Coronavirus - Media Discussion
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Perhaps another thread for this, as it pops up across pretty much so all others, but worthy of its own?
Anyway, I've been complimentary of the BBC throughout this as I think they've stuck to factual reporting with little position other than relying communications, whilst others have focused much more on praising the NHS and / or abusing the government. I've mentioned my ex-favourite broadcaster Piers a few times, but I saw this last night which made me laugh.
Quick background - in a nutshell, Morgan has utterly berated the Govt from pillar to post (too slow, unprepared didn't take it (him?) seriously etc etc), has managed to get one interview with Hancock (Health Sec) where he decided it was more important to spend 18 of the 20 minutes yelling his own views over the top of Hancock's message. Anyway, he's pretty much so championed / shoved anything that agrees with him and I noted this last night on his twitter feed:
And has berated anybody who argues with him as apparently this guy (editor of a mag) is now the global leading expert (According to Piers) ... but I noted this reply which made me laugh ..
Seems Piers new found expert isn't the expert after all ...
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@MajorRage a lot of media folk that played it down in Jan/Feb are acting like that never happened now.
One organisation that should have known better is the WHO. They're meant to be a global health organisation yet they were playing it down and recommending NO travel restrictions and NO screening in and out of Wuhan.
It's either sheer incompetence or pandering to the Chinese government. Neither of those are acceptable.
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I'm interested in the two sides to reporting of this. Let's call it the news.com.au version, and the ABC version
One seems to be how coronavirus is going to get you, one seems to he how to avoid it. The tone taken is vastly different.
I'll let you decide which is which
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I actually think I need to step away from the news for a bit. It's affecting my moods
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@mariner4life said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
I actually think I need to step away from the news for a bit. It's affecting my moods
Yep we all noticed that
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@Virgil said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
@mariner4life said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
I actually think I need to step away from the news for a bit. It's affecting my moods
Yep we all noticed that
I sort of apologise for that.
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@mariner4life said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
I actually think I need to step away from the news for a bit. It's affecting my moods
I said the same to my wife. Follow factual sites, not opinion / agenda driven sites and you'll be fine.
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@MajorRage said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
@mariner4life said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
I actually think I need to step away from the news for a bit. It's affecting my moods
I said the same to my wife. Follow factual sites, not opinion / agenda driven sites and you'll be fine.
It's the uncertainty that kills me. And that has never been something I have worried about in the past. It's an interesting introspection
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@mariner4life said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
I'm interested in the two sides to reporting of this. Let's call it the news.com.au version, and the ABC version
One seems to be how coronavirus is going to get you, one seems to he how to avoid it. The tone taken is vastly different.
I'll let you decide which is which
Just on that...
Only a cretin would analyse the public mood based on the number of Twitter likes, but nonetheless social media is revealing in some respects. This week a tweet praising New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern pointed out she had faced several daunting challenges in her first term, including the Christchurch terrorist attack, climate change reforms, a volcanic eruption and a pandemic – all whilst being a mother.
It attracted over 12,000 likes, which is neither here nor there. What was significant was its retweet by ABC’s News Breakfast co-host Michael Rowland. “Yes to all of this,” he said.
You could also say Australian prime minister Scott Morrison – a father of two young girls – has had an equally tumultuous time in just 19 months at the helm. Despite assuming leadership at a time of great turmoil within his party, he successfully fought an election few thought the Coalition would win. He has been castigated (not all of which was deserved) for his response to last summer’s bushfires, and during that time had to cope with the death of his father.
Ardern has a huge advantage over Morrison in responding to the pandemic. New Zealand, unlike Australia, has a unitary system of government. Whether Morrison handles this crisis successfully largely depends on the co-operation of six premiers and two chief ministers. Already some have acted unilaterally, thus threatening National Cabinet cohesion. To paraphrase the original tweet, can we expect the critics to shut up and let Morrison get on with his difficult job? Even better, how about a big “Yes to all of this” from Rowland?
Sadly, and to the detriment of all, the ABC cannot let go its anti-conservative agenda, even in a national emergency. Last week its flagship show Q&A, in a COVID-19 special, featured among others aged care minister Richard Colbeck and Bill Bowtell, a former adviser to Hawke government health minister Neal Blewett.
Bowtell’s conduct was boorish. His manner when talking to Colbeck was contemptuous, he repeatedly interrupted and talked over him, he addressed him condescendingly as “Richard” and loudly remarked “rubbish” on at least three occasions as the minister spoke. “You are speaking like a politician,” sneered Bowtell. Colbeck may have sounded like a politician, but he was not the one carrying on like a prat. It was behaviour that should have been called out, but host Hamish MacDonald was either unable or unwilling to control Bowtell.
