From blood clots to Craig Kelly, is the media reporting Covid responsibly?
When the Black Death ravaged Europe in the 1300s there were no newspapers. When the Spanish flu killed an estimated 100 million worldwide in the early 1900s there were no radio or television news broadcasts, no daily livestreamed press conferences, no computers, email or social media.
Even the HIV/Aids pandemic that started in 1981 ran most of its course at a time when news was absorbed by households gathering around a single screen at a defined time of day, or by sharing around the daily piece of dead tree over breakfast.
But now, everything has changed – and public health experts, politicians and journalists are having to wrestle with the implications, and a changed relationship with the public and with truth.
The World Health Organization has described what we are currently living through as an “infodemic” running alongside the Covid pandemic.
It is, the WHO said, “the first pandemic in history in which technology and social media are being used on a massive scale to keep people safe, informed, productive and connected”. But at the same time, communications technology enabled the undermining of the global response.
Journalism struggles to keep up. One of the touchstones of the craft is the idea that sunshine and publicity are like disinfectant in public life. A journalist’s job is to find things out and tell people about them. Suppressing the news is considered indefensible in a democracy.
Public health has an analogous principle. The Centre for Disease Control in the US has a field manual for epidemiologists that counsels the importance of trust and credibility. These, the manual says, rest on “honesty and openness” with the public. Suppression of information is considered unconscionable.
But in this, the first public health emergency in a mediatised world, there are good reasons to question these first principles, which were developed in an earlier age.
Is it, for example, serving the public interest to publish prominently every report of an AstraZeneca vaccine recipient getting blood clots – even though we know the risk is rare, and the risk of vaccine hesitancy is greater? Should we not report it at all? Or just with less prominence?
It is not an easy question. Any journalist, or government, found to have covered up news about dangerous sideeffects is guaranteed to lose the public trust on which credibility relies. And yet some reporting has almost certainly fed vaccine hesitancy – which is also a life-threatening phenomenon.
Was it helpful and responsible for Melbourne’s Herald Sun to report the news of AstraZeneca being dropped as the preferred vaccine for people in their 50s with the headline “Flirting with DisAstra”?
And what was the decision-making process that led Nine newspapers to headline a story “Doctors warn over 50s cancelling appointments despite experts saying second doses are safe” in one newspaper, and report the same events in another title as “Why Rodney won’t be getting his second jab” with the fact experts said it was safe relegated to the fifth paragraph.
Was there a discussion about this? Any thought given to the balance of responsibilities? Decades in newsrooms tells me that the answer is “probably not”. Newsrooms make judgment calls every minute of every extremely frantic working day, but most of these are invisible even to the players, obscured by the working day, by habits and unquestioned assumptions. It is just the way things are done. It’s called “news sense”.
Or, to spread the blame, how helpful is it for Scott Morrison to congratulate Gladys Berejiklian on not going into a lockdown just 24 hours before she did exactly that – except she at firstcalled it a “stay-at-home order”.
We shouldn’t be surprised that the pandemic response is politicised. Public health has always been about politics in the broad sense of the word. It is about how we choose to live together, and the balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility.
It was only once society understood the importance of bacteria and viruses, that plagues such as typhus, cholera and smallpox were tackled through sewerage and water systems built by government – which implied taxation to pay for them.
Later came mass vaccination and quarantine and, in the case of HIV/Aids, government interventions to change behaviour in the most intimate aspects of citizens’ lives.
It’s not surprising that those who emphasise individual liberty are more hostile to society-wide government interventions, and not surprising that those who emphasise shared social responsibility are more open to government restricting freedoms in the interest of public health. Thus we have an innate left-right divide.
I would argue history teaches us that when it comes to health, social responsibility wins. Individual liberty means little without the right to health. The big advances in human wellbeing since the Black Death have all been about collective action and public health.
But precisely because this is political, messaging matters. And politicians and journalists have particular responsibility.
Queensland University of Technology academics Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington and Edward Hurcombe recently published the results of a study on the spread of the false idea that 5G technologies caused Covid.
At first, they found, the assertion was confined to existing fringe groups on social media and did not spread beyond them. Then a few celebrities began to promulgate the idea.
That’s when the mainstream media became part of the problem. “Soft” and entertainment reporting proved journalism’s weak spot, because the celebrity antics were considered automatically newsworthy, and were reported without challenge.
That content, with the credibility lent by the news media brands, was picked up, shared and distorted more widely.
Then activists began to sabotage 5G phone towers in the United Kingdom. At that point, serious journalists felt obliged to report both the sabotage and the reasons for it, all agog that people could believe such things.
But would any of it happened if the media had simply not reported the original fringe claims?
Hurcombe comments: “All this tells us that misinformation is not just a social media problem, or the sole fault of fringe accounts. Instead, celebrities and mainstream news can play major roles in spreading false – even harmful – claims,” he says.
In recent months it has become clear that politicians are a kind of celebrity. Again, journalists consider what they say as inherently newsworthy.
And it is not only the fringe players such as Craig Kelly, but also the prime minister and senior opposition figures.
One thing for doctor and experienced ABC health journalist Norman Swan to say in the course of an interview, with lots of context and explanation, that in less urgent times AstraZeneca might be withdrawn from the market. Another for Kristina Keneally to leap on social media and use Swan’s comment to protest “Once again older women just didn’t matter … Morrison has stuffed it up again. What a mess.”
As some of her followers commented: “Thanks for pushing vaccine hesitancy. You are the problem.”
Perhaps the assumption that what politicians say is automatically newsworthy is due for a challenge. In the US in the aftermath of the presidential election, some news outlets took the momentous professional decision not to report Donald Trump when he was spouting falsehoods.
But do we trust journalists – neither elected nor accountable – to make those decisions? How do we acknowledge a need to exercise responsibility without becoming censors?
And what of the journalist who has reservations, but knows that the competing outlet will have no such scruples? Or that the cat is already out of the bag on social media, and perhaps it might be better for journalists to enter the field rather than leave it to the crazies?
Whitney Phillips, a professor of communication at Syracuse University in New York, has written a report on how journalists should approach the reporting of extremists and manipulators online.
She talks about the “ambivalence of journalistic amplification … as necessary as it is problematic”.
Among her suggestions is to always think, before reporting, about the context, the way the material might be misused, and in particular consider whether the story should be reported at all.
If the story has not already extended beyond a small community and has damaging potential, “all reporting will do is provide oxygen”.
But where to draw the line? Reporting the devastating impact of lockdowns on businesspeople, for example, probably undermines public compliance. Is it for the journalist to adjudicate on the false dichotomy between public health and the economy?
And a news outlet that doesn’t report the suffering of its community is hardly going to retain public trust.
There are no easy answers. We are in the middle of a step-change in how we live together, enabled by a communications revolution. We must work it out as best we can.
But as we do so, politicians, public figures and journalists should consider that just because we are free to speak doesn’t always mean we should.
And that with all freedoms come equivalent responsibilities.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist, author and academic
Is it serving the public interest to publish prominently every report of an AstraZeneca vaccine recipient getting blood clots?