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The authors "define disaster media as a heuristic, or approach, that recognizes the ways “natural” and human-made disasters are communicated about, constructed, and variously exacerbated or relieved through media means. This heuristic is not simply a temporary model for problem solving but tries to account for ecological forces and material conditions" (my emphasis).

They close the article with three provocations:

1) All Media on Deck: the current moment of combo disaster (COVID and climate crisis) requires the production of more public and open access materials (of various kinds), but also boosting of media literacy. The auhtors acknowledge the conundrum of producing more media, while being confronted with sustainability issues and the call for "no-carbon" media.

2) Relief and media Production: a critical look at the kinds of assumptions that governments/NGOs/industry bring to COVID-19 relief efforts (videos, websites, maps, algorithms...) -- what counts as relief and for whom? 

3) Focus on Social and Environmental Justice: "In moving forward, it will be crucial to approach disaster media as a domain in which structural reform agendas that interweave social and environmental justice can flourish."

In the article, the authors address visualizations of COVID cases, including related satellite mages of air pollution in Southern California and China (generated by NASA/ESA) as well as of mass graves in Iran.

First, they provide basic framing of how to critically read air pollution satellite imagery. Connections between COVID-19 measures and improvements in air pollution are not identifiable in a straightforward way.

"Figure 1a, for instance, uses bright magenta to indicate greater concentrations of nitrogen dioxide and light blue to signify cleaner air. However, such color choices can be misleading: there is no material correlation between nitrogen dioxide and the color magenta; and reduced traces of this chemical do not turn the sky a paler shade of blue. [...] color-coding selections imply, satellite images are not just scientific; they are cultural as well."

Second, they point out the paradox role of satellite imagery to account for the inequitable impact of COVID-19

"satellite image, from a US satellite operator, locates pandemic “excesses” in an Iranian “elsewhere.” But this is an increasingly deceptive proposition, given that the United States has one of the highest COVID-19 per capita transmission and fatality rates in the world."

Third, they draw comparisons between the "hockey stick" visualization of global Climate Change and the various "curves" used to display COVID-19 developments:

From a disaster media perspective, the film’s global warming graph depicts a dramatic climate shift, projects imminent catastrophe, and issues a world warning. Its circulation in global media culture for the past fifteen years potentially informs the ways people are engaging now with similar-looking charts of coronavirus death and illness. Historically, news media have relied on sensationalistic photos of human suffering to convey a sense of disaster, but in the age of big data and the current pandemic, numbers speak, and graphs and curves tend to dominate the mediascape. In both cases, scientific experts and publics must grapple with how these graphs make meaning, what datasets they rely upon, and how these media come to stand in for highly complex conditions.

Finally, they remark that COVID-19 visualizations are always incomplete - because of lack of testing and withholding of data - but also because stories of e.g. workers are missing. They reference the cover of the New York Times (May 24, 2020) that displayed the names of 100,000 people who had died from COVID.

The article points out the simulation Crimson Contagion that was run by the Department of Health in 2019.

"Despite all of the pressing unknowns of the disease, one cannot call its emergence unpredictable. A simulation by the US Department of Health and Human Services, code-named Crimson Contagion, ran from January through August 2019. The aim was to prepare for the effects of an influenza pandemic. The findings reportedly “drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed” (Sanger et al. 2020)"

They also note the rise in Internet usage, pointing to environmental and energy implications:

"[C]oronavirus capitalism is interwoven with digital capitalism (Schiller 1999; Terranova 2004; Fuchs 2019). The pandemic has prompted a massive rush to online spaces of work and leisure activities. It is estimated that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased total internet use by 70 percent (Beech 2020)."

