Media vs. Covid-19

Both China and Iran have taught the world a valuable lesson, albeit unintentionally: having a free independent press is essential, especially during COVID-19. Until the truth started to resurface on December 30th on social media, it appears that the Chinese government managed to suppress news of the virus in Wuhan for three weeks. The virus was even reported as early as December 10th, when a patient named Wei Guixan was admitted into Eleventh Hospital in Wuhan with a rare infection in both lungs. Later in the month, there were already thousands infected, many of whom had been traveling around the country and globally. According to a study done by the University of Southampton, had China taken proper measures to combat the coronavirus and alert other countries, the number of cases in China would have been reduced by 95 percent. While these claims in no way justify the xenophobia and blame assigned to China for the pandemic, they do demonstrate the dire needs for freedom of the press. Julien Reichelt, the editor-in-chief of Germany’s largest newspaper Bild, wrote to China’s top leader Xi Jinping, “you [Jinping], your government and your scientists had to know long ago that coronavirus is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it. Your top experts didn’t respond when Western researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan. You were too proud and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national disgrace.” 

When COVID-19 made its way to Iran, authorities used aggressive tactics to silence independent journalists and social media users. In Tehran, when journalists contradicted Iran’s official medical reports, the revolutionary guard threatened to arrest them and censored their news outlets. Medical practitioners, doctors, and nurses faced a similar treatment. They, too,were  told to withhold information from the public. In late March, Tehran’s health ministry reported more than 27,017 cases and 2,077 deaths. The director of emengies from the World Health Organization (WHO), however, states that the actual number of COVID-19 cases is greater by a factor of five. Furthermore, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni reportedly told the Iranian people not to “overestimate the virus” on March 3rd. The head of the revolutionary guard, Hossein Salami, even stated that COVID-19 could be an American biological attack. Iranian Students’ News Agency was warned by Tehran’s attorney general Mohammad Jafar Montazeri for publishing non official statistics. On February 23, the University of Toronto’s Infectious Disease Epidemiologist, Ashleigh Tuite, discovered that cases found in Canada, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates, were of Iranian origin.

Since we cannot change the course of time, and the effects of the pandemic that our world has undergone, this article serves as a remainder to the importance of an independent and free press in around the global