Hours before global headlines about the Queen of England broke, a tweet by the American consultant and columnist Ian Bremmer went viral, with a graphic from the Quartz website (image below). It showed that “China passes the United States in life expectancy”.
For Bremmer, “it should make headlines in every US paper.” As far as we’ve seen, it hasn’t been anywhere. The New York Times had reported it, but without highlighting and without mentioning China, and others not even that.
In the wake of the tweet, Washington columnist for the Financial Times, Edward Luce, questioned the “indifference” to the country’s “morbid trajectory” and “death crisis”. “At 76 years old [de expectativa de vida]Americans now live shorter lives than their peers in China.”
Neither Luce nor Bremmer cite, but the original Quartz report focused on both the US and China. Regarding the former, he stressed that “Covid is the main cause of the reduction in life expectancy”, accounting for 50% of the data.
Regarding China, he highlighted that the “Covid zero strategy avoided an astonishing mortality”, being “a key reason for the disparity”. Chen Weihuaa correspondent for China Daily, a newspaper linked to the Chinese foreign ministry, gloated over the viral tweet:
“The US fights for military supremacy and global dominance, China fights for the life expectancy of its people.”
Quoting Chen, Newsweek produced a “Fact Check: Has China Exceeded US in Life Expectancy?”. It concludes that “data suggest that China has indeed surpassed the US in life expectancy, although there is some debate about what the current gap is.”
In any case, both the NYT and Bremmer himself intensified, after the news, their criticism of the Covid zero strategy.
‘MEDIA QUEEN’
In the vacuum of media criticism today in the US and in England itself, the best the NYT has produced on the coverage of the death is the video “Elizabeth II’s Legacy as Queen of the Media”.
In short, from the beginning she “blended the ancient and the modern with the help of mass media”, from TV to the social networks on which her death was announced, to establish her “real narrative”. In one of her most remembered phrases, “I have to be seen to be believed in”.
CLICK HERE JOURNALISM
Also coinciding with the orgy in the coverage of the Queen of England, the website Axios reported that Ben Smith, editor-in-chief and media columnist for Semafor, which debuts in a month, will launch the book “Traffic”, at the beginning of the year that he comes.
It will be “a history of clickbait culture and its consequences for democracy” or even the origin myth of the “Age of Disinformation”, which took place in online journalism, before Facebook.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
