When COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan and the government worked to confine it, the western rhetoric on China was overwhelmingly hostile, frequently calling China's measures "draconian."
But western countries later followed suit,themselves advising self-isolation measures and shutting down schools.
And while western media called China authoritarian, people in Canada were largely looking for government direction.
"The sentiment I keep seeing on Twitter is people waiting for [the] government to compel/order action, not just merely suggest it," wrote Elamin Abdelmahmoud.
At the start of the crisis, the mentality of western exceptionalism and the lack of political direction gave way to the notion that COVID-19 wouldn’t affect the west. But it affected the Chinese diaspora. Chinese business went down and racism, attacks and vandalism took place in Montreal. But there was no government intervention to help Chinese businesses as there is now for everyone. At the same time, COVID-19 went viral as a punchline.
In Canadian media, TV and radio personalities traded quips. A CTV reporter in Toronto got fired after making a racist joke, but most went unchecked.
Dakshana Bascaramurty, race and ethnicity reporter with the Globe and Mail, first wrote about the impacts on Chinatowns at the end of January. Other media outlets then followed Bascaramurty’s lead, interviewing people and businesses about racism.
But it was too late, and showed how the media ignored its own role in it.
CBC’s staff is 90 per cent white, and it shows why racialized issues aren’t always covered appropriately.
And in 2018, a community paper in Ottawa published comments about English language abilities and cleanliness at a nail salon.
In the wake of COVID-19, the Asian American Journalists Association released recommendations to "avoid fuelling xenophobia and racism that have already emerged since the outbreak." The media, the AAJA says, should stop using photos of local Chinatowns when they do not have direct links to the story, as they are often being used as visuals for general COVID-19 stories and reinforcing racialized narratives.
There is also a lack of reporting on racist incidents taking place in Canada according to the Pan-Asian Collective of Montreal. We’ve instead heard of more incidents in the U.S. where on March 14, a 19-year-old stabbed two children, aged two and six because he believed they were Chinese.
Journalists use the passive voice when writing about these crimes, impacting the narrative for the worst, wrote columnist Anne Kingston. Kingston spoke to experts about violence against women who said the passive voice takes away the perpetrator’s accountability and leaves onus on the victim.
‘A man stabbed two children’ uses an active voice while, ‘two children were stabbed,’ uses a passive voice.
Changing this writing is vital for fair reporting, especially for those who face further inequities due to factors such as race and gender.
Journalism is a needed and vital service, and there is no question in that. But it needs to confront its own biases. In the wake of the Nova Scotia shootings, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even urged media outlets not to give the shooter visibility by showing his picture or using his name. Online, many criticized the Globe and Mail for tweeting a now-deleted post saying that the shooter had “a passion for policing.” Studies have also shown that media coverage has encouraged further acts of violence.
There are guidelines for media outlets to follow when covering suicide in order not to encourage others. There should also be renewed guidelines in covering everything from racism, to how the Trump government operates.
There is now some dialogue about racism and COVID-19, but there is a racial hierarchy that allows this to happen. Western commentary also made Ebola and the Zika virus punchlines, and while Trump calls COVID-19 the Chinese virus, Zika was named after the Zika Forest of Uganda. When these issues take place in African countries, there is no analysis, but when it affects those with a lighter skin tone we open the dialogue. When the pandemic subsides, social services and policy may change for the better, but racism will get worst—just as 9/11 inflicted Islamophobia—if we do not seek to address racism and its underlying issues.