Nora Loreto signals the need for social change & pushes journalists to dig deeper

You might know Nora Loreto from her podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics. If you don’t, you should. Her conversations with Sandy Hudson aren’t just hilarious and relatable, they’re full of appropriately directed anger, and in many ways model a kind of solidarity that is necessary right now. You should also know her from her two books: Take Back the Fight, which I discussed with her last year, and Spin Doctors: How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the Covid-19 Pandemic (https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/spin-doctorshttps://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/spin-doctors). The new book offers political insights on precisely where the system failed, who it failed, and the roots of the political decisions that led to our current calamitous moment. In this interview, I ask about her fundamental motivation in writing the book. What is essential about documenting this dizzying time in detail? Why is it crucial that reporters and social critics document everything and think through what Loreto calls the “moving target” of the pandemic? She insists here that if we don’t, then we know that the virus’ impacts on especially the marginalized, those trapped in a hollowed out, profit-driven system of long-term care, the women who take care of the care labour required to keep society going, all of these underserved communities will be reduced to a footnote as the country pushes hard to return to something resembling “normalcy.” Against that wanton desire for a snapback into the status quo, Loreto forces us to dwell with the nightmarish resurgence of straightforward eugenics in this pandemic. The logic of disposability forced on people in long-term care, the apathy shown toward data that reveals the overwhelming correlation between disability, transmission and premature death. The ignorance of officials who waited for data to confirm the vulnerabilities that organizers and activists already knew existed in a world still deeply stratified by race and class. We end in a somewhat hopeful place, by trying to imagine what a robust left media could do in Canada. She says there’s obviously a pressing need for independent media to grow consequential enough to contest the attrition and monopolization that continues to hamper critical journalism in this country, but she says it can’t really grow in the intersectional, multivocal ways that we need it to if we don’t address and redress the overwhelming whiteness of the journalistic profession in Canada. This crisis made it feel, for a moment, like “anything was possible.” But making change at the root level in this moment required taking stock of the loss of collective power, the weakening of democracy under neoliberalism, and resisting these reassurances that “normal was right around the corner.” None of that happened, despite the fact that we could feel that this appeal to returning to some version of normal was maybe always a false promise. In the first months of the pandemic, fear felt omnipresent. Now something else seems to be intensifying: fatigue. And fatigue can be fatal.