It simply confirms the perception, as was the case with the bushfires last summer, that any critic of the government’s response to coronavirus can be assured that ABC will provide a platform and amplify their voice. “It has been very clear for weeks and months what controls should be put in place at borders,” said Bowtell, as quoted in Daily Mail Australia this week. “A lot of things that ought to have happened at airports did not happen.”
Weeks and months? As former editor of this paper Chris Mitchell noted this week “Bowtell wanted far more drastic measures to lock down Australian society, and yet only three weeks earlier he had been a speaker at a Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras public event at the National Arts School”. Also, the first time that COVID-19 was mentioned this year on Bowtell’s Twitter account – which has been active since 2011 – was February 26, barely four weeks ago. Who’s a Harry Hindsight then?
Then there is the case of Dr Norman Swan, host of the ABC’s Health Report. Alluding to the government last week, he told ABC Breakfast News last week “we’re … dicking around and we’ve just got to shut stuff down now,” as well as calling for schools to be closed. This has put him at odds with the government’s chief medical officer, professor Brendan Murphy; and other experts.
But as the Sun Herald noticed last weekend, Swan’s advice has been inconsistent. Last Friday he told his podcast listeners he would send school-age children to school if he had them saying, “If and when the authorities decide to shut down schools, that’s when you keep your kid at home. At the moment, your child is not going to be saved from very much of anything by staying at home.” Que?
This image of Swan as a swashbuckler with a stethoscope endears him to his fans. “He’s the one,” Sydney Morning Herald columnist Peter FitzSimons tweeted gushingly on Monday, sounding like a poor man’s version of Morpheus from the film “The Matrix”.
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Part 2:
Swan is one of many on the public payroll who blows raspberries at the government in the knowledge they are untouchable. Last week he told the Guardian he would not be cowed, saying his job as a journalist was “to hold governments to account”.
That may be so. But holding governments to account and second-guessing experts far above one’s pay grade are separate things. Australia’s peak medical bodies were so concerned about public uncertainty arising from conflicting opinions that they wrote to their members last week, urging them to back the chief medical officer. The president of the Australian Medical Association, Tony Bartone, affirmed this advice, saying “Everyone wants to be an expert”.
That is exactly how ABC has portrayed Swan regarding his knowledge of COVID-19. Last week ABC’s “The Conversation Hour” featured Swan and University of NSW professor Raina MacIntyre. The online summary of that show refers to both as “coronavirus experts”. Co-host Richelle Hunt also referred to them as “Two of Australia’s finest experts in this area”.
That is plain wrong. MacIntyre, an infectious diseases expert from the University of NSW, can lay claim to this title, but Swan is a medically qualified journalist with postgraduate qualifications in paediatrics. He is not a coronavirus expert. I do not suggest this inaccuracy was his doing. But this misconception has remained uncorrected online for 11 days, despite the fact that ABC editorial policies require presenters not to “misrepresent any perspective” and not to “present factual content in a way that will materially mislead the audience”.
The closest Media Watch host Paul Barry came on Monday to admonishing the ABC for this was to say “Commentators like him [Swan] do face a challenge: how to hold government and health authorities to account without confusing the key health message”. Barry did not mention either last week or this week The Conversation Hour’s inaccurate depiction of Swan’s expertise.
This is the biggest crisis since World War II, but so far this has not been Aunty’s finest hour. Last week Rowland called for Bowtell and Swan “to be included in every health briefing to the government from now on”.
And on Monday, when 88,000 Australians lost their jobs, ABC Sydney radio presenter Wendy Harmer called for the broadcaster to be given “more funding”.
An acquaintance of mine, a senior media figure, summed up Harmer’s attitude perfectly. “If the ABC spent half as much time telling their audience about what’s going on with COVID-19 as they did telling them how important and indispensable they are, we’d have perfect compliance with social distancing nationwide,” he said.
At the beginning of last week’s Q&A, MacDonald set the scene of a public dismayed, confused and let down by its government. “So many of you have contacted us expressing genuine fear and anxiety,” he said. Well here is something to consider. A Guardian Essential Survey this week revealed only 35 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement “I trust the media to provide honest and objective information about the COVID-19 outbreak.” Conversely, 56 per cent trusted the government to provide objective information. That is hardly ideal for the government, but it’s a superb achievement compared to how the media is perceived.
And here’s another thought. Perhaps journalists and commentators could, at least for the duration of this crisis, do their job by reporting and analysing events rather than play self-fulfilling prophecy. Leave the ideology aside and forget trying to undermine a conservative government at every opportunity. If you are still enraged over the Coalition being returned to the power last year, well hey, somewhere out there is a counsellor’s couch with your name on it.
This is a world-wide pandemic that moves incredibly fast, and one that threatens to overwhelm many countries as it has Italy. Understandably, governments are struggling to contain it, and their responses change by the hour.
