Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Journalism Wanted: where does Courtney Love get her COVID tests from?

Recently tweeted into my feed: Courtney Love says that wealthy people have had access to home COVID tests for months.

The article that was tweeted into my feed and others I've been able to google up basically reiterate the content of Courtney Love's original instagram post. 

But there a lot of questions here that some mild investigative journalism should be able to answer - or, at least, pinpoint the non-answers.

Who manufactures these tests? Who sells them? Are they out of reach to the general public because of price? Or because the test company will only sell to famous people? Or some other reason? How did Courtney Love and others like her find out about them in the first place? When Courtney Love wants to buy a COVID test, exactly what steps does she take? What would happen if a regular person who isn't rich and famous took those exact same steps? If someone asked Courtney Love where exactly she gets these tests from, what would her answer be? Would she decline to answer because they'd deny her tests if she leaked? Or for some other reason? Is manufacturing capacity limited? If so, what would it take to scale up?

Courtney Love's post flagged a problem, but didn't pinpoint what exactly the problem is. It could be anything from the utterly banal "home COVID tests cannot be produced at a sustainable price point" to the utterly terrifying "some malicious actor is trying to make sure only the rich and famous survive COVID by concealing the existence of convenient tests from the rest of us".

The job of journalism is to tell people what exactly the underlying problem here is, not just to transcribe Courtney Love's instagram posts. With a bit of investigative journalism, this would be a very interesting and probably very important story. But without the investigation, it's nothing but a celebrity gossip feed.

1 comment:

laura k said...

Yes. I'll make one edit. Wanted: news sources that will pay for investigative journalism.

They are few and getting fewer all the time. Most stories on daily news sites are copies of media releases. It's so depressing.

I was interested to see how many investigative news sources would come up on a google search "rich people covid tests". Results.