COVID-19 is a media eclipse like no other

Thursday marked 100 days since a surface-toair missile obliterated a Ukraine International Airlines flight over Iran. Fifty-five Canadians were among the 176 people killed. Yet it feels as if this horror occurred light-years ago.

In February, the prime minister flew home early from a foreign trip to deal with the sudden proliferation of anti-pipeline blockades across the country. This, too, seems eons ago.

Early last month, city officials were angrily threatening to end Ottawa’s multimillion-dollar light-rail maintenance contract with the Rideau Transit Group. Hard to recall the story at all, isn’t it?

Each of these crises has been overshadowed by the “media eclipse.” That’s a term used when a single overpowering event bulldozes everything else out of the headlines. And the COVID-19 pandemic is “a media eclipse unlike anything we have ever seen,” write Mireille Lalancette, a professor of political communication at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, and Michel Lamy, a grad student in political science at Université Laval, in Policy Options magazine.

The 1998 ice storm could be considered a “media eclipse” — at least in Eastern Canada. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was another. The biggest one of this century until now was the 9/11 attack. Today, with social media and traditional journalism intertwined, COVID-19 utterly rules public discourse. And the barrage of news coverage is likely to continue for months, as the pandemic alters almost every activity: our jobs, our leisure, our kids’ education, our politics, our health care, even our screen habits. Everything.

Is there a danger to so much coverage?

In an interview, Lalancette enumerates some of the problems the inundation of information poses. “People get anxious, stressed out. They turn the radio and TV off.” With journalists drawn to the eclipse, some entities might take advantage of the lack of scrutiny on them; a company already planning layoffs or a takeover, for instance, could act unchallenged. Longer-term problems, such as the global refugee crisis or clean water for Indigenous Peoples “are shoved under the bed.”

That is a real risk in devoting all of our journalistic resources to one overpowering story. What is dictator Bashar Assad doing to thousands of displaced Syrians who have already suffered outrageous human rights abuses? It can’t be good. What about the climate change agenda? What about neighbourhood crime? (And yes, what about fixing LRT?)

Clearly there are sound reasons for the relentless media focus on the pandemic. For one thing, it’s a crisis in which people’s actions can make a difference. “Everyone is focused on flattening the curve,” Lalancette notes, and media attention “keeps the message alive.” This is crucial for political leaders, who need people to see the value of following public health guidelines over time. As well, the more journalists cover this particular “eclipse,” the more discerning and critical their questions become about the policies on offer. That’s a good thing.

Working journalists don’t necessarily think of it in quite these terms. Citizen managing editor Michelle Walters describes our mission thus: “This is the defining moment of our lifetimes. Generations will look back at this with a sense of ‘before’ and ‘after.’ It’s our job as journalists to document this historic period of interruption for the generations to come.”

It’s also our job to offer concrete, practical information — from explaining physicaldistancing rules to letting you know where you can get food delivered; from discussing who should wear a face mask to debating whether you can have a beer on your driveway while chatting to a neighbour. People are desperate to learn what they can, to control what they can.

And this story keeps changing. One day, borders are closed. Another day, schools are shuttered. A bailout package is announced. A spate of deaths occurs in a nursing home. Good deeds are done. Innovations are announced. We can’t tear our eyes away.

Says Walters: “The entire globe is at a practical standstill right now. When we stop to think of the magnitude of the situation, it’s hard to believe that there can be too much reporting on it.”

Christina Spencer is the Citizen’s editorial pages editor.