You found an inconsistency in their approach? You’re a hero. You want to make fun of a prime minister’s choice of words when he is clearly exhausted? Good for you, champ. You nit-pick a complex policy which by its very nature is variable upon variable ad infinitum? Congratulations. You are up there with the class snitch, or the office narcissist who cc’s the boss every time he discovers a minor oversight by a colleague.
If your intention is to be despised, then carry on as you were. If not, then stop dicking around.
from The Australian
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That's really interesting mate. I generally have no time for the ABC but I have found their news website the best factual, no opinion source of new info
I am astounded by some of the coverage. Holding someone to account for something they said a week ago in s situation that changes by the hour is at best disingenuous, at worst outright misinformation.
I have in the main been impressed with both Australasian governments, and I'm willing to cut them an awful lot of slack for being forced to make it up as they go along
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Swan is well over the top.
Federal government has been on the lenient side.
Think what we need comes down somewhere in between.As far as the media go: FFS it is nonstop. Guy at work on Hangouts saying his wife is so stressed out and they're kicking around with a toddler in the joint.
"Just turn it off, mate" said another team member. And he's right. Look at the stats, see how they're changing, and fucking ignore the media. The government is late to the party on public health messaging, and they're doing a less than ideal job, but the commercial media will always be tripping over each other to sensationalise, and the ABC TV coverage I've seen is just rotating doors of experts BUT their radio has been decent as usual.
There is some good stuff in all of it, but pare it back to the facts, fuck yas. We don't need it every hour.
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Regarding Richard Horton (Piers' new best mate), whilst that tweet was correct,by all accounts he quickly changed his view shortly after making that tweet and has been pretty constant since then.
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I thought this was a sensible article from JA. I'm not always a fan, but this was a good reminder (if not stating the slightly obvious, but sometimes forgotten)
Coronavirus: It’s time for us to decide if the cure is worse than the disease
In Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens writes that the essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks but in how it thinks. It is intellectual curiosity that matters most. And right now we need more of this key ingredient. A healthy democracy does not die in a pandemic.
Let’s be clear. No one has the wisdom of Solomon or the prophetic powers of Apollo. But finally, this past week, many more people are publicly asking if the cure is worse than the disease. We need more of this intellectual curiosity instead of joining the cheer squad for the Morrison government or the more hysterical Canberra press bubble.
It means probing government decisions, checking herd mentalities, raising differences between expert advice, and understanding that bureaucrats advising governments about the current economic responses to COVID-19 never lose their jobs in a crisis. We should not accept medical advice as the sole source of truth either. Not only is it both contestable and contested, but doctors have a laser-like focus on medical issues and have little or no knowledge of, and sometimes not much interest in, the social, economic or cultural consequences of their advice.
A few weeks ago, Guardian Australia political editor Katharine Murphy wondered whether dealing with COVID-19 might be the revenge of the experts. Beware of those who assert that “experts” equal a consensus, or accepted wisdom, or settled orthodoxy. Remember Brexit? These phrases are often used by people who pretend to love a rollicking debate — but only when it suits them. On some matters, they claim consensus to shut people up.
As American intellectual Walter Lippmann once said: “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” And happily, not all people think alike. Consider the comments this week from newly appointed Deputy Chief Medical Officer Nick Coatsworth, an infectious diseases specialist at Canberra Hospital. In an interview on ABC radio on Thursday, Coatsworth said the effectiveness of imposing harsher rules around social isolation to deal with COVID-19 is “a contested point”.
Coatsworth also challenged the ABC’s message that the broadcaster’s medical reporter, Norman Swan, is the go-to guy on COVID-19. “I disagree with Norman when he thinks that this is going to be over in weeks if we go for harder and faster lockdowns,” Coatsworth said. “I don’t think they’ve thought through the impact on Australia and Australians of doing that.”
It is no bad thing to push back. John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine in epidemiology and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Centre in the US, questions the official death rate of 3.4 per cent put out by the World Health Organisation.
No one can accurately tally up unrecorded cases of COVID-19 and that single fact renders the modelling inaccurate. If the true fatality rate is closer to 1 per cent or even lower, Ioannidis says, then “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational”.
Veteran left-liberal commentator Thomas Friedman also has broken from the pack about this pandemic. Writing in The New York Times this week, Friedman is asking whether the cure is worse than the disease. Friedman spoke with David Katz, founding director of Yale University’s Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Centre in the US, who questions the current “horizontal interdiction” — basically, shutting down commerce and limiting movement by large parts of the population.
Katz posits a more surgically targeted “vertical interdiction” strategy to sequester and protect the more vulnerable after a short, sharp period of lockdown of two weeks, rather than a longer, unsustainable and economically ruinous approach that will deliver its own devastating health costs.
