Media Matters Stephen Glover

Has relentless media coverage inflamed the hysteria?

Like other oldies, I lived through the Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1968, in which 80,000 people are said to have died. My God, wasn’t it tough! Er, no. I don’t think it was. At least not for me.

I was 16 years old, away at boarding school, and not unduly stupid. I skimmed a newspaper most days and sometimes watched the television news. And yet I can’t remember a single thing about an epidemic that killed more than twice as many people in Britain as have so far died with COVID-19. It’s true that memory dulls, but I don’t think a single master or either of my parents ever advised me to be careful, or showed the slightest degree of trepidation on their own behalf.

How can this be? Perhaps, despite causing more deaths, Hong Kong flu didn’t target the elderly and vulnerable as conspicuously as COVID-19 does. Although highly contagious, it appears to have been even less lethal. Maybe people were also more blasé about epidemics, there having been one as recently as 1957 – though it had accounted for comparatively few deaths. I don’t recall that, either, although I do have memories of the Suez Crisis the previous year.

Let me propose another explanation for my inability – and may I rope you in, too, dear reader? – to remember what was undoubtedly a pretty serious outbreak in 1968. Half a century ago, modern mass media had not yet come into being. Even Rupert Murdoch had not imagined the nightmare of roundthe-clock television news channels. On the BBC and ITV, there weren’t correspondents all over the globe giving us frantic live accounts of the latest fatality figures. Nor, of course, did the worldwide web exist, or the furnace of social media.

As for newspapers, 50 years ago in terms of sales they were more powerful. But they were far calmer – and duller – than they are today. Broadsheets had not adopted the tabloid habits that either enhance or disfigure them now, according to your taste. The tabloids themselves were less noisy and sensationalist, though the 37-year-old Murdoch was dreaming of acquiring the Sun and transforming it into a provocative and irreverent masscirculation newspaper.

I don’t dispute that television and radio, as well as the press, covered Hong Kong flu – from its inception in the British colony to its progress round the world and its arrival in this country. But it was all done in a much more low-key way. When the virus hit Britain, TV reporters were not dispatched to hospitals dressed like spacemen to interview sick patients linked by coils of tubes to machines with flashing lights. Nor did newspapers dramatically publish daily international league tables of fatalities, or fill page after page with hair-raising stories about the disease, or carry innumerable columns berating Harold Wilson’s administration for its ineptitude in tackling the virus.

In a word, it was a very different world in which the media, and in particular television, still stood back respectfully from our lives, and gave us room to think and breathe. I believe people may have had a wider interest in news than they do today, but they weren’t the terrified news junkies we have become, hooked on hourly bulletins of death and disaster.

Is it possible that in almost every country in the world, the authorities’ extreme reaction to the current pandemic – the economy-destroying lockdowns; the temporary withdrawal of our liberties – owes something to the all-encompassing nature of the modern media? Or, to put it another way: if, as a result of some strange divine injunction, the relatively restrained media of 1968 had not evolved into the hysterical and invasive media of 2020, might we be facing a less bleak future? I’m only asking.

My friend and former colleague Stephen Fay has just died, at the age of 81. I’m sure he will have been known to many Oldie readers as a prolific author, and a fine writer on the Sunday Times and Independent on Sunday. Some years ago, he wrote an illuminating profile of Paul Dacre, then editor of the Daily Mail, for this magazine.

I first met him in 1989 when we were setting up the Independent on Sunday. Though Irish by background, he looked and spoke like a Trollopian squire, at any rate in my conception. He wanted to join the paper as a writer. In the event, he was central to its genesis and development, and soon became its deputy editor.

Stephen’s friend the journalist Philip Knightley (with whom he wrote an excellent book about corruption in Venice, published in 1976) once described him as the best journalist he had known. I wouldn’t quarrel with that. Both as a writer and as an editor, he was a master of the long descriptive or analytical piece. Young journalists loved learning from him. God alone knows why he never became a newspaper editor. Perhaps he was too generous and too wise.