Covid 19 coronavirus: Dawn Picken - Media more vital than ever amid pandemic

Newspapers and media are important. Photo / Getty Images

COMMENT:

Would you intentionally do your job in a way that might put it at risk?

If you're a business owner, would you speak harsh truths to clients knowing some of them will take their money elsewhere?

If you're an employee, would you follow the rules of your profession, even if those rules meant sacrificing your income?

Imagine a doctor telling a patient the following: "You're 20kg overweight, your cholesterol is too high, and with your family history of heart disease, you're at risk for a life-threatening cardiac event."

The physician then tells the patient he needs to lose weight and start taking medication.

No one wants this news. You can pretend your doc's advice is irrelevant - just look for a website that says fat is fiction, cholesterol doesn't count and neither does your family history. Tell your GP he's feeding you fake news, because this is something you don't want to hear.

Doctors have a duty to tell patients hard truths - to deliver a diagnosis, a prognosis and, sometimes, to tell people when treatment has stopped working.

Journalists also have a duty to tell hard truths, as they've done before the time of Covid-19 and as they are doing now and will do afterwards

People love to shoot the messenger, especially during catastrophes. Especially when we're scared. I regularly see statements claiming media are manufacturing the coronavirus crisis, how we're sensationalising it to sell more newspapers or get higher radio and TV ratings.

If that were true, we've hurt ourselves. Some media outlets may be gaining a bigger audience, but they also have less revenue because so many advertisers aren't allowed to operate at the moment.

The Government's moratorium at the time on publication by non-daily print media during the lockdown may have prompted Bauer media (whose titles included The Listener, North & South and Women's Weekly), to close its New Zealand operations, though the communications minister said the company was not interested in government assistance and was already facing serious challenges before Covid-19.

A recent report from the US says many businesses that can still afford to advertise refuse to have their brand next to stories about coronavirus. That's tough when most of the stories being reported globally are about effects of the virus.

Would outlets like to report something else? Yes, but when you lay off staff, there are fewer bodies to round up other stories. It would be easy for media organisations in a pandemic to not to report on the pandemic at all.

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But that would be unethical. And dangerous. And wrong. Because we've seen how lack of information and misinformation can kill. We can't protect ourselves against an invader we don't know about.

Cover-ups have happened before, such as a media blackout during the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. The virus would eventually infect at least a third of the world's population, killing anywhere from 20 million to 100 million people.

The first official cases of the so-called Spanish flu were recorded at a US army camp in Kansas. According to an article in National Geographic, strict wartime censorship meant European and the North American press were barred from reporting outbreaks. Only in neutral Spain could press freely report what was happening, which is how the disease got its nickname.

Journalist HL Mencken in 1956 wrote the 1918 epidemic was seldom mentioned, and most Americans had apparently forgotten it. "This is not surprising. The human mind always tries to expunge the intolerable from memory, just as it tries to conceal it while current."

Think about that the next time you encounter a pandemic denier on social media. They're doing what humans are hard-wired to do - downplaying a disaster until it affects them.

Nancy Bristow, author of American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic wrote the war facilitated the virus' spread. "... Even as more than half a million Americans are dying of influenza, the president of the United States refused to speak of the crisis that was underway precisely because he was worried about the war effort. He was so preoccupied with the prosecution of the war that he feared that people would lose sight of the most important business at hand, which was, for the United States, to win the war."

Now, more than ever, we need local media. Even Facebook recognises this; the company announced late last month it would invest $100 million to support news organisations and reporters as they navigate the economic impact of coronavirus.

We rely on news outlets not just to report what's happening, but to counter the deluge of misinformation on social media. Otherwise, more of us might be following advice that is downright dangerous or deadly.

The media also must hold governments accountable for their actions, asking whether procedures are being followed and whether money is flowing to people for whom it was earmarked.

Support media you rely on. For me, that means subscribing to several outlets, including this one and several international publications. It might sound like a lot, but in fact, I spend less on news than on Netflix and Spotify each month.

We're all in this together. And by "we", I mean journalists, too.

• Covid19.govt.nz: The Government's official Covid-19 advisory website