Katz suggests that “the rejuvenating effect on spirits, and the economy, of knowing where there’s light at the end of this tunnel would be hard to overstate”.
“Risk will not be zero,” he told Friedman, “but the risk of some bad outcome for any of us on any given day is never zero.’’
Again, none of us has the perfect set of answers. And no leader should be demonised for changing tack. US President Donald Trump wants to reopen the US economy by Easter. It may not happen, but Trump offers hope instead of the dark, uncertain and confusing tunnels many of us face in other countries.
It was breathtaking to hear Anthony Albanese claim this week that the Morrison government needed to avoid a tension “between dealing with the health issues and dealing with the economic issues”. Is he kidding?
Was this brazen politics or reckless stupidity? There are devastating social costs arising directly from decisions to shut down businesses and shunt away people.
If Albanese cannot grapple with that, then he has no rightful claim to be the alternative prime minister.
The tensions are immense. Poverty kills people, too. Losing your job through no fault of your own is soul-destroying. Facing extended unemployment can wreck the prospects and futures of millions of people. People and families need to know how they will pay their bills and buy food.
Government Services Minister Stuart Robert assured me on Sunday evening that the myGov bureaucracy was primed for huge numbers of newly unemployed Australians desperately seeking help on Monday. It had already been road-tested by the bushfire crisis, he said.
This is not a time for cockiness. The system crashed the next day under the weight of demand. I had passed on the minister’s assurances to try to allay the concerns of hardworking decent people who lost their jobs on Sunday night.
Can Robert imagine what it is like to stand in a long line on a pavement during a pandemic to ask for money because a job has been taken from you overnight by a decision made by government?
The next day, Robert tried to wash the egg off his face by claiming there had been a cyber hack attack. It wasn’t true.
Robert still has his job.
We are tearing at the social fabric of communities, shutting down footy and pubs and church services. GPs tell me of their concerns about the devastating mental health consequences of enforced social dislocation. Are we potentially creating a powder keg that we will one day rue?
Being forced into lockdown in dysfunctional and even dangerous households doesn’t bear thinking about. But we must, surely, consider all these tensions as part of every single decision made to deal with COVID-19.
A woman who lives on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula, 165km from Adelaide, was due to have a hysterectomy in Adelaide on Thursday. On Wednesday morning, she was told all elective surgeries were cancelled, effective immediately because of government directives. Early Wednesday afternoon, she was told her surgery would go ahead after a change to the rules. Later that day, she was told it was cancelled again. Her distress is immense.
At another Adelaide hospital, a nurse went to work on Monday, only to be told to stay home the next day because of new self-isolation rules that applied to her after a trip to Sydney on the weekend. On Tuesday, she asked to come to work after all. She was told that the rules about self-isolation applied only to people arriving after Tuesday 11am.
This confusion is across industries, across the country.
To be sure, leaders are doing their best in the most frightful circumstances. As the Prime Minister spoke to the nation on Tuesday evening following a meeting of the national cabinet, who could imagine telling the country that a funeral must have no more than 10 mourners, or that a big birthday party for a two-year old cannot go ahead in these times?
It is unthinkable. But that does not mean we must be unthinking.
JANET ALBRECHTSENCOLUMNIST
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@mariner4life said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
I actually think I need to step away from the news for a bit. It's affecting my moods
I had ABC News 24 on in the background when at home last week. I don't any more. It just depresses me.
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@antipodean I've quite enjoyed ... wrong word ... maybe appreciated Dr Norman Swan's "Coronacast".
But I did note his inconsistency over closing schools.
Seemed one day he's saying kids seem to be less likely to transmit to each other and therefore there's less risk with them in school, to the next day saying he'd always thought they should close.
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@mariner4life said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
That's really interesting mate. I generally have no time for the ABC but I have found their news website the best factual, no opinion source of new info
I am astounded by some of the coverage. Holding someone to account for something they said a week ago in s situation that changes by the hour is at best disingenuous, at worst outright misinformation.
I have in the main been impressed with both Australasian governments, and I'm willing to cut them an awful lot of slack for being forced to make it up as they go along
I don't get the hate for ScoMo.
Has come across well from what I have seen of him.
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@mariner4life said in Coronavirus - Media Discussion:
That's really interesting mate. I generally have no time for the ABC but I have found their news website the best factual, no opinion source of new info
I am astounded by some of the coverage. Holding someone to account for something they said a week ago in s situation that changes by the hour is at best disingenuous, at worst outright misinformation.
I have in the main been impressed with both Australasian governments, and I'm willing to cut them an awful lot of slack for being forced to make it up as they go along
I agree with this, I can't imagine Scomo or Jacinta or any other leader for that matter has had a lot of sleep in the past few weeks. They are making decisions than can have huge lasting impacts on people's lives here. It must be incredibly tough.