Witness the media’s magical disappearing act with the pandemic

Opinion

What will it take for most of the media to set aside their magic disappearing trick and face the reality of a continuing pandemic which has not gone away?

Sometimes the media displays magical powers. Publishers and broadcasters can make pressing social problems go away by simply ignoring them – or at the very least by airbrushing out the causes that lie behind them.

It is impossible to make the “world-beating” queue of lorries on the M20 in Kent actually disappear, although mysteriously many of the roadside cameras that would reveal the extent of the problem, do not appear to be working.

The media can however mess with the cause of the lorry jam, not replicated on the other side of the Channel. This happens by attributing it to the Easter holidays, the weather and the troubles of P&O Ferries – anything but the real reason, the introduction of Brexit controls abetted by the usual less than perfect computer system to deal with them.

The manoeuvre is seen in all its glory in many BBC broadcasts where journalists are happy to perform any number of backflips to avoid the B word. Some conspiracy theorists have even speculated that there is a person deep in the bowels of the BBC who sole task is to remove Brexit as the cause of anything unfortunate in this country.

This is almost certainly untrue but you can see why there has been speculation.

The fact that the Government understands the real reason, and believes the problem will be with us long after the Easter holidays, can be seen from the promise to install portable toilets all along the M20 before the end of the year.

Such queues will have a significant impact on UK exports, particularly in the case of perishable goods, but few are likely to die as a result.

Think of the much more powerful magic of making a pandemic disappear even though there were 1,613 deaths last week following a positive Covid-19 test taking the total through the 170,000 mark. Deaths with Covid-19 on the death certificate were considerably higher at 187,929 while Covid hospital admissions are now close to a peak 20,000 even though, mercifully, there are fewer people in intensive care.

With very few honourable exceptions, the story has been allowed to virtually disappear.

Permission to ignore Covid

What is going on here? Is it Covid fatigue, the inability of the media to concentrate on a story month after month, or wishful thinking?

Or is the story being squeezed out as the news caravan moves on to Boris Johnson being the first British prime minister in history found to have broken the law while in office? Or Putin’s aggressive war on Ukraine, or the Sunak family’s non-dom status or the dramatic rise of inflation and the fall in living standards?

The new era of trying to ignore Covid was launched by Boris Johnson’s 24 February Freedom Day, removing all restrictions and announcing, in effect, the end of Covid, or at the very least the beginning of the time of “living with Covid.”

That gave the individual liberty-loving, right-wing press full permission to ignore Covid and encouraging the general public to drop sensible measures to try to mitigate the spread such as wearing masks in crowded places including shops and public transport.

Johnson compounded his Freedom Day errors by ending both the provision of free testing kits and the requirement to isolate after testing positive.

You didn’t need a Nobel Prize in science to predict what would happen next. Fewer people would take the tests, more would go to work while infectious and the overall numbers suffering from the most recent, highly transmissible strain would rise.

And so it has turned out. The official number of those testing positive are indeed down by nearly 40%, but the number of those taking tests in the past seven days are down by more than 1 million.

The rising number of deaths and hospital admissions tell the true story.

You have to look very carefully to see any of this in large sections of the national press. A continuing, serious pandemic has almost disappeared, as if by magic.

There are a few signs, many from individual doctors on Twitter, such as the consultant who Tweets that he is off with Covid, as are three-quarters of the fellow consultants at his hospital.

In plain sight and yet absent from news coverage

The effects of rising Covid numbers seep into the press by proxy, such as the shortage of nurses because of Covid and cancelled flights because of Covid-related staff shortages.

Yesterday The Times framed a “summer of travel chaos” against such a background, combined with the slow nature of carrying out security checks on new employees.

There was no space for any explanation as to why the Covid part of this crisis was happening, or coverage of a stark warning from the NHS Confederation, the body that links organisations that commission and provide NHS services.

The NHS Confederation told of increasing staff shortages and said this Easter will be “as bad as any winter”. Chief executive Matthew Taylor argued that instead of the understanding and support shown to the NHS staff during 2020 “the government seems to want to wash its hands of responsibility” for what is happening in plain sight up and down the country.

Meanwhile, the NHS staff feel “abandoned by the Government and they deserve better.”

Taylor did not mention the media, although many sections could just as easily be accused of “washing its hands of responsibility” for failing to cover the crisis.

The Confederation CEO also argued that the Government should give “clear and honest messaging” on the scale of its policies, or lack of them, on the current impact on Covid and rates of infection.

In particular Taylor wants to see a renewed focus on encouraging mask wearing in crowded spaces and the need for good ventilation and emphasising the importance of isolating, if Covid is suspected.

What will it take?

The NHS Confederation statement was issued on Saturday and was not covered in either The Sunday Times or the Mail on Sunday, although the Daily Mirror has been an honourable exception.

Yesterday’s Daily Mail led on the Easter traffic chaos with a sideways glance at “Covid staff shortages.”

The paper did cover the NHS Confederation warning but only in the context of Downing Street rejecting any possibility of returning to wearing masks or encouraging social distancing.

Then the Mail’s primary yahoo, Richard Littlejohn, was released to argue that the promised Easter mini-heat wave has “brought out the professional merchants of doom” to rain on the Easter parade.

NHS staff have been “falling like flies,” or, as Littlejohn sneered, outside the public sector this is known as “throwing a sickie.”

Littlejohn then stirs in Taylor’s Labour roots, the “doctrinal obsession” in some parts of the Health Service with natural childbirth and the difficulty of getting face-to-face appointments with GPs.

No mention of the record 1.7 million Britons suffering from Long Covid, now an official new disease recognised by the World Health Organisation, or that the current high levels of Covid transmission amount to the perfect breeding ground for new, and possibly more dangerous, strains of the virus.

You are left with a rather dispiriting question. How many deaths, hospitalisations and Long Covid cases will it take for most of the media to set aside their magic disappearing trick and face the reality of a continuing pandemic which has absolutely not gone away?

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays.

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