On March 23, 2020, then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson looked down the barrel of a camera and uttered the words:
From this evening I must give the British people a very simple instruction – you must stay at home.
The UK’s first full COVID-19 lockdown had begun.
Five years on, many of us have tried to move on from the misery of that period. I know I certainly have. But we are getting to a point where we can, perhaps, analyse what happened. Don’t worry, I am not going to offer medical or scientific comment. I don’t even particularly want to relitigate whether or not lockdowns and vaccines were right or wrong. (For what it’s worth, I was quickly worried we had no exit plan from the former and was hugely supportive of the latter. I’m also not convinced we are fully discussing the consequences of lockdown, whatever your view on whether or not it was necessary.)
The key question for The Addition is whether or not the media rose to the moment. Even with the benefit of a few years of hindsight, I’m not sure it did.
One thing that deserves huge praise is the way things kept running. Newspapers and magazines did get printed. TV and radio broadcasts continued to air, often providing huge comfort to people. Given the scale and speed of the upheaval, that is no mean feat. It was crucial at a time the public needed information. Another area in which I think the British media performed well was supporting the vaccine rollout. Whether it was framed as Britain winning or just a public good, that backing helped a successful programme.
Media Scrutiny in the COVID-19 Pandemic
Most credible mainstream outlets, perhaps scarred by the events of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election in 2016, focussed on scientific experts in a bid to drown out any fake news. As I outlined in my 2019 book, “Not Buying It”, leaning on expertise is unequivocally the right thing to do. However, we must also remain wary that experts can be wrong. Scientists make mistakes. Journalists need to make sure they are pushing back when necessary and I suspect that on reflection some wish that they had done more in that regard. Certain figures like Chris Witty, Jonathan Van-Tam and Anthony Fauci became totemic, their word taken as gospel. That is generally not a healthy place to be, however brilliant such people are.
While I’m naturally ill-disposed to anything that smells of conspiracy theory, I can’t help but feel that the lab leak theory was too readily squashed by most outlets. I haven’t got a clue about how the COVID-19 virus emerged and would never claim to. That is the point. It is the job of the media to scrutinise all reasonable possibilities, and even some unreasonable ones. I do not think it passed that particular test.
While proper scrutiny can give the public confidence in what the experts are saying, failure to do so actually leads to conspiracy theories being spread. The “just asking questions” crowd come from a very different place and ended up pushing out nonsense about WHO plots and defibrillators.
My final gripe is the frequent publishing of pieces, normally written by middle-class columnists from their second homes, talking about how great lockdown was. This was a complete indulgence that did not reflect the difficulties much of their audience were facing.
Let’s hope we never have an opportunity to put into practice things learnt in the pandemic. Because, for all its achievements at the time, there are certainly ways the media could have performed better.
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