Pundits hunt for key to success of ‘team of 5m’
Researchers pore over 1pm Covid media briefings to find lessons for future crises
New Zealand’s “team of five million” has been endlessly credited for the quashing of Covid-19 — but how did our leaders unite us when scientific evidence was being ignored elsewhere?
Victoria University of Wellington researchers have pored over transcripts of the 1pm media briefings that became routine viewing for Kiwis this year, to search for communication lessons for future crises.
“We’ve been widely and rightly praised for having an evidence-based response to the pandemic, but our response wasn’t just about facts and numbers,” Dr Courtney Addison said.
“It reflects profound ideas about right and wrong, about life worth, and about what we owe each other as citizens.
“We’re now asking how questions of right, wrong, good, bad, obligation and solidarity manifest in our leader’s explanations of the pandemic — and their response to it.”
Addison and masters student Dinithi Bowatte were already studying Kiwis’ scientific knowledge about Covid-19 when, halfway through 2020, she and a colleague associate professor Rebecca Priestley, turned to how that science was being explained to the public.
She’s since teamed up with fellow anthropologist Dr Jane Horan to interview Kiwis, while Priestley — a prominent science communicator in her own right — has worked with media studies scholar Dr Alex Beattie to analyse the briefings transcripts.
That work has all led to a project Addison is leading with Bowatte, focused on the role that ethics played in the briefings.
More specifically, they wanted to understand how the “ethics of anthropology” applied. That was the notion that local factors — be they social, cultural, political or economic — determined how we decided what was good or worthwhile.
“This perspective also treats ethics as something that we work out through our relationships — as we try to do right by each other and ourselves,” Addison said. “So, by applying this theory to our Covid-19 response, we’re asking what moral reasoning matters here in Aotearoa.”
In the new study, just funded by a Health Research Council grant, Bowatte will examine the transcripts to highlight what’s known as “moral talk”. “That’s references to good, bad, right, wrong, risk, care, solidarity, responsibility, best interest, and so on,” Addison said.
The researchers sought to identify prominent themes, such as whether some explanations were given more weight than others — and if this changed over time. Bowatte said some interesting shifts had already been documented by researchers.
“What’s been striking this year is the research coming out showing that Kiwis’ trust in science, scientists and even politicians has gone up as a consequence of our successful national response to Covid-19.”
She said the 1pm briefings by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and health chief Ashley Bloomfield proved a big part of how Kiwis accessed and made sense of scientific knowledge.
The PM’s chief science adviser, Juliet Gerrard, agreed Kiwis’ trust in experts made a “massive difference” in overcoming the threat.
“You can have the best science advice in the world — but as several countries have tragically illustrated, this makes no difference whatsoever if nobody trusts it.”