Coronavirus: Free media beats one gagged by censorship as Beijing’s virus response shows
A couple of commentators poles apart politically made pertinent observations about the coronavirus panic that last week culminated in a national run on toilet paper, even though the disease is one of the upper respiratory tract rather than the lower digestive tract.
Andrew Bolt asked on Sky News last Wednesday night and in his Thursday column in the News Corp dailies if the COVID-19 scare from China had killed “the easygoing Australian”.
On Wednesday economics editor Ross Gittins in The Sydney Morning Herald argued “if reports we hear of people stripping supermarket shelves and deserting cafes, bars and other places of recreation are a guide, the main consequence so far is an outbreak of national hypochondria”.
It is hard to reconcile footage of panicked shoppers with Australia’s traditional national self-image of toughness in the face of adversity.
Think of country boys volunteering a century ago to sail to Europe to fight in the Great War, or starving Diggers looking after each other in dire conditions on the Burma Rail or in the squalor of Changi.
What would War War II medical heroes Weary Dunlop and Kevin Fagan have thought about those staff at Sydney’s Dorothy Henderson Lodge who refused to work on Thursday because of the death of a 95-year-old and the infection of three others?
A nation noted for its laconic scepticism should understand after the overheated media treatment of previous outbreaks — think bird flu, SARS and swine flu — that television and print news sources have a vested interest in overblowing fears of global contagion. This is exacerbated today by social media that rewards “likes” and clicks on stories online with advertising revenue linked to website traffic. Where serious media sources were once concerned not to overplay such stories for fear of reputational damage, all the incentives now favour sensational treatment that drives readers and viewers.
Strangely, the non-commercial ABC has often been among the worst offenders on media overstatement about potential medical disasters. Just google its coverage of bird flu to see how our national broadcaster has treated the issue over the past two decades.
“In an ideal situation, a person with suspected #COVID19 would be met outside the hospital, outside the emergency department, at which time a mask will be put on, and they would be assessed to see if they're likely to have COVID19 or not.†Dr Sanjaya Senanayake @sanj971 #abc730
— abc730 (@abc730) March 2, 2020
So it was good to see Leigh Sales on February 27 interviewing Canberra-based infectious diseases specialist Dr Sanjaya Senanayake, who made the best point about reported infection rates I have heard since the start of the outbreak: “We have a … fatality rate of 2 per cent but that 2 per cent … is of confirmed cases. What we know is that there are a lot of people … who haven’t been tested who have had coronavirus. Therefore the real case fatality rate … is probably less than 1 per cent.”
So that’s where all the toilet paper has gone... https://t.co/W2bvvBa7y2 pic.twitter.com/2DbHOEtba0
— Sanjaya Senanayake (@sanj971) March 3, 2020
To that you can add other positives pointed to by Bolt: The infection rate is slowing in China, suggesting that with aggressive quarantine measures COVID-19 can be slowed; the death rate outside China is lower than in Wuhan; and the virus has less effect on children than traditional influenza.
ABC 7.30 devoted a full program to COVID-19 last Wednesday. Dr Amesh Adalja, from the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security in Pittsburgh, brought much needed calm: “ … the majority of cases are going to be very mild, and many will be indistinguishable from the common cold, which makes it harder to actually diagnose these cases … because the symptoms are so non-specific: fevers, cough, sore throat, runny nose.”
Other media have not done so well. BuzzFeed Australia news reporter Cameron Wilson on March 4 looked at the role of the media in the loo paper panic.
Social media had been at the forefront of spreading stories, often from mainstream media, that although not fake news did fail to make clear there was no shortage of toilet paper and most consumed in Australia is made here rather than in China.
Wilson quoted Professor Axel Bruns, a social media and journalism expert from Queensland University of Technology, who said analysis of 1400 fake news domains found there was no deliberate campaign “pushing the toilet paper panic in Australia”.
As with many problems in modern journalism, Professor Bruns blamed mainstream media “uncritically elevating accounts of shortages from social media”.
“Mainstream media are amplifying the Twitter discussion, possibly without much verification. And of course social media then re-amplifies the mainstream coverage.
“Mainstream media coverage implies at least in theory that the content has passed through a more stringent gatekeeping process. That’s no longer necessarily true though, especially for clickbait news.”
For all the faults of modern media the COVID-19 story also highlights the importance of a free press in the proper functioning of a large, modern society.
The first real hero of the latest outbreak was Dr Li Wenliang, the whistleblower who died from the disease in early February. As The Guardian noted on February 8, Chinese social media had been awash with posts mourning the death of a man who first raised the alarm over the novel coronavirus but was charged for “spreading false rumours” and “disrupting social order”.
The Guardian pointed to a similar scandal 17 years ago when the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic infected more than 8000 people and killed more than 800 across 17 countries.
Chinese authorities had covered up the disease “until whistleblowing … Dr Jiang Yanyong exposed the crisis”. Jiang is confined to his home.
China was so flat-footed about the spread of COVID-19 that it initially denied Dr Li had died, authorities claiming he was in fact alive on life support before eventually confirming his death.
Li had warned of the Wuhan outbreak at the start of January but the central government refused to concede the problem. This is now a major black mark against President Xi Jinping.
A freer media in China would have forced action by the central government earlier by alerting health authorities around the world to the outbreak.
Shortages of loo paper may be a small price to pay for the sort of media freedom that can shine a light where powerful totalitarian forces would prefer darkness.
As to the likelihood COVID-19 will be this century’s Spanish flu, killing tens of millions around the world, the last word goes to Stanford University historian Niall Ferguson on ABC 7.30 last Wednesday: “The likely way in which this ends is (a) we arrive at medical remedies, vaccinations and treatments, and (b) the majority of people who encounter it survive and we build up … herd immunity.”
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The coronavirus epidemic is bringing out the best and worst in journalism but has also made it clear a free media — even if riddled with hyperbole and mistakes — is better than a media hobbled by censorship.