C4 eZ re the washington post.saturday, april 4 , 2020
resulting from the virus and
other administrative expenses.
No one knows when the crisis
will end, so the money might be
the center’s only income for as
long as six months, rutter said.
And even when the arts center
does reopen, it’s unclear w hether
government rules will continue
to limit the size of public gather-
ings or whether audiences w ill be
comfortable r eturning to the the-
ater.
“We are trying to conserve the
cash for as long as possible,”
rutter said on Tuesday. The cen-
ter also has a $10 million line of
credit it can tap.
Critics have openly wondered
on news sites and social media
why the federally supported arts
center — the largest in the coun-
try — doesn’t use its $100 million
endowment to temporarily cover
employee salaries by borrowing
against or drawing directly from
those funds. T he Kennedy Center
has decided against that ap-
proach. The endowment is al-
ready small, about one-fifth the
$500 million required for an
organization of its size, ex-
plained Andrews.
“If we were to draw any
amount of funds at this time, it
would further reduce our invest-
ment and make recovery and
long-term fiscal health even
more fragile,” s he said.
[email protected]as a makeshift morgue outside a
hospital. A facebook photo of
three nurses wearing trash bags
at a m anhattan hospital eventual-
ly made it to the cover of the New
York Post.
The images are powerful — but
journalists face a challenge in
verifying whether they capture
the scope of what is happening
inside of hospitals.
reporters should be able to
help settle debate about how seri-
ous the crisis in hospitals is by
verifying the authenticity and
sources of these accounts and
placing them within a larger con-
text, said Kelly mcBride, chair of
the Craig Newmark Center for
Journalism Ethics at the Poynter
Institute.
“Professional journalism has a
role to play,” she said, “becausecitizens are demanding an an-
swer and unable to provide it on
their own.”
rosem morton, a nurse and
photojournalist in maryland who
has been documenting her experi-
ence on the front lines of the
pandemic, said journalists can
convey stories in a way that doc-
tors and nurses can’t a lways man-
age. “A s a journalist, your mind
also can spot stories that a person
who usually sees it on a day-to-day
basis may not recognize as impor-
tant for other people to see.”
Jeremiah doesn’t want to go
into hospitals for fear of contract-
ing the virus, and he felt conflict-
ed when his assignment outside a
hospital put him in position to
snap photos of bodies being load-
ed into a refrigerated truck.
“But at this point, some people
are still not taking this [disease]
seriously, and if it’s going to take
pictures of people wrapped in
sheets being loaded by forklifts
onto trucks — I’m sorry about
that.”
As in a war, “journalists find
ways to tell the story,” mcBride
said, whether it’s using handout
materials from the military or
information gathered by civilians
or soldiers. “A nd sometimes we go
there ourselves.”
And yet war correspondents
are only risking their own lives
when they venture to the front
lines.
“Now it’s a n infectious disease,”
said morton. And the danger can
follow you home.
[email protected]
[email protected]and Science University. “Which is
appropriate. But it makes it like a
CIA operation: ‘We can’t show
you, but trust me, it’s bad.’ ”
The scarcity of images has led
to some journalistic sloppiness, at
least in one case: “CBS This morn-
ing” accidentally showed an im-
age of an Italian hospital while
trying to illustrate a story about
the crisis in New York. The net-
work quickly corrected and apol-
ogized for the mistake.
But it was a damaging error at a
time when the vacuum of infor-
mation is being filled by doubters
and conspiracy theorists.
Last w eekend, a video of a quiet
parking lot outside a Brooklyn
hospital launched the hashtag
#filmyourhospital, an apparent
effort to discredit media warn-
ings about the seriousness of the
pandemic. “Just went to 2 hospi-
tals in LA to check out these ‘War
Zones’ the mSm keeps telling us
about,” DeAnna Lorraine, a right-
wing activist and failed California
congressional candidate, wrote
on Twitter a couple days later,
with a minute-long video of the
placid exterior of one building.
“They are very quiet & EmPTY.
We are not being told the truth.
Why??”
Bleak images said to represent
the crisis have also gone viral on
social media. A hashtag #Get-
mePPE alongside photos from
within hospitals was generated by
people who said they were health-
care workers in dire need of
masks and other protective garb.
A video showed bodies being
loaded o nto an 18-wheeler parkedquired to work despite showing
covid- 19 symptoms. (A hospital
spokesman denied the claims.)
“oftentimes, that’s the only
way they have to voice their con-
cerns,” s aid Sally Watkins, execu-
tive director of the Washington
State Nurses Association. She
added that some are risking their
jobs by doing this in defiance of
hospital managers. The American
medical Association said in a
statement that “no employer
should restrict physicians’ free-
dom to advocate for the best inter-
est of their patients.”
Stefan Jeremiah, a freelance
photographer in New York, said
he’s been yelled at and shooed
away by security guards even
when he’s attempted to photo-
graph the exterior of hospitals in
Queens and Brooklyn on assign-
ment for reuters.
“meanwhile there are mem-
bers of the public waving camera
phones back and forth, taking
selfies, but dare a member of the
press to do the same thing, it’s
‘you’ve got to go, you’ve got to
move,’ ” he said.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for
journalists trying to convey the
devastation of coronavirus is the
very containment strategy re-
quired to combat the disease: As
soon as people test positive, they
are sequestered — and not able to
give an intimate interview or per-
haps even consent to a photo
session.
“Literally we are hiding the
disease,” s aid Esther Choo, an as-
sociate professor of emergency
medicine at the oregon HealthWhen President Trump sud-
denly dropped his goal of a rapid
return to normal and extended
social-distancing guidelines
through April, he made reference
to images from Elmhurst Hospi-
tal in his native Queens, the same
one featured by the Times — a
hospital he said he knows so well
he can picture the color of the
building.
“I’ve been watching that for the
last week on television, body bags
all over in hallways,” t he president
said on Tuesday. “Trucks that are
as long as the rose Garden, and
they are pulling up to take out
bodies.”
Capturing those kinds of imag-
es is fraught.
many media bosses have been
reluctant to allow their journal-
ists to venture into hospitals.
They don’t want to get in the way
of overworked hospital staff or
use up scarce protective garb —
and they don’t want their own
employees to get sick. Both CBS
News and NBC News have lost
employees to covid-19, and all of
the networks have had staff mem-
bers infected.
Network news executives say
that they don’t rule out sending
their journalists into hospitals in
the future, “but the bar is extraor-
dinarily high,” s aid oppenheim.
There are barriers set up by the
hospitals as well, citing their legal
obligation to protect the privacy
of patients under the Health In-
surance Portability and Account-
ability Act, known as HIPAA.
In NBC’s prime-time news spe-
cial on the virus Tuesday, produc-
ers relied on video diaries and
footage compiled by health-care
workers. “I just want to tell people
in other parts of the country, take
this seriously, because you don’t
want to end up like us,” s aid one.
CBS’s “60 minutes” aired an
in-depth report Sunday with dra-
matic interviews from doctors
and nurses from New York’s hos-
pitals. But for scenes from inside
the hospitals, they relied on vid-
eos and images produced by hos-
pital workers, according t o execu-
tive producer Bill owens.
Some hospitals say they’ve
been willing to accommodate
journalists — CNN was able to get
a reporter and videographer into
a Brooklyn hospital this week —
but it doesn’t a lways come togeth-
er.
“We’ve offered people to come
in, and they’ve refused,” said mi-
chael Dowling, the president and
CEo of Northwell Health, a large
New York state network of hospi-
tals, some of which were featured
in the “60 minutes” segment. He
declined to address the “60 min-
utes” report but noted that his
hospitals have provided their own
photos and videos to news outlets.
many h ealth-care workers have
also been speaking to reporters
without institutional permission
— and their candor has informed
stories such as The Washington
Post’s look at doctors and nurses
who fear that they will infect their
families and the Wall Street Jour-
nal’s r eport on a lack of supplies in
a Bronx hospital where some
staffers claimed they were re-
hospitals from C1
Lack of images from hospitals can stoke skepticism
kathy Willens/associated pressMary altaffer/associated presstop: Journalists at a news
briefing after the arrival of the
Usns Comfort, a naval hospital
ship, in new york. a BoVe: a
medical worker at the
samaritan’s purse field hospital
in new york’s Central park.“This money isn’t going to us
as an arts center but as a memo-
rial,” she said in an interview
with The Post on march 26. “This
money isn’t going to pay for
programming.”
The budget breakdown re-
leased earlier this week paints a
different picture.
The largest portion, $12. 75
million, will fund six months of
salaries of the roughly 150 em-
ployees still on the payroll, most
working in finance, marketing,
programming and the box office,
as well as the salaries of those
they hope to bring back from
furlough as soon as possible after
mid-may, such as the musicians
of the NSo.
“Spreading out the $12. 75 mil-
lion throughout the summer en-
ables us to bring staff and musi-
cians back on payroll when we
can more confidently forecast a
realistic reopening date,” Kenne-
dy Center spokeswoman Eileen
Andrews explained.
In 2018, the center had 232
employees earning annual sala-
ries of $100,000 or more, accord-
ing to tax filings, and at least 13
earned more than $200,000, in-
cluding rutter, who is paid
$1.2 million a year but has re-
nounced her salary until thereading about the furloughed
musicians, he’s decided to ask for
a refund.
“I found it difficult to take,
hard to stomach,” Nellis said. “I
would like to take that money
and donate it to a worthy charity
that is trying to feed people and
help people out.”
Nellis s aid he is s ympathetic to
arts executives who are faced
with difficult decisions, but he is
especially dismayed that the
Kennedy Center furloughed staff
after receiving significant federal
aid.
“I thought it was unfair to take
it out on these guys. It seemed a
bitter blow,” he said.
Thousands of patrons had
tickets to the 431 performances
already canceled as part of the
closure that continues until at
least may 10. The arts center
reports that about 90 percent of
tickets are being refunded, de-
spite its pleas for them to be
donated or exchanged for future
shows. The refunds put addition-
al pressure on the organization’s
finances.
Initially, rutter said the
$25 million in federal aid would
be used for the center’s mission
as a living memorial to President
John f. Kennedy.diligence on oversight into the
Kennedy Center’s actions.”
The arts center’s board of
trustees is required to submit a
report by oct. 31 to the House
and Senate appropriations com-
mittees “that includes a detailed
explanation of the distribution of
the funds p rovided,” according to
the stimulus regulations.
The political backlash comes
as Kennedy Center President a nd
CEo Deborah rutter continues
to defend why her organization
needs federal help even as it
temporarily sheds more than
half its staff. Almost 800 part-
time and hourly workers were
laid off in mid-march, the 96 -
member National Symphony or-
chestra was furloughed last
week, and this week 250 mem-
bers of the Kennedy Center’s
administration, about 60 per-
cent, were told they would be
furloughed without pay for five
weeks starting monday.
The outrage is extending to
the box office, too. John Nellis,
81, of Bethesda had agreed to
donate the $380 he spent on four
tickets and a parking pass for a
canceled performance by the
New York City Ballet. But, after
Kennedy Center from C1
K ennedy Center backlash continues
ty and health care — for all
employees, including those fur-
loughed. The center continues to
negotiate with its insurance com-
pany to fund health-care benefits
after may 31. Another $1.75 mil-
lion is for future artists’ con-
tracts and fees, and $1 million
will pay the rent for off-site
properties, including the Wash-
ington National opera adminis-
trative offices and its Ta koma
Park studio, the Kennedy Cen-
ter’s archive and production
warehouses.
The $2 million balance covers
deep cleaning and IT upgradespandemic recedes. The center
also pays NSo music Director
Gianandrea Noseda, Washington
National opera Artistic Director
francesca Zambello and a roster
of artistic advisers such as renée
fleming, Q-Tip, mason Bates,
Jason moran, Ben folds and mo
Willems. Noseda is not being
paid as a result of the canceled
concerts, according to Andrews.
Pay f or the others are either
being deferred or reduced, she
said.
About $7.5 million of the bail-
out will cover six months of
benefits — pension, social securi-J. david ake/associated press
deborah rutter, president and Ceo of the Kennedy Center, which
furloughed workers after receiving $25 million in stimulus funds.TheMovieDirectoryhasgonedark.Wewillraisethecurtainagain
assoonaseventswarrant.