It is now generally
(although not universally) accepted that those of us who campaigned
vigorously against the government’s austerity policy from 2010 were
right, and the media and the political near consensus at the time
that austerity was the right thing to do was horribly wrong. In
particular, during a period when interest rates were on the floor the
government should have been pouring investment in our public services
and infrastructure, and its determination to do the complete opposite
is part of our current malaise. I remain proud of the work I did, in
collaboration with others like Jonathan Portes in the UK and of
course Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong and others in the US, to debunk the
many false arguments made about why austerity was essential. I could
do all that in part because I was an expert. Not only was I an
economics professor at Oxford whose field was macroeconomics but one
of my specialist areas was fiscal policy. Unfortunately our work had
little impact on policy at the time.
The latest
report from the Covid public inquiry makes it clear
that there was a similar dislocation between expert opinion on the
one hand and the govenment and the media on the other hand during the
Covid pandemic in 2020 and 2021, before vaccines became widely
available. Through luck the UK had January and February 2020 to
observe what was happening first in China and then in Italy and put
all the resources it could muster into preventing a similar disaster
happening in the UK. If it had, there is a slim chance that a
lockdown could have been avoided. But the government, largely under
the influence of Boris Johnson, decided to do almost nothing. Nor do
I remember any newspapers or broadcasters mounting a campaign for
more preventative action. As I
wrote at the very beginning of March 2020: “One
lesson of coronavirus may be never put into power politicians that
have a habit of ignoring experts.”
As the Inquiry
rightly concludes, by March a lockdown was inevitable. The handful of
academic experts saying otherwise were and are wrong, just as the
handful of academic experts promoting austerity were wrong. History
also
tells us that lockdowns have always been the weapon of
last resort in pandemics. As the inquiry notes, even after it was
clear the virus had become embedded in the UK the government still delayed
implementing a lockdown, and just acting a week earlier could have
saved more than 20,000 lives.
Just as the
expertise in the Treasury failed to stand up for basic macroeconomics
against the political will of its masters during the austerity
period, so medical experts in government encouraged
government inertia by talking about herd immunity and
inventing stories about possible lockdown fatigue. But these
government experts cannot be blamed for the purely political failures
in encouraging virus spread in the summer of 2020, and the delay in
implementing additional lockdowns in the autumn and the turn of the
year. [1]
While all this has
and will be widely commented on in the sections of the media that are
not propaganda outlets for their owners, I suspect much less will be
said about the role of the media during the pandemic, not only in
these failures to listen to expert advice but also in holding
politicians to account for the consequences of their failures. There
is a famous phrase ‘who
guards the guardians’, but increasingly the idea
that the media plays any guardian type role to hold our politicians
accountable seems like a bad joke.
The deadly role
played by our right wing propaganda press cannot be overemphasised.
They helped give us a Prime Minister totally unsuited to the job in
the first place. Losing money because of lockdowns, newspaper owners
quickly decided that lockdowns were bad, and started promoting those
who argued this way. These newspapers had a direct influence on
Johnson (his ‘real boss’ he once said), and were a major
contributor to his constant delays in implementing lockdowns.
Remember that a delayed lockdown doesn’t just mean more deaths, it
means the lockdown when it inevitably comes has to last longer,
implying more disruption to the economy, schooling and everyday life.
This press has a
huge impact on our broadcast media. But there are two other reasons
the broadcaster media also failed to give enough weight to expert
opinion and to hold politicians to account. The first is an obsession
with balance. Balance can be and often is the enemy of transmitting
expertise to the public (and therefore to politicians not in
government). The idea that you should generally balance a consensus
among experts with the opposing view just because some politicians or
newspaper owners take that opposing view is part of the reason the
media failed so badly during the pandemic. [2]
The second problem
is the absurd decision to generally give political journalists rather
than journalists who are subject experts the lead in commentating
about the pandemic. Understanding the basic maths of pandemic spread
and control is not difficult, and even for arts trained journalists,
subject experts should and often did get experts to explain that
maths to them. Political journalists rarely did, so for example we
had the nonsense of continual talk of a trade-off between the economy
and virus control when in everything but the very short term virus
control helps the economy.
