'Post-COVID Journalism and the Americanisation of Disaster' / Robin Gibson
Why the death of BuzzFeed Australia should have you wringing your hands.
Each day begins by waking up to another statistical measure. Increases, decreases (both exponential, of course), expected counts, raw counts, flattened curves, squashed curves (?). It’s a lot to take account of, especially in a country which has been dealt a comparatively easy hand in terms of non-catastrophic transmission rates. I imagine the question is apparent to many: how much longer do I have to keep on top of these inane statistical concepts in order to say that I’m ‘doing my part’?
While we haven’t yet eliminated community transmission and the risk of reuptake is present, the relevance of the media’s almost total obsession with COVID-19 is starting to weigh heavy on the mind. This is especially the case in Australia, where our experience of the pandemic is set against the backdrop of a ‘black summer’ of death and destruction.
In the process of writing this article, it has become evident to me that any attempt to predict COVID-19’s media trajectory is an elusive task. Between the protests in America and robodebt’s abolishment, it appears that we are moving on from the pandemic. For the first time in recent memory, the virus is not front page news. Of course, these stories are set against the backdrop of COVID-19: protestor’s don facemasks as the dominance of public health over public outrage begins to crumble. In Australia, the government’s belated admittance of illegality is clearly a political manoeuvre to contain outrage at the 60-billion dollar shortfall in the JobKeeper program. Perhaps it is wishful thinking to expect COVID-19 to forestall further disasters. More likely is that it will have a compounding effect, multiplying the urgency of global inequality and resultant instability many times over. Maybe history will look upon the stasis of COVID-19’s media coverage like the calm before the storm. While this article will appear dated in its specifics by the time it is published, its general point stands: a national focus is critical in the next chapter of this pandemic.
Brian Massumi sets the “half-life of disaster” at 2 weeks. After the initial shock of the disaster event has worn off, there is residual pain, trauma and suffering, but the media’s interest in it (and perhaps ours?) tails off until the event is deemed irrelevant. COVID-19 has challenged the boundaries of this timeframe – it has now been at least 3 months of non-stop COVID coverage. The baseline reason for this is easy to pin down: this is a global phenomenon which affects wealthy Western countries. While COVID-19 affects each population differently, this is largely because of already existing inequalities rather than inequalities of transmission inherent to the virus itself. Because of this, the threat of infection can be projected onto almost any part of the world.
It is this potential for projection which affects our ability to conceptualise disaster. Once a disaster event is amplified by the media, our perspective on the likelihood of its future recurrence becomes subject to ulterior motives. It is important to consider how COVID-19 is affecting this cycle. Massumi’s 2-week timeframe was based on the pre-COVID media landscape of ‘disaster capitalism’ which revolved around the twin poles of natural disaster and terrorism. In order to maintain a steady stream of attention in the form of low-level fear (‘that could have been me! My family! My dog!!!’), the media moved between bushfires, floods, Islamic extremists, white supremacists and everything in between. Massumi calls the media’s necessity to switch from one disaster event to another with predictable regularity ‘affective conversion’: initial horror is modulated into subjectively grasped anxiety and again into a low-level yet pervasive fear, which is then channelled into the next disaster event. But in the context of COVID-19, this imperative has been put on hold. There is only one story for now and we’re all living it. It seems that the bar for disaster has been raised.
To what extent will this pandemic play out in favour of the corporate media machine? What if the aim of corporate media is not simply to report on events, but to instil an ever-present fear within us, a kind of ‘affective surplus’ which keeps us coming back for more? Seen from this perspective, corporate media has little motive to change its coverage from the global COVID-19 story to more locally or even nationally relevant disasters. It may be too soon, but I am imagining a situation in which Australia is 100% ‘quarantine clean’ while the US and Europe are still counting thousands of deaths per day. Will the ongoing horror in other parts of the world be enough to sustain Australian media consumers? Will corporate media privilege the construction of overseas disaster over home-grown calamities? When will we get back to the bushfires???
The global nature of the pandemic means that the internationalised corporate media machine will be hesitant to revert to more nationally oriented stories when they can just opt to continue coverage of US deaths and pretend that it’s Australia. If this assessment turns out to be even somewhat accurate, the impacts on Australian politics and nationhood could be profound. We have already seen the importation of American conspiracies to Australia. Anti-lockdown protestors in Melbourne pronounced their belief that Bill Gates is intending to use a coronavirus vaccine in order to insert us with location-tracking microchips. This resulted in a bizarre dick-swinging contest in which a columnist from The Australian asserted dismay at the possibility that “Americans have a monopoly on crazy.” While it may seem slightly absurd, I think this speaks to the oversized influence of international and especially American media on our own political landscape.
If the post-COVID Australian media landscape continues to deteriorate, then many Australians will be channelled into reading about the continuing overseas disaster in place of local, state and national concerns. This will give unwarranted cover to the Morrison government’s tendency toward state-of-exception authoritarian measures. We have already seen Peter Dutton’s gleeful acceptance of heightened powers at the border. And this is not just the maritime border, that favourite domain in which the tyranny of distance is exercised. Dutton has also been given the go-ahead to patrol Australia’s virtual border: the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (International Production Orders) Bill 2020 gives “like-minded” foreign countries (most notably the US) the power to access surveillance data from Australian journalists without their consent. Again, with the image of a potential future kept in mind, it is not difficult to envision the detrimental effects this might have on Australians. The virus, spiralling ever further out of control in the US, leads a falling empire to enact pitiful yet potentially harmful and definitely invasive power grabs by tapping into Australian phones or accessing online banking details. It enables the US an unprecedented level of control over Australia’s media environment, which would seriously affect the stories we have access to.
We are undergoing an historical reassessment of the relative prioritising of national and international concerns. The pandemic has forced nations into this predicament on a number of other fronts – trade, education, industry. The media is no exception. Now, more than ever, requires a balanced reappraisal of the media’s role and its susceptibility to international influence in Australia. Without wanting to commit to a fully anti-globalist position, I think that a prioritisation of Australian issues is needed in the global fallout of COVID-19. It may sound grim, but we have to choose which disasters to focus on. We have to force journalists to focus on the catastrophes which govern our lives instead of those which govern other people’s. If there is anything to take away from this article, it should by now be clear: read and support Australian news media. Otherwise, we will be living someone else’s nightmare, rather than our own…
By Robin Gibson.
Image by Dustin Hefford.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Verve Zine.
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