents, international stories have often been pushed to the margins. But as a deadly virus shows just how connected we are to the world, do UK audiences need to know more about the devastating impact of Covid in South America, the effectiveness of public health responses across East Asia, or the struggles to supply vaccines to countries that can’t afford them?

This event, jointly organised by the International Broadcasting Trust and the Media Reform Coalition, explores what the pandemic can teach us about the place of international coverage within UK media – particularly those parts of the media that claim to act in the ‘public interest’.

How successful are our national public broadcasters, like the BBC and Channel 4, at giving audiences a truly international perspective? How do independent media with a global focus prioritise stories when their scope is the entire world? And what kind of media do we need for a world where pandemics may become the norm?

Part of the MRC’s The BBC and Beyond: Reimagining Public Media campaign, the discussion will feed into a Manifesto for a People’s Media later this year.

Speakers:

Liliane Landor - Channel 4 News

Vanessa Baird - New Internationalist

Indi Samarajiva - writer living in Colombo, Sri Lanka

Camilla Knox-Peebles - CEO of Amref Health Africa UK

Romilly Greenhill - UK Director, ONE Campaign