"Yet with this surge in online activities and virtual gatherings, the COVID-19 crisis has both exacerbated and laid bare the internet’s rising energy dependency, its growing carbon footprint, and issues of energy justice. The challenge is to be able to address crises of various kinds while reducing fossil fuel use especially, and developing sustainable and equitably managed energy sources. There is a burgeoning scholarly literature about the ill effects of the nuclear, petroleum, coal, and hydroelectric energy sources that power the grid and about the environmental devastation their industrial incursions wreak. In the meantime, the impacts of extraction and production of the various energy forms that keep the grid and the internet operating are often toxic and inequitable." 

Finally, they point to the connection between media and health, including civic archiving of HIV activists.

[F]ilm and media scholarship on public health [...] not only serves as crucial context for the COVID-19 pandemic but also extends the conceptual contours of disaster media to include disease and illness, outbreaks and pandemics, and the ways government agencies address or fail to address health-related crises. Alexandra Juhasz’s book AIDS TV (1995) explores community educational initiatives and activist videos that became vital means of conveying information about and perspectives on HIV transmission during the 1980s and '90s and continuing public health crises. Addressing media portrayals of other outbreaks, Kirsten Ostherr’s Cinematic Prophylaxis (2005) critically examines Hollywood films “that represent the spread of contagious disease across national borders.” In it Ostherr argues, “Audiovisual materials play a crucial role in the articulation of world health, not only as vehicles of educational and ideological dissemination, but also as metaphors for the spread of disease within the processes of globalization” (2). Her study sheds light on the current COVID-19 crisis by demonstrating how outbreaks become disaster media.

The positioning that you have to choose, and that Bono gets to choose, between livable working conditions and wages vs HIV treatment - forecloses possibility of HIV treatment AND acceptable working conditions. 

Forecloses critique of the industries’ unethical work conditions - because they are “proven” by inspectors to have good working conditions, and the bodies of the HIV worker-patients who are treated are proof of the goodness of the corps

Worker resistance is foreclosed because they know they depend on this “ethical” reputation to even have industry in their country, which is needed for survival because of past extractions and present oppressive global trade conditions

Bind that the workers are in - they have to perform the ethicalness and pretend their working conditions are ok when inspected because they know that their job (and the whole country’s export industry) depends on this performance of ethicalness and goodness of the factory

Performed Inspections provide proof, as do their HIV-treated bodies

Bono - celebrities promoting - people and at the stores purchasing/consuming branded RED products - blatantly baking “ethical” into the branding of consumer goods. 

Obscure bad working conditions with success of HIV treatment

ALAFA - while genuinely caring about workers’ health, they have made a decision on their behalf that this HIV treatment is what matters, and their working conditions don’t matter; same for Bono of U2 as an example celebrity here.

Fails on the worker’s understanding of responsibility to care for the sick -  violation of moral order because factory makes you sick 

Rejects and sidesteps responsibility for horrible working conditions (exposure and unlivable wages, no maternity leave, insecure) - focus instead on the HIV, for which they claim they have no responsibility, the HIV was already there, so they are responsible for treating those who are their current factory workers, giving them drugs and treatments that help them to be productive bodies, give them trainings that responsibilize them for getting the disease

The ethical is something you can enforce with these performed audits

The ethical is something consumers buy that’s branded and ethically produced - the ethical production is “no sweat” and also made by people whose suffering the profits can go to help

Celebrities and emotional and political sovereignty: “The vague network of forces for which Bono acts as spokesperson decides that HIV treatment is more important, and by extension, that labor violations, work rights, poverty, occupational health risks are less urgent forms of social suffering” -p474

ALAFA, a PPP organization, also makes this decision for the workers

ILO as well, as the inspectors

CSR through humanitarian fetishism, humanitarian consumption of ethical production, ethical industries or ethical production zones, where up the supply chain the brand buyers demand suppliers down the chain be “ethical” (while still demanding obscenely low prices, so of course it’s not possible). 

Ethical production zone against the race-to-bottom for garment manufacturing - instead of the labor being cheap they are sick in a way that the corporation can treat to its own benefit while gaining moral capital - it is a PPP so there are many “stakeholders” paying for different things

Celebrity involvement - consumers of humanitarian products