Expertise, Government, the Media and Covid

 

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.