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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Throughout the pandemic, there’s been a vocal group of journalists who are adamant that the risk of Covid-19 is being overblown.

But what drives this kind of thinking, and is it changing anyone’s mind?

Today, writer for The Saturday Paper, Richard Cooke, on the Covid contrarians, and what they tell us about the state of the Australian media landscape.

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RUBY:

Richard, you wrote about Covid contrarianism in The Saturday Paper. Can you tell me exactly what you mean by that term?

RICHARD:

Well, I think that everybody now who has any contact with the media has encountered some Covid contrarianism.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“I’ve heard that 99.5% of cases worldwide are very mild…”

RICHARD:

This is the view that Covid is no big deal, it's just like a very bad flu, the real harm is caused by mass hysteria...

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #2:

“Testing for antibodies in people who’ve recovered could tell us something reassuring about whether we really are facing imminent death from this virus if ever we leave our homes, like that ABC hysterics suggested.”

RICHARD:

This is a position that some people sort of dug for themselves very early on in the pandemic.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #3:

“I think historians of the future are going to look back completely shocked at what we’ve done. I mean, it’s clearer and clearer every week, I mean it’s verging on farcical, in my view…”

RICHARD:

You would think that they would change after a million people had died, but they have become even more deeply entrenched.

RUBY:

And is there something that unites these perspectives? Is it uniquely Australian, or does it go beyond that?

RICHARD:

Well, this is something which is not just happening in Australia. It seems to be especially virulent in Australia, perhaps just because we have quite a conservative press. But these are people usually on the conservative side of politics, though not always, whose primary way of looking at the world is economic, and also with a quite select understanding of rights - they’re generally not interested in human rights, but they are interested in the rights of particular people and particular classes to do as they please. And the pandemic causes big problems for both of those things.

RUBY:

This tension between economic and humanitarian concerns, it's evident in some of the calls for the eldery to be sacrificed. What would they be sacrificed for?

RICHARD:

Well, the rationale here, as far as I understand it, is that these people have already lived a full life, that there is an economic burden being borne by the rest of society in keeping them alive, that that economic burden is unfair, and that these people would willingly curtail the rest of their days so that their children can live a prosperous and and free life.

Obviously, that is indicative of the crudity of the trade-offs, as they are understood by Covid contrarians. You don't get to make these kind of neat choices in the real world. It is not just a trolley problem where you pull a lever, it is a set of very complicated, dynamic trade-offs with not very many good options. So you're usually not sacrificing the person who is ready. You're sacrificing people who are not and there's a whole lot of other unintended consequences as well.

RUBY:

So it goes to this idea that the cure for Covid is worse than the disease itself, which is to say it's the claim that lockdowns cause more harm than that virus does. And you're saying that argument is shallow, essentially?

RICHARD:

Yeah. I mean, obviously lockdowns cause some harms - we're already finding out what some of them are. There are already elements of the lockdowns which are probably unnecessary, which probably are going to turn out to have limited scientific bases. Reasonable people can disagree around what has to be negotiated and how we do this accounting. There does have to be some sort of accountancy for what we value. But these are people who have decided that the value to be placed on, you know, very large numbers of mostly older people elsewhere is pretty much zero.

RUBY:

These ideas aren’t confined to one publication, we've seen them across many in Australia, so what do you think it reveals about the Australian media landscape more broadly?

RICHARD:

Well, I mean, the Australian media landscape has shifted very dramatically to the right.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“Anti-democratic, authoritarian, unscientific, unfair, and unreasonable.”

RICHARD:

It's, in fact, far more right wing than the population is, especially on questions like this.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #2:

“I can’t think of a more egregious crime to impose upon your people than a leader who misleads his or her subjects during a time of deadly crisis.”

RICHARD:

And you only have to see the kitchen sink - or sinks - currently being flung at Daniel Andrews…

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #3:

“Go, Daniel Andrews, and go tonight, for God’s sake.”

RICHARD:

...to know that this is a media class that is out of step with what voters are thinking now.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #4:

“It is the judgement of Dan Andrews that is so flawed and so rotten, that it is corrupting the entire system, the police, the public service, beneath him.”

RICHARD:

It's not just the Australian, it's the tabloids, it's the interstate tabloids. You know, it's weird to see The Daily Telegraph in Sydney or the Courier Mail in Queensland fixating on the Victorian Premier to the extent that they have. But this is a full court press scenario. And at the end of it - it's now been going for weeks - Daniel Andrews is still standing. His poll numbers have not shifted very much.
I think part of the severity of this campaign springs from the fact that the media's influence is diminishing, and they know that, and it is difficult now even to make a single politician resign. That's evidenced by the fact that they're trying so hard to so little effect.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Richard, you’ve said it’s mainly conservatives making these arguments against lockdowns. How does that fit within their broader political framework?

RICHARD:

Yeah, it is mainly conservatives and it's mainly conservative publications. You know, in the UK, this has been matched by the Times, by The Daily Telegraph. It's, of course, been matched by Fox News in the United States.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“Cases are down, hospitalizations are down, deaths are down. So the people who have been trying to panic the country for six months…”

RICHARD:

They tend to place a great emphasis on the economy, not just as something of importance, but as a kind of meaning machine.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #2:

“The great news here is that businesses are reopening, and the economy is moving forward at a rapid clip, probably better than folks thought.”

