In times of crisis and widespread concern about decision-making, the public is extremely reliant on journalists to put its questions to those in power.
If there was ever a time for the media to act as the fourth estate, holding power to account in the public interest, the coronavirus pandemic is it. Now, more than ever, their role is crucial in ensuring that the public mood is communicated and acted upon.
If prime ministers have traditionally started the working day by reading the press to get a sense of the public mood, now government ministers face (virtually) daily scrutiny from journalists at briefings who are communicating it directly to them.
In the context of daily death tolls and concerns around strategy, there is one issue that is omnipresent across the press, news broadcasts and the briefings. That pressing question is: when will the lockdown end? Newspaper headlines in the run-up to the Easter weekend, which marked three weeks of lockdown in the UK, showed this pattern intensifying: “Ministers delay lockdown” (Telegraph, April 9, following this headline the previous day: “Who will make the call on lockdown?”). On April 9, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror led with: “Lockdown: no end in sight”, while the Independent bemoaned a “lack of lockdown answers”.
At the daily briefings, there have been similar repeated calls for answers: on April 6, the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, set out the public’s demands, and on April 8 again referred to the “trade-off between protecting people’s health and protecting people’s jobs”.
In response to a fairly nuanced first question on the staggered and safe easing of restrictions, Fiona Bruce, presenter of the BBC’s Question Time, summarised: “This is the question everyone wants answering: when might we begin to get out of this?”
Public sphere
Following the briefing on April 8, the presenters of BBC Radio 5 Live’s Drive programme announced they had received “a stack of texts” objecting to the main line of questioning: “Asking for an exit date is like asking Winston Churchill for an exit date in 1939.” Another read: “I don’t want the government to feel they need to end the lockdown prematurely due to the media going on and on about it.” Somebody else texted: “If I have to stay at home for the next six months I’m honestly not bothered as long as people stop contracting it and dying.”
In other words, the public is overwhelmingly on the side of ensuring safety and listening to the scientists. Drive presenter Tony Livesley defended the journalists: “I think they think they are asking on behalf of the general public.” But, he admitted, there was not a single audience text demanding an exit date.
Before the advent of social media, it was often argued that radio phone-ins were among the few places where the UK had anything resembling a genuine public sphere – a democratic space for dialogue and deliberation. As 5 Live is driven by listener participation, and has a weekly audience of five million, this can be viewed as a not insignificant poll. On March 24 – the day after the lockdown was called – YouGov reported that 93% of the public supported the measures.
Perception gap
As a researcher who investigates public openness to policy measures on climate change, this all sounds familiar. We collected focus group data from across the UK to assess the public’s response to a proposed meat tax aimed at reducing UK consumption to drive down greenhouse gas emissions. A key finding of our qualitative research was that the majority of the public is willing to accept restrictions as long as the science is communicated clearly and rooted in questions of the public good.
Media reports often frame measures such as the meat tax as representative of a “nanny state” – which implies an overly authoritarian government approach to a particular issue. But our research found that policymakers – many of whom are influenced by this kind of reporting – tended to overestimate public resistance to restrictive policies.
The degree to which the government’s message on coronavirus has been communicated effectively and its policy informed by expert advice is open to debate. But, however chaotic Whitehall’s communications have been, the simple message of “stay at home and save lives” is one which the vast majority of the public recognises and is responding to.
First published by The Conversation
Jackie Kemp says
That’s not how I feel. I think the incidence in Scotland’s quite low – the health service isn’t overwhelmed- there is no sign of the predicted surge. I thought the lockdown was to prevent the heath service being overwhelmed- well it’s not. We should start to open up like the Scandinavian countries. There is no easy solution to this nasty virus but I think we should start to open up soon and manage the situation in a pragmatic way.
Brenda Steele says
We do not have sufficient data to indicate we are over the peak, and in any case we are woefully short of testing capabilities to even contemplate reducing the lockdown.
Fay Young says
For me the question is how long? At the moment there seems no question that we need to reduce the spread of infection, reduce mortality, and in so doing reduce deadly pressure on health and care workers who are risking their lives for ours.
But at some point we will pass the peak and start to descend on the other side. What then? There are suggestions that a return to ‘new normal’ could be phased in with different age groups in different sectors of the economy.
What of those judged most at risk, people with other health conditions, and those aged over 70? At the moment, with vaccine still to be discovered and effective treatments still unproved, there looms a possibility that anyone over 70 could be in lockdown for a very long time. Not just three more weeks, or three more months, but perhaps for more than a year. A life of isolation. Is that socially sustainable?
David Gow says
The surge may yet be to come given we are behind, say, London in terms of when the virus hit as Sturgeon said this morning: as James Urquhart has said, if one gradually loosens the lockdown and there is a resurgence, then we could be in for a stop-go cycle of 5/6 sequences…much worse than making sure
Fay Young says
Reading today’s BBC report from the frontline – health workers across the world struggling to cope with the crisis, many countries ill-prepared for a pandemic of this scale and ferocity. Nurses and doctors working intensive shifts, under pressure emotionally and physically. It is impossible to imagine the stress they are enduring. And how long it will take to recover once the peak is past?
Burnt out, they will surely be suffering the effects of this hugely traumatic impact on resources. And what about care workers, and other lowpaid key workers? There is an obvious imperative need to allow the health and care system time to breath and recover if/when the pressure eases. But then what?
Stop-go lockdown would surely prolong the agony. As James Urquhart argues we need to be planning and preparing now for a resilient test/trace/isolate programme. Neil Ferguson deserves praise for his courage in breaking ranks with his SAGE colleagues. Until vaccine and treatment are secured, this is the only constructive way forward…the only way to reduce deadly pressure on our key services