A piece by Freddie Sayers on Sweden’s approach to quarantine hedged its bets under the headline “Jury still out on Swedish coronavirus strategy” but still attracted high traffic. He sounds more like an academic than a newshound as he challenges simplistic headlines with nuance and context. In pieces on the merits of lockdown, or the value of the 100,000 testing target, Chivers peppers his commentary with theories such as Goodhart’s law and Simpson’s paradox, noting of the evidence that “it’s even harder than that” or “it’s even more complicated than that”. “He doesn’t really write in certainties.” Quality over traffic “He won’t really come down on either side,” says the UnHerd editor Sally Chatterton. His journalistic style is unusual in that he doesn’t seek out an attention-grabbing line but weighs the data in articles that are often inconclusive. The science writer Tom Chivers is one of UnHerd’s most popular contributors. Its mission is to stand aside from the rest of the news pack and “to push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking”. This pandemic offers us time to be more discriminating in the news sources we turn to and to be less hurried in our consumption of information. As Tony Blair’s former press secretary Alastair Campbell said to the news site UnHerd recently: “The media now is so vast and so big, and there’s so many different elements there’s no such thing as the media.” Alastair Campbell has declared the ‘media’ as a single institution dead (Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty) Portraying the entire media as a single amorphous blob is ridiculous – it’s the sort of stunt Dominic Cummings uses to present himself as a radical thinker. Edelman reported this month that trust in traditional media has soared since January to 69 per cent. Another YouGov poll reported in March that trust in “upmarket newspapers” is at a six-year high due to coverage of this life and death crisis. Polls vary according to who you ask and how you phrase the question. So why, amid all this contempt, are news sites across the board reporting record traffic?
SEEN AND UNHERD TV
Loss of smell or taste added to list of official Covid-19 symptomsĪ YouGov poll for Sky News on attitudes during the pandemic found that 64 per cent of respondents distrusted TV journalists and 72 per cent distrusted newspaper journalists.
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In discussions of coronavirus coverage on social media this disgust is vented in similar measure by those who feel that news outlets are failing to report government failings in handling this crisis, and those who detect treachery in any journalists who ask ministers difficult questions. There are those today who hold the media in such low regard that they talk of it almost as a Satanic force, a corrupting influence that they choose to blame for all of society’s ills.
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