Twitter is an interesting metaphor for infectious
diseases. I write something. It might be seen be some of my followers, but it
has to compete with what everyone else is writing so it might be ignored. If
someone retweets, it might be seen by any of their followers, but just
occasionally a tweet captures the mood and suddenly it spreads and spreads way
beyond what I might have expected when I wrote it.
Recently I wrote:
Journalism is missing the
mood the country. We don't want blame, we don't want argument as if this were a
General Election, we want a contribution to the national effort to get us out
of this crisis. We want hope optimism and faith in our country. We need less
negativity.
This tweet has been liked and retweeted more than any
other tweet I have written. Some people objected. It became clear from reading
their responses that this was usually because they were hostile to the
Government either because they voted for someone else at the last election or
because they voted Remain in 2016. They too were missing the mood of the
country.
What strikes me most from my online interactions is
that ordinary Brits have gone beyond politics. We understand that we are not
fighting a General Election. We are fighting the worst pandemic in the past one
hundred years.
Morale does matter. So does national unity and a sense
of common purpose. When Boris was sick, and Dominic Raab said he was a fighter,
some journalists didn’t get it. They objected that it implied that those who
died were weak. It didn’t. Raab was simply expressing hope. He was being
positive. If Captain Tom got sick, we would all call him a fighter. We would do
so no matter the outcome.
A person or a people who believe they will win in the
end is much more likely to do so. This is why morale matters so much to armies.
It has on numerous occasions seen a smaller force beat a larger force. Morale
can cause miracles not merely in battle but in illness. Being brave, optimistic
and full of faith does not guarantee that you get better, but it helps. Thinking
your case is hopeless and you are bound to die sometimes guarantees that you
do. This is what the country gets that journalists don’t.
I have been impressed by a few journalists in the past
weeks, but not many. I think the BBC Horizon team have done an outstanding job
in helping us understand the nature of the illness we face. Some economic
journalists have done a good job in explaining the economic consequences of the
worldwide lockdown. One or two political journalists have given us some help in
understanding Government thinking. But journalists for the most part have
disgraced themselves.
There are people I usually enjoy reading who
frequently make interesting points about society and politics who are simply
showing their lack of knowledge today. Too many journalists who think there is
only one story to write about skim a few medical journals and then think they
are qualified to tell the rest of us what should be done. They go from one
extreme to other and pretend to have a knowledge that they don’t.
Twenty-four-hour news programmes are full of
relentless negativity. They pick up on one issue such as ventilators go with
that for a few days and then obsess about Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).
Next we get comparisons between countries. This country has more deaths than
that country as if it is some sort of Olympic medal table. Why can’t you get
PPE? Because everyone else in the world wants it too. But shouldn’t you have
prepared? Would you like to apologise for your failure?
The worst of all is the daily press briefings. We
listen to some of the best minds in the country explaining to us what is being
done and why only to have a series of ignorant childish questions from
journalists trying to score political points and trip up a minister. No wonder
most of us switch off when we get to that point.
There has never previously in the whole world been
such a lockdown. The only insight from the Sunday Times was that hindsight is a
wonderful thing.
The first thing you learn in history is that people
make mistakes. Faced with unprecedented situations they make lots of mistakes.
When I first started reading about Covid 19 back in January I read everything I
could find on the subject because I was planning to make a trip to Central
Asia. I told myself I’d be OK and booked my flight. I was lucky that it was
cancelled, or I might be stuck there yet. I would have made a terrible mistake
otherwise.
I didn’t read a single journalist in January or
February who predicted that Britain would be locked down in March. I read lots
of journalists who said that Covid 19 would be no worse than seasonal flu and
we had nothing to worry about. I didn’t read a single journalist who in
mid-January accurately predicted how the virus would spread worldwide nor one
who said that we should lockdown immediately.
If we had had the modern journalist profession in
1940, we would have lost the war. They would have complained about the
Governments disastrous mistakes at Narvik. It should have known that the Maginot line
wouldn’t work. Journalists would have demanded that Churchill should have been
immediately sacked for the defeat at Dunkirk. They would have described our
situation as hopeless and would have ridiculed our ability to fight them on the
beaches and would have said it was mere arrogance to suppose that our pathetic
little country could have a finest hour. After all the Germans do everything so
much more efficiently than we do. They would have listed all the mistakes our
country had made and called it insight. The British people however would not
have listened to them then, just as we don’t read them now. Newspapers are
going out of business. They deserve to.