All our attention has been focused on one thing. Photo / Getty Images
All our attention has been focused on one thing. Photo / Getty Images
COMMENT:
As coronavirus slithers across the world, squeezing the air out of everything it touches, it also wraps around the media, steadily constricting the news agenda until it is the only thing left.
As almost every headline, alert, and breaking story is dominated by one thing, it poses an importantquestion: what have we missed while we are in the tight grip of a deadly virus?
Commerce may have slowed, sporting events may have been cancelled and flights may have been disrupted, but there are people in New Zealand and elsewhere with other stories to tell.
How many court proceedings have been missed? How many landlords have taken advantage of their tenants? How many scammers have been able to hide in the long shadow of the virus?
Even PR professionals have hit pause on pestering journalists with press releases about the latest and greatest innovation to hit the market.
We are all so captivated by one thing, that even major events are now passing by with a whimper.
Yesterday, when landmark abortion legislation was passed into law, it was met with an almost distracted "hurrah" from supporters and a slightly impolite "hey" from detractors.
There was no room in the media for the columns, responses and analyses that would normally accompany such a big event.
This is nobody's fault.
What we're seeing is a once-in-a-century event.
A veteran Herald journalist who previously reported on the 1987 crash and the GFC told me this week he has never seen anything like this. "It's like the GFC and 9-11 all wrapped into one," he said.
Some are even taking the comparisons back further, to 1929, but this too feels insufficient to capture the intensity of the impact. It did, after all, take a full four years for the 1929 crash to reach its bottom in 1933.
Markets have been decimated by the pandemic. Photo / AP
We should always be careful when it comes to trying to rationalise these things. The statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb described them as "Black Swans", after the ancient assumption that black swans just didn't exist. When we are eventually accosted by such a black-feathered creature, it's always much easier to rationalise its existence with the power of hindsight. "I saw it coming all along", goes the classic refrain.
What we've essentially done here is pull the emergency brake on the entire economy. History has no precedent. No one could have seen this one coming. This is history in the making.
And there's almost a morbid curiosity behind all those clicks on news websites. You can't really help but wonder: "So, how bad is this going to get?"
This crash feels more personal than those that came before.
Financial collapses are often esoteric events that start around the polished desks of the rich and powerful. It usually takes a while for the tremors to reverberate through the world and hit the ordinary people.
The immediacy of coronavirus' impact on normal lives makes it different. It has ripped our social interactions apart, stolen our entertainment, rendered our workplaces unsafe and left our employers questioning how long they can keep going.
Digital media was purpose-built for a moment like this. Every infection, development and government announcement has been fed to the public in real time.
While media are often criticised for this approach, it has proven integral in keeping New Zealanders informed and helping to stress the importance of social distancing in reducing the speed at which the virus moves through society.
The distressing stream of stories coming out of Italy has only pushed this message further, giving us a glimpse of our future if we underestimate the virus.
Showing the true face of this enemy only becomes more important when viewed alongside the utter nonsense being shared on social media channels.
Fake news creators are taking advantage of the fear, and regularly use memes to tell us that gargling salt water can kill the virus, that it was the product of Harvard scientists' experiments or that breathing hot air from a hairdryer will cure a person with symptoms. The best part is that you can even get this information in a range of languages.
In this context, the media's role becomes even more important in that fake news is often a good indicator of what people are most interested in. Interest doesn't always coincide with the news agenda, but what we're seeing with coronavirus is a rare confluence of events where the most important story of the day also happens to be the most popular.
So while other important stories might be pushed to the back of the queue for a while, we have little choice but to keep our eyes on coronavirus until the day when analysts say they saw this Black Swan coming all along.