With some forms of
expertise the media can defer to that knowledge. In physical
sciences, for example, where things can be demonstrated to be true in
controlled experiments. Because such experiments are possible,
politicians tend not to try and contradict the science, so the
scientific knowledge gets reported in an uncontested way. But areas
where controlled experiment is much more difficult, such as much of
economics, medicine and climate change, then there will be groups or
politicians that do take contrary views, and there the broadcast
media generally seems to fail to stick up for science. In the Brexit
referendum, for example, equal time was given to the overwhelming
academic consensus that Brexit would harm the economy and the
nonsense spouted by a tiny minority of academics that disputed this.
We now know the academic consensus was correct.
I think the
implications of this are immense. In my last post I linked to a post
by Chris Dillow who asked whether we had had a string
of poor Prime Ministers by accident, or instead “why is our
political culture characterised by such basic incompetence?” A
large part of the answer lies in the media. The media
shapes politics because it is the interface between
politicians and the votes they need. Amartya Sen once
observed that press freedom meant there were less
famines, and I think it is also true that repeated government failure
during a pandemic would not be possible without a compliant media. As
I
wrote in mid March 2020: “Lack of criticism
encourages a certain laziness, but also gives politicians the courage
to do things that those in democracies with more accountability would
not do.”
There are so many
examples of how this works. If political journalists are invariably
going on about how a policy plays with the electorate, rather than
whether the policy works, don’t be surprised if politicians begin
to worry less about whether policies will actually work. If the media
obsesses about balance rather than calling out lies, that encourages
politicians to lie. If the media chases clicks rather than providing
good information, you get a politics that appeals to emotion rather
than reason. If the media is so preoccupied by today’s news that it
rarely follows through on how yesterday’s stories played out, don’t
expect the media to always hold politicians accountable for their
past mistakes.
While Farage and
Brexit are the obvious examples of that today, the pandemic provides
just as stark an example. Boris Johnon’s actions and inactions led
to at least tens of thousands of deaths, and yet it has taken a
public inquiry years later for him to be held accountable for those
failures. His party’s popularity actually
improved through 2021. Yet he was held accountable
when it was discovered he had allowed parties that broke lockdown
rules at No.10. The difference was that the lives lost are a
counterfactual assessment by experts, and the parties were real and
could not be disputed. Even though these counterfactuals may be
solidly based on consensus and well established, evidence backed
science, because the media doesn’t value expertise, these
counterfactuals are given little weight by the media. It is why the
tens of thousands of lives lost seemed to matter much less to the
media than the No.10 parties did.
Of course simply
listing all the ways the media degrades politics and government today
does not tell us that it is responsible for a deterioration in the
quality of our politicians of the kind Chris Dillow suggested. To
show that you would need to demonstrate that the media environment
had got worse over the last few decades. That is beyond the scope of
this post, and probably my expertise. But it remains the case that
the Covid inquiry is a vivid illustration of not just political
failure on a deadly scale, but of the failure of the media to inform
the public and a failure to hold politicians that allowed tens of
thousands to die unnecessarily to account.
[1] The mechanics of
how the government processed expert advice needs to be rethought,
particularly in an emergency context. A complex committee structure
that then funnels into just one or two people who are left to distill
that advice to politicians is a very civil service like hierarchical
structure, but this often left experts in the dark about what the
constraints they were working under were or why
their advice was or wasn’t acted on, and allowed
politician’s misunderstandings to go unchallenged.
[2] Have a look at
this clip from Irish media from mid-March, showing the
consequences of pursuing herd immunity in a very clear way. I don’t
remember seeing anything remotely comparable anywhere in UK media.
Source link
