It’s time to shake up government-press relations with a dose of reality

Covid-19 is a chaotic disease which has upended the world’s health systems, mobility and economy. And yet its patterns have become wearyingly predictable for those in the US and the UK, which seem bound together not just by a “special relationship” but by a worrying inadequacy in government response.

In the face of rising public fear and frustration, even the loyalist press on both sides of the Atlantic are toppling like treacherous dominos, pushed over by the not-so-slight touch of facts and existential threat.

The bodies piling up in the makeshift morgues, the families and friends in hospital or worse, the sirens that sound all day and all night, are pieces of physical evidence ignored by only the most debased Twitter conspiracy theorist.

It was startling to see the Daily Telegraph, the house journal of the Boris Johnson government, deliver the banner headline “Questions without answers” last week as the government fumbled to give any clear responses on the lack of testing and the projections for lockdown.

“This testing shambles is unforgivable: when will ministers act?” asked the Daily Mail. Telling the public what they want to hear is suddenly out of fashion in partisan journalism. Instead, they are telling them what they need to hear. In public health, communication is everything. Policy and behavioural change is the target with Covid-19 and government accountability is the key.

In the US, the unthinkable happened as Fox News, which rallied behind Donald Trump in the earliest days of his coronavirus denial, sharply changed its tune. It fired Trish Regan, a host on Fox Business, after a histrionic opening monologue to her show where she blamed “liberal media” for spreading “mass hysteria” and using the coronavirus as a tool for impeachment.

Sean Hannity, the most high profile and Trump-aligned Fox personality, dropped the “Coronavirus hysteria” graphic from 9 March and replaced it with a more sombre “Facts over fear” tone a week later. It might be too late. A survey from the Pew Research Center’s Journalism and Media Project last week showed a stark division in beliefs about the spread of the virus, according to which cable outlet viewers watched.

In a world where facts have been treated as optional, particularly by Fox News’s main channel, the need for a shared belief in evidence-based coverage has now become a matter of life and death. An open letter from journalists and academics was sent to Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, and his son and Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch, detailing the ways in which the deliberate spread of misinformation on the channel was endangering lives: “Inexcusably, Fox News has violated elementary canons of journalism. In so doing, it has contributed to the spread of a grave pandemic.”

Some of the more comfortable practices of government press relations, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been put under the microscope. In the UK, the briefing of lobby correspondents on complex health issues is clearly not working. While it is important to know how the government is thinking and forming its strategy, it is also important that subject experts can ask the harder follow-up questions. Off-the-record briefings to favoured journalists, particularly those with a large broadcast presence, have long been standard practice. But there is something shockingly irresponsible about ideas such as the disastrous “herd immunity” strategy being laundered through a journalist, even one as well respected as ITV’s Robert Peston.

Those with long memories will remember what a tour de force Peston was as a BBC journalist, breaking story after story on the financial collapse in 2008. As a highly skilled and experienced financial journalist, he was in the perfect position to understand and interrogate the information.

Ten days ago, the US press was debating why it sends political journalists to the White House daily press briefings, rather than health correspondents. Now a number of high-profile outlets, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, are simply not sending correspondents to the briefings at all, as editors judge the news-free pantomime of a miniature Trump rally not worth the risk to reporters’ health.

Cable and broadcast networks no longer, as a matter of course, carry the full two-hour rambling promotions. On a good day the medical expertise of Dr Anthony Fauci or Dr Deborah Birx comes to the fore, obscuring the boastful rambling of the president. On a bad day, you might get the Trump cheerleader and chief executive of MyPillow, Michael J Lindell, or Jared Kushner, the president’s ineffectual son-in-law.

Not everything is worse than expected. If you had told New Yorkers, before the wave of a deadly pandemic broke over them, that the national hero of the catastrophe would be their governor, Andrew Cuomo, and his somewhat notorious powerpoint presentations, few would have believed it. Cuomo’s peacetime reputation as a political blunt instrument, whose policies have neither addressed inequality or fixed the subway, has been blown away by a wartime leader of gravity and directness, warmth and steel.

Cuomo is Churchillian, in that his decidedly poor record on many peacetime political matters has been largely erased by getting the wartime calls right. Cuomo’s daily walk through the unvarnished numbers of New York City deaths, hospitalisations, availability of beds and ventilators, the expansion of emergency facilities, is nationally required viewing. The clarity of now, is reassuring in the grip of future uncertainty.

Reliable clear information, presented in a clear understandable way, peppered with human empathy, goes a long way to papering over the yawning chasms of unpreparedness.

We are by now used to thinking ahead about what might change after the pandemic is tamed. For politicians and the media, the change ought to be that we replace the current pantomime of government press relations with a more serious piece of policy theatre, or even a dose of reality.