That was quick. One minute Australia’s news media were all Omicron all the time. Next minute the new variant was gone, shuffled down the news lists, buried behind the daily grind out of Canberra, the coming summer of sport and the ringing-in of summer.
But Omicron’s brief moment in the media sun demonstrates one big thing: almost two years into the pandemic and Australia’s traditional media haven’t learnt much about the perils of a breathless catastrophising.
Here’s Nine’s The Sun-Herald front page on Sunday yearning for action with: “Borders close as new strain spreads”. And on Monday there’s News Corp’s The Daily Telegraph turning up the heat with an all-caps front-page screamer: “MUTANT ON MARCH”.
For four days, the lack of detail about Omicron proved no barrier to reporting across Australia’s media. Uncertainty turned to benefit — a could be and a maybe were all that was needed to huff and puff us back to the depths of the early crisis.
As a story, it was perfectly engineered to go viral at just the right place and time. The story broke late in the week when the global news centre of the United States was largely absent on its Thanksgiving long weekend. It exploded out of the always mysterious Africa and it came packaged with just enough anec-data (some of it true-ish) to pad out the bulletins.
The pandemic’s commentariat jumped into action to explain why this variant changed everything — without needing to change their beliefs. At one end: is this a new virus — the dreaded SARS-CoV-3 — set to lurch us back to March 2020? At the other: could this be the long-hoped-for evolutionary rescue through a transmission-heavy yet symptom-lite variant that would usher in a nirvana of herd immunity?
Who knows? Could be either. Could be neither.
Problem is the news media has been spoiled by the pandemic. The public’s urgent need to understand its changing nature as it happens has hurried on the needed transition to a digital medium supported by readers through subscriptions, all of which have boomed over the past 20 months.
At the same time, the insistence on facts has been challenged by the allure of fake news and conspiracy theorising. The dull reality of vaccines slowly making things better struggles to compete with the global deep-state secret injection of 5G chips.
At its best, the pushback against fake news has produced some of the best journalism of the moment, deepening our understanding of medical science and how public health works, building community trust.
But it’s had to compete with the excitement delivered by Facebook conspiracists. Keeping up has created a type of pandemic “news”: the speculator of the vaguely possible which, through the alchemy of looks-like-journalism, turns the fact-free improbable into the undisprovable possible. (Exhibit A: Sky after dark’s evergreen favourite, the Wuhan lab-leak thesis.)
It’s a slippery slope. In the US, politically aligned media like Fox News have discovered that once you start pandering to the most engaged of your audience with a mix of fact-lite news and a “just asking questions” commentary, you end up sliding deep into full-blown anti-vaxxery.
The lure of the advertising dollar doesn’t help. Australia’s venerable newspapers think they’re having it both ways: sticking as close as possible to the known knowns in the news pages, while quietly banking the cheques for the front page COVID denialist advertising from the United Australia Party. Nice money if you can get it — but what’s the credibility cost?
It was into this polluted news environment that Omicron landed.
But here’s the good news: the catastrophising narrative was upended by the news media’s own success. People who read and watch the news have learnt a lot about viruses and epidemics in the past two years. They’ve embraced vaccines and the science that comes with it.
They’ve learnt to live with COVID. Part of that living is making hard-headed assessments of the value of the reporting they’ve been offered over the past week. Judging by this week’s eagerness to shelve Omicron until there’s something substantial to say, seems they’ve got the message: news readers want news, not speculation.
Thanks for that article Chris.
As usual, we can rely on Crikey and its journalists to present a balanced and sensible view of the problems of the day.
I think that I had a cynical enough view of our society before COVID struck. The way so many people have responded to it has only caused my levels of cynicism, distrust and pessimism to ‘go through the roof’.
To me Chris, one of the lessons to be learnt from your piece is the absolute need for a good science curriculum in our schools so that ordinary people can gain a better understanding of the causes of a biological crisis and how best to respond to such a development. But then the question arises, at least in my mind, how on Earth do you educate the sort of individuals, (on anything of any consequence really), the likes of which we have seen congregating on the steps of the Victorian Parliament advocating the lynching of the Victorian Premier, and rioting on the streets of Melbourne, in recent weeks?
The way most people have responded to the pandemic is to follow the rules and get vaccinated. It hasn’t increased my “cynicism, distrust and pessimism.”
Living with Covid is what we’d like, it’s dying of it that we don’t want. And we’d greatly prefer not to live the rest of our days with long Covid either.
But 2yrs into the pandemic, it is plain that governments everywhere are happy for their citizens to continue to die in numbers akin to wartime conditions. I believe the people’s choice is to end the pandemic and a resounding ‘no’ to war, and that’s why we don’t see it in the ‘news’.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/in-the-loop-helen-clark-criticises-vaccine-inequity-as-omicron-variant-spreads/R4FACSAWQ3RKX4GZ42EM4U4K64/
While I agree, Chris, I think the media are actually falling down on the Omicron reporting. The pressing question of interest isn’t how dangerous Omicron is, or how amenable to antibodies from vaxes and past infections: we’ll know both within weeks, and no sooner. It’s how a variant of concern managed to evade surveillance while acquiring 30 to 50 mutations, when the rate of mutation is seldom faster than one per fully infected patient week (which should put its branching back into 2020 or earlier.)
There are four theories at the moment:
The ‘so whats’ here are a) how and when we’d know which scenario it is; and b) what we’d do about it. At the moment, theory 3) is most popular, but all remain credible.
Of these, normal tweaks to health policy might work for 1-3, but theory 4 has profound impact on our pathway out of pandemic.
That’s not ‘panic now’ news reporting, but is of immense public and policy interest. However even the rare journalism that reported theory 4 could do little more than talk about how scientists were feeling as they considered ideas journalists failed to understand with policy implications they failed to explore or explain.
So the issue here isn’t just journalism avoiding doing egregious wrong; it’s also learning how to do more right by the science and the public interest.