THANKS to Global Health Now (GHN), one of our favourite sources of inaccurate health information, we recently learned how stressful nurses had found the covid years. The global adulation, clapping for them and banging pots was not enough.
At least three years after the events of the purported pandemic, they had to remind us of what a trauma it all was for them. Clearly, the years of training, drawing a salary while others languished on furlough and largely doing next to nothing for two years did not mitigate the terrible effects of a largely mild and non-lethal upper respiratory infection.
Now it is the turn of journalists. Specifically, Italian journalists. As ever, the source is GHN and the link was to the online magazine Nieman Reports published by Harvard University. The article, titled ‘The lingering trauma of COVID coverage for Italian journalists’ says that many still ‘struggle to process what they witnessed’. Frankly, many of us are still struggling to process what they reported.
I don’t read Italian, but I work in Italy and visited immediately before, during and after covid restrictions. Suffice to say that, when it comes to covid, the Italians got one of the worst doses in the world. They were quick off the mark with restrictions on travel, mask mandates and vaccination mania and draconian in their implementation.
I know from Italian colleagues and students that the media played a large role in promoting the pandemic mentality, not questioning the imposed measures and conveying to the world chaotic scenes of hospital critical care units overflowing with patients and medical staff togged up in PPE. I have written elsewhere about the Italian love of ventilators and critical care. Italy has more ventilators per capita than the UK and their use exceeded that of the UK during covid by an order of magnitude. Largely, we have Italy and the Italian press to thank for our own disastrous adoption of the use of ventilators in the UK.
But what so upset the journalists that they had to tell us about it? For one it was ‘flashbacks of army men loudly loading coffins on their trucks’ and that her body only stops shaking once she manages to ‘calm down with breathing exercises’ she learned during therapy. Dear me, do I detect a snowflake melting in the wallow of self-pity? People come back from war zones having seen what goes into coffins, often in instalments. They are traumatised for sure, but do we hear about it? Rarely.
In a rhetoric-laden article, each statistic relevant to deaths of citizens or journalists ‘of’ covid is followed by ‘undoubtedly an underestimate’ or ‘certainly higher’. We learn how these ‘first Western reporters on the front line’ are now ‘dismayed to see how fast the world has moved on from a tragic news event that has impacted their mental health for ever’.
I speculate but wonder if they, perhaps, ‘protest too much’. Has the reality of covid dawned on them? Have the downright lies, the gross exaggerations and the futility and damage of the measures taken overwhelmed them leading them to feel more than a little gullible or compliant? Moreover, has their complicity in promoting panic and fear around the ‘pandemic’ led to guilt which they can only assuage by doubling down on that complicity?
According to the article ‘Italian journalists responded to the pandemic with extraordinary commitment and resilience’ but these great virtues left them ‘vulnerable to high levels of PTSD’. If that is so, then their commitment was certainly not to the truth and their resilience was sadly limited.
If the stories of journalistic headline hangover are true, then it is impossible not to pity those reporting their lingering trauma. On the other hand, one must laugh at some of the stories and the inflated reportage. One journalist says that when she ‘hears the sound of ambulances approaching in the distance, her heart races and cold sweat wets her forehead’. I suspect either some exaggeration or an insight into someone who may have chosen the wrong career.
Military metaphors abound. Thus, one journalist ‘felt the gravity’ of his mission. Another, an actual war reporter prevented from going to report on an actual war by covid travel restrictions, set out ‘on a mission to give a face to a faceless enemy, embedding with the local Red Cross’. Living proof that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Remarkably, the same journalist said ‘he did not like the way people constantly likened pandemic coverage to ‘war front-line reporting’’.
But covid was not like a war, it was much worse, according to Bruce Shapiro who says that ‘unlike war – in which the risks, however horrible, are visible and known – COVID was both pervasive and mysterious, the nature of its threat was wildly uncertain for many months’. Apart from the fact that none of that is true, we knew the precise risks (very low) from covid almost before it reached our shores. The author clearly has a vested interest in the journalistic trauma narrative as he is the director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Valentina Calzavara, a journalist from Bergamo, referred to more than once as ‘ground zero’ for covid, says that she ‘sometimes wakes up from nightmares’ and devoted two chapters to the trauma of journalists in her book on covid. She felt the subject ‘needed a platform’. The article does not record if she provided a similar platform for dissenting voices to the covid narrative and the lockdown regime. Calzavara says ‘it could take 15 or 20 years for people to be ready to talk about these experiences with detachment’ and that meantime ‘you just learn how to live with it’. If only I had a violin . . .
The article in Nieman Reports testifies to the fact that, while covid is long over, there are forces at work that wish to perpetuate its memory. That this article is the result of interviews with journalists, written by a journalist and published in an Ivy League university magazine indicates what many of us have long suspected, that the press was and continues to be a powerful arm of the covid fearmongering machine.
