How the media made the crisis even worse

Covid-19 has brought the conformism, apocalypticism and self-importance of the media to the fore.

The news media in the UK and worldwide has rarely seemed more important or influential than during the coronavirus crisis. Web searches for ‘news’ have hit record highs, with Covid-19 dominating more than any issue on record…

The coronavirus crisis has clearly demonstrated the value of good journalism. Yet the response of too much of the media has also shown how bad journalism can help to make a terrible situation even worse…

The coronavirus crisis is quite real and bad enough. It surely does not need any sensationalism or exaggeration. Yet too often it has seemed that the worst-case scenario makes the best and biggest headlines. When a senior war correspondent from a top British newspaper can write that, in corona-hit London, ‘popping out to buy milk might prove as deadly as driving on Kabul’s most suicide-bombed road’, you know that journalism has taken a wrong turn towards apocalypticism.

From the start, too much of the media has seized one-sidedly on the most unrestrained (and unrealistic) estimated death tolls. Morbid daily reports have casually mixed up the numbers dying ‘from’ and ‘with’ coronavirus. (In this, as elsewhere, the experts feeding the media are often as much to blame as any news outlet.) News reports have singled out the atypical deaths of a few younger people with no known health problems, downplaying the fact that those dying with Covid-19 are overwhelmingly elderly and infirm. The result of Apocalypse News has been to further inflame public anxieties...

Media big-hitters claiming to speak for the people have repeatedly demanded that the government follow their instructions and ‘act’, often with scant knowledge of what the outcome might be. The overwhelming pressure of this shrill Something Must Be Done journalism quickly helped to push the UK government into changing tack and imposing a general lockdown, with far-reaching consequences for society. It will also make it hard for the authorities to relax the lockdown anytime soon, faced with a chorus of media disapproval.