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A major limitation on journalists covering global health is the cost: getting to a story can mean airfare to Africa or Asia, hotels, Jeep rentals, satellite phones, translators, sometimes even armed guards. Meanwhile, many news organizations are cutting back.
Last week, “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” received a Gates Foundation grant of $3.5 million to help its correspondents produce 40 to 50 reports over three years on malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis, measles, neglected diseases and other global health issues.
It came with “no strings,” said Patti Parson, managing producer of “NewsHour,” which is seen on 315 PBS stations. If her reporters found a story critical of the foundation’s work and Mr. Gates objected, she said, “we’d let him defend it, of course, but we’d proceed with the story.”
This is the foundation’s most overt financing of health journalism, but not the first. It has given $6 million to WGBH in Boston for a series on global health; $5 million to Public Radio International, a partnership between American public radio and the BBC; $2 million to the International Center for Journalists to train African reporters; $1.2 million to Harvard for fellowships for health reporters; and $1.6 million to Johns Hopkins to send top editors on a fact-finding trip to poor countries.
And because fictional plotlines may be even more persuasive, it gave $1.4 million to a University of Southern California program that advises television and film writers on medical issues.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From The New York Times:
