Abstract
We learn as cub reporters to introduce real people if we want our stories to have impact. Which explains why, for the last six months, reporters have given us not only the names of the Covid dead, but more about their lives and the circumstances of their last breath than we ever imagined we might know. Never have the media taken such interest in the elderly. What a pity that, in playing on our heartstrings, they have scared the living daylights out of us. No wonder no one wants to get a bus to work.
News values have traditionally relied on gut, rather than rational plotting. In broad terms, we are thought to care about what goes on in our village, town, county, country, in that order. On deaths, we go murder, accident, natural causes. A young death is more newsworthy than an old one, unless the old one is famous. The international equation is more complex: in every newsroom, a figure calculates how many must die in an Iranian earthquake to trump a British house fire horror; judges whether a foreign disaster – without British victims – warrants the front half of the bulletin; ponders the audience interest in a struggling African state.
Novelty is news, though not all news is novel. Once it became clear that this virus could kill, the first deaths were bound to attract attention. Some of those that followed satisfied the demanding criteria for news – a young nurse leaving a grieving family, a retired doctor who had returned to the ward to help, a bus driver provoking questions about safety at work, the husband and father who, against all the odds, came through. The human element has undoubtedly increased the impact of mistakes: the shortage of protective clothing, the discharging of hospital patients to care homes, the questionable efficiency of some homes.
But why has television news devoted so many hours to grown-up children whose parents have slipped away only a little ahead of time? How many stories are we to read about the cruelty of a disease in taking an 88-year-old life? Were these middle-aged relatives, brought to tears by the television cameras, expecting more years when they put their elderly in care? In that normal world to which we hope one day to return, some 600,000 people die in Britain each year, an average of five a day in road accidents. Most were not news but passed unreported, prompting only private grief and local sadness.
Engulfed by the misery inflicted on us by the 10 o’clock news, reeling from the newspaper spreads, it’s no wonder that we have become more worried than the statistics suggest we should be. The economic consequences threaten greater harm than the virus itself. Best estimates suggest about one in 2,000 is currently infected in the UK, that many have the virus without showing symptoms, and that most encounter only short-term discomfort.
It’s not entirely the media’s fault, for they have reflected the line taken by the government, whose early insouciance turned to forecasts of Doomsday. The prime minister’s own brush with death – now there’s a human story – encouraged media to intensify the gloom. The government is beginning to appreciate how hard it is to persuade people to act as they used to, after force-feeding them for months on the dangers of doing so. The media – with few exceptions – have been eager messengers. We’ve been discouraged from using analogies with war, but imagine if we really were in one and journalists concentrated so hard on bringing us the relatives of those who died.
As we approach the autumn, the emphasis is changing, though talk of the second wave may put paid to that. Right now, the papers are swinging wildly, screaming on the front about crowded beaches, shrieking inside about empty offices. Perhaps TV news will start to spare us the nightly intimacy of talks with relatives of the elderly. We’re not asking for misplaced optimism: just a little less hysteria.