“Critical Coverage: Cable News and Trump’s Covid-19 Diagnosis.” 

Joel Kaplan, associate dean for professional graduate studies and professor of magazine, news and digital journalism in the Newhouse School, was interviewed for the Nieman Reports story “Critical Coverage: Cable News and Trump’s Covid-19 Diagnosis.” In recent weeks, cable news outlets have had to navigate handling news of President Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis. Kaplan, who has worked extensively in the public broadcasting industry, says the Trump administration is not the first presidential administration to downplay matters surrounding a president’s health, but that doesn’t mean it is ethical today to do the same. “Roosevelt was never shown in a wheelchair, right? And John Kennedy had Addison’s Disease and all these other things. So it’s not like this is new — but it’s new for certainly the modern era, the post-internet era, that you have this type of opacity,” says Kaplan.