RICHARD:

You know, they don't really believe in externalities in the classic sense of economics. So when a problem like this comes along that markets can't solve, they just want to pretend that the problem is not there or not as severe as it obviously is.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Woman #1:

“We performed 17 million more tasks than our counterparts in Western Europe, we have roughly the same number of deaths. Our economy though is much stronger. And investors have more confidence in our outlook going forward.”

RICHARD:

I mean, this is a similar process to what we're seeing with climate change because it involves government intervention as a preventative measure. And because that government intervention is anathema to conservatives, they are at an impasse.

RUBY:

And do you think it works in terms of actually changing public opinion?

RICHARD:

Yeah, absolutely. It also, it doesn't have to change public opinion. It can just waste the public's time, as it were. I mean, other countries and other places are talking about the pandemic as a way to rethink about society. You know, there are countries in Europe which are considering it as the beginning of an experiment in universal basic income, for example. What is the rhetoric that we get here? It's largely the same as it always is about a down payment on future austerity. It partly works on public opinion by limiting the threshold of possibilities available in a situation like this.

RUBY:

And this is all coming at a time when the media sector is faltering on multiple fronts. So can you talk to me a bit about that and also where you think we go from here in the media industry?

RICHARD:

Well, if I start talking about that, I might not stop. When you start to criticise the standards of the media generally, and the media in Australia in particular, it sometimes feels like pulling at the end of an endless piece of thread. It is very difficult to do the kind of work that creates genuine accountability now. It often goes unrewarded financially and in terms of an audience. And so what instead happens, especially when there's a sort of faux emphasis on balance and fairness, is that you end up doing a horse race style reporting where everything is a dialectic, everything is a high school debate, where you have two sides and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

That is something I didn't think that we would see with a killer virus, but, you know, the rules of both-siderism are stringent enough that the virus has to have its advocates. The kind of long, thankless work is still being done, but it's natural that when budgets are tight and when an audience will flock to click bait more rapidly, it's natural that resources will head in that direction, and that's what we're seeing.

RUBY:

Do you see this as a bad sign in terms of our ability as a society to discuss complex issues beyond the pandemic?

RICHARD:

Yeah, I mean, I think that we've always...society struggles with complex topics, the media struggles with complex topics. If you speak to anyone who works in a complex field, especially science, and you speak to them about the way that the media reports on stories, they have been very critical of that for a very long time.

You know, the way that health is reported generally, you know, even pre-pandemic, tends to be in terms of miracle cures; You know, there aren't really very many miracle cures - some people said there are no miracle cures. Or X gives you cancer, you know, that is not how lifestyle epidemiology works. It's not how genetics works, really. But these sort of rational astrologies are how we generally and the media makes sense of the world. They are partly demand driven.

RUBY:

Richard, in your piece, you call the media an inessential class, and you say that maybe it’s time that it died off. And I wanted to know, is that a joke or is that that you really think?

RICHARD:

I don't think that it is a joke. I think that there is strong evidence now that these kind of ‘gee whiz’, slapdash, contrarian opinion pieces - even as they're increasingly being ignored - have done damage.

We are at the end of a quarter century period where all of the counterfactuals turn out to be wrong. And the people producing those counterfactuals on war, on climate change, and now on pandemics, are all still there; there's been no process of accountability whatsoever. At least in the US, they've changed the faces. We don't even have that. It is all the same people who are responsible, partly responsible, for all those same mistakes. And we're still stuck listening to them and we're listening to them trying to encourage us to make another set of very severe mistakes. And I think listening to them is a mistake.

RUBY:

Richard, thank you so much for your time today.

RICHARD:

Thank you, guys.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today:

US Presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump faced off in the first election debate yesterday.

Archival Tape -- Chris Wallace:

“...As we welcome the Republican nominee, President Trump. And the democratic nominee Vice President Biden” [claps]

RUBY:

Analysts described the head-to-head matchup as a chaotic and at times incoherent event.

Archival Tape -- Joe Biden:

“I’m not going to answer the question.”

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“Why wouldn’t you answer that question?”

Archival Tape -- Joe Biden:

“The question is… Will you shut up man?”

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“Who is on your list, Joe?”

RUBY:

The moderator, Chris Wallace, was criticised for failing to control the debate stage, as the president continually spoke over him and Joe Biden.

Archival Tape --Chris Wallace:

“Mr President, I’d like you to-”

[Interruptions]

Archival Tape -- Chris Wallace:

“Mr. President, I’m the moderator of this debate and I’d like you to let me ask my question…”

RUBY:

Biden attacked Trump over decisions he had made as President, including his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Archival Tape -- Joe Biden:

“When he was presented with that number he said it is what it is. Well it is what it is because you are who you are. That’s why it is. The president has no plan.”

RUBY:

Trump fired back, using a range of personal attacks to criticise Biden’s record as a lawmaker.

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“Don't ever use the word smart with me. Don’t ever use that word.”

Archival Tape -- Joe Biden:

“Oh give me a break.”

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“Because you know what, there's nothing smart about you, Joe. 47 years, you’ve done nothing.”

RUBY:

The President also refused to directly condemn white supremacy.

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“Who would you like me to condemn?”

Archival Tape -- Chris Wallace:

“White supremacists and..."

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“Proud boys, stand back and stand by…”

RUBY:

I’m Ruby Jones. Thanks for listening. See ya tomorrow.

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