Are Anti-Local Media Policies Harming the Pandemic Response

The government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been characterised by a reliance on faulty assumptions about so-called herd immunity, and by an obsession with centralised management and procurement. When it comes to ramping up the social infrastructure that can deal with the pandemic, we are finding that ten years of brutal austerity has left the cupboard empty, and we don’t have the local solutions in place to get the job of containing the pandemic through tracking and tracing activities done. Instead, the government has had to put in place big schemes and resources that have the ability to lift capacity.

Donna Hall’s account of how local councils have been bypassed in favour of centrally organised and run call centres and data processing exposes the choices that this government consistently makes when it comes to planning and funding for public social provision. It is easier for this government to give away money to ferry companies with no ferries, than it is for them to give money to support local public services that can directly strengthen capacity for testing and tracing.

The main advantage of local provision, as Hall points out, is that local teams of contact tracers know their local circumstances, and have experience working their local patch. It is asinine, as Hall points out, for a report of a potential case of Covid-19 to be made to a centrally run call centre, then for it to be rerouted and cascaded back to the local teams who then have to reinterpret the information all over again. Why not let people go directly to the contact teams and report directly their health concerns to their local care and wellbeing service? By centralising the process of contact training, and not using local government to support these essential tracking service, we run the further risk that if something is faulty at the centre, it also cascades out to the periphery.

An indication of how the breakdown of trust can happen is slowly being experienced in regard to our media, news and information services. Ofcom has reported that more people are taking themselves out of the information loop and are actively avoiding news services. Ofcom’s figures indicate that 31% now actively avoid news compared with a figure of 22% a couple of weeks prior. This could be for two reasons. First, information overload has set in, and the relentlessly flow of negative stories has worn many people’s resilience down. Likewise, it could be that trust in our news and information providers is being similarly deflated. It could be a combination of the two, as weariness and scepticism take root.

If this continues, however, then there is a real problem that government and essential services are likely to find it more difficult to get messages into the public domain, and to get the public to respond to those messages in a positive manner. Either way, weariness and contempt are a threat to good public health, and could be deadly as more people become hardened to essential messages and become more difficult to reach and communicate with. As the public health messages start to change, and the challenges of the lockdown become the challenges of the new normal, then the need to address issues of ongoing social trust, sustainability and wellbeing become more urgent.

A conversation I had this morning, with a group of entrepreneurs from Leicester, seemed to indicate that the syndrome of information overload and scepticism of the message is becoming widespread and taking root. I was talking with otherwise savvy and independent people who expressed their weariness of the flow of unaccountable stories and antagonistic discussions. The question I had after this conversation was: why is this happening when we have access to valuable forms of news and information like never before? Why are we loosing faith in our collective ability to process and engage with one another and arrive at a place of mutual and truthful understanding?

Contributing factors are many, but when it comes to newspapers and broadcast media, we are probably now witnessing the consequences of the years of running fast and loose with partisan positioning, selective demonisation of who communities, and a significant narrowing of the news ecology. The news industry in the UK usually blames the rise of the tech giants, leaving commercial operators with no option but to consolidate their news services and reduce investment in sustainable independent provision and alternative platforms. We’ve been living with a capricious news industry that has been left to its own devices for too long, while also letting the tech giants off the hook, as they gobble-up revenues that used to ensure local and independent journalism was viable. The answer, however, is not to shower public subsidy on the newspapers with no strings attached.

With the loss of so many local news services, that have previously supported an information ecology which could keep local communities civically active, we are now seeing the emergence of news and local information desserts. Newspapers have been closed and merged at an alarming rate. Local radio has been centralised and networked in ways that give almost total control over local media provision by a small number of large international conglomerates.

At the start of the lockdown the BBC won many plaudits for its ability to shift its resources behind the coordinated and message-focussed services. The BBC stepped in to fill gaps left by the closure of schools, places of worship, art galleries and even fitness studios. The BBC offered to help fill the gap when we can’t get out to visit places because of the need to physically distance. And while a lot of these services have proven to be useful, I have my doubts that this is something that had to be provided by the national state broadcaster?

Furthermore, it’s not as if the BBC has crowned itself in glory in recent years. For the BBC to suddenly remember that it is a public service which has a duty to protect the interests of the citizens of all parts of the UK, beggars the question of what they where doing before the pandemic broke? It is ironic that the BBC has remembered this role just when Netflix, YouTube, Disney, Facebook and many others are offering viable alternatives at a lower cost in the commercial domain. When you get your entertainment from a range of alternative streaming platforms, and your news from alternative news services online, what role does public service broadcasting retain if it can’t be trusted or identified with?

BBC programming at a local level, for example, is still massively underfunded. The BBC is still dominated by a culture of professional elitism that means that content is devised and then given to audiences on the basis that it matches the social needs that the BBC knows best about. This process, however, is seldom open to scrutiny. It is seldom possible to question the national or the local managers and commissioners of BBC services, because the BBC lacks any requirement for civic engagement and deliberation about the service it provides. Occasional meetings with MPs and glossy