Hard Reset

The pandemic has highlighted and worsened inequality in the United States, where two neighborhoods in the same community can have vastly different infection rates. Also: How prison overcrowding can lead to covid outbreaks.

Today on the show: For years, far-right personalities have claimed that tech companies are biased against conservatives. Recent reports from NBC News and BuzzFeed show that at Facebook, fears of that perception led the company to turn a blind eye to misinformation from certain conservative pages.

Also: Why this year’s election results may be delayed and a look at the president’s recent executive order on evictions.

The federal government’s plan to fight the coronavirus has some holes. For some cities and states, that means filling those holes to protect the public.

This week’s show looks at this issue in two areas that deeply affect our lives – work and school.

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration has released guidelines, but no concrete, enforceable rules that force businesses to take actions to protect their workers against covid-19. So last week, Virginia became the first state to create its own safety rules in response to the pandemic. We spoke with Doris Crouse-Mays, president of Virginia AFL-CIO, about why the requirements were needed.

Meanwhile, school districts are deciding whether or not to start fall classes in person or online. We talked to Aaron Phillips, president of the Amarillo Education Association, about the Texas Education Agency’s plan to allow schools to begin the fall semester virtually.

Far-right extremists called the Boogaloo Bois have gained national attention after multiple arrests and their presence at some racial justice protests. We spoke with Cassie Miller, a senior research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center, about why the pandemic was a breaking point for the group and whether or not it’s an actual movement.

We also spoke with tech journalist Jacob Silverman about what journalists go through while covering Facebook, which does everything it can to throw reporters “off the scent” of a story. At the same time, there’s a big power disparity between news outlets and Facebook. Newsrooms rely on the social network for traffic and sometimes for funding. Through the Facebook Journalism Project, the company has given millions of dollars to news organizations.

On Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, President Donald Trump held his first rally in months, an event that was controversial from the beginning. We spoke with Dylan Goforth, editor in chief of the Tulsa-based investigative news site The Frontier, to get some context about what the rally meant to Tulsans and how the city and state responded to criticism that the event would put the public’s health at risk.

Plus: The use of surveillance on protesters and the companies that have cut coronavirus hazard pay.