Michael P. Senger wrote for The Tablet4 about China’s online propaganda campaign. He noticed that these 50c army Twitter users were going a step further, taking ‘a darker turn’, by criticising US Governors who did not issue statewide lockdowns, deliberately trying to influence US policy.
On 11 March 2020, in an interview with the BBC, David Halpern, head of the UK’s Behavioural Insight Team, talked about the plan to ‘cocoon’ the elderly until herd immunity had been acquired.5 The concept of herd immunity is well-established in science and had not been considered controversial until that point. Interestingly, by 13 March Chinese state-affiliated Twitter accounts were criticising the approach:
‘Sweden will not test people with mild symptoms. UK and Germany tried to build a “herd immunity”, which will expose many people to the risk of death. These countries are unwilling to invest more resources in epidemic control. What about human rights? What about humanitarianism?’6
This is rich from the country that literally welded people into their homes and instigated a brutal and experimental lockdown. And that’s without getting started on wider human rights violations, such as the internment of Uygur people in Xinjiang. As a Chinese satirical song that also did the rounds on social media goes: ‘After brainwashing, wash your hands and your face.’
Some things naturally proliferate on social media: they ‘go viral’. Fear is one of those things. In 2020 it was given wings. Understanding who helped it fly, how and why should be of immense concern to our government and to all of us.
Other countries mimicked China’s lockdown. Confusingly, the World Health Organization didn’t recommend lockdowns, yet at the same time lauded China’s approach. The West was largely horrified by footage of Wuhan residents trapped in their homes, yet we enacted a similar totalitarian policy. The Sun reported that ‘devastating footage appears to show coronavirus patients being welded inside their homes and “left to die” as China battles to contain the fatal disease’.7
The newspapers which shared Chinese videos without verifying their authenticity lacked journalistic rigour. What followed throughout 2020 and into 2021 was an incessant onslaught of doom-mongering through TVs, newspapers, radio and the internet. In the rest of this chapter I will look at the reasons why the UK media might have reported the epidemic in the way it did.
The constant Covid news and daily death tolls meant they dominated our thoughts. In all likelihood, Covid, death, lockdown and the effects of restrictions have been your brain’s main go-tos. The availability heuristic, or availability bias, describes a mental shortcut which means that we recall the most immediate examples of things. When a matter is extremely pressing, it crowds out our ability to think of other things. If Covid deaths are talked about every day then you think about them every day, at the expense of other types of deaths, but also at the expense of much of life. Our cognitive roadmap was redrawn in 2020. You may have been driving, but the government and media had control of your satnav.
The media has a responsibility to inform us, but it also has a responsibility to be balanced. The coverage of daily death tolls, the ghoulish headlines and the scary graphs permeated our brains. Some of the people I have interviewed told me about the considerable effect that the media had on their perception of the world and their subsequent mental wellbeing.
The media should serve the public trust and owes its readers and viewers the best available version of the truth, ascertained by careful questioning. The British public expect the highest standards from the BBC, which is probably why it hurt so much that it spread alarm, exemplified by Sarah’s mother (p37). Of all the news providers, it is the BBC we would most expect to take a careful step back from the furore and fear and offer a balanced perspective.
I talked to former BBC journalist Sue Cook. She told me she had been surprised and disappointed by the BBC’s one-sided coverage of Covid, and the lack of vigorous questioning. A lifetime listener, she even turned off Radio 4 this year because she couldn’t bear to listen to it anymore. For such a BBC stalwart it was a bitter discovery that the BBC’s ‘standards of truth and impartiality have gone’. She said, ‘My fear is that there is now no solid, consistent media outlet you can trust. You have to cast around and find people you can trust. It might be someone on Facebook or YouTube, and it’s a jungle out there.’
The BBC has a Charter which promises to ‘provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them’. In the BBC’s guidelines on the ‘Use of Language’ there are specific undertakings in times of terror, war and disaster. One promise is that ‘care is required in the use of language that carries value judgements’.8 Some of the BBC’s coverage of Covid sits a little uneasily with its Charter, although some welcomed the value judgements. BBC Newsnight presenter Emily Maitliss received both praise and criticism from different quarters for her ‘editorialising’ when she criticised Dominic Cummings on 26 May for ‘breaking the rules’. There were 24,000 complaints to the BBC, which agreed she had breached impartiality guidelines.
The BBC appeared to highlight stories which would create fear, focusing on negative outcomes rather than recovery.
