Addressing inequality in a post-pandemic world requires a more inclusive and representative news media
- Julie Reid
- Feb 6
- 1 min read
In their recently published book, Tell Our Story. Multiplying voices in the news media, Julie Reid and Dale T. McKinley explore grassroots community stories that often get overlooked by mainstream media and they use these stories to critically evaluate the role that the media plays in constructing and disseminating dominance. They offer some background to the book.
he Covid-19 pandemic continues to expose a range of acute inequalities across and within societies around the world. Nowhere is this clearer than in the disproportionately negative impact on the lives of the marginalised and poor.
Public health systems are under heavy strain, unemployment is rising, access to online education alternatives for all scholars is unrealised and opportunities to eke out even a meagre income in the informal sector are declining. Combined with overcrowded and highly polluted living conditions, which make physical distancing and maintaining hygiene nigh impossible, the spread and impact of the pandemic in poorer communities are exponentially more virulent.
Responding to these realities, a small collection of social commentators have suggested that a post-pandemic world can and should be a better one. They point to the possibilities as we emerge from this particular crisis (as we will eventually and inevitably do), of enacting deep and lasting structural reforms to address the systemic inequalities that the virus itself has so viciously exploited. One of those reforms must be how the dominant media listens to, represents and publishes the voices and stories of the very same marginalised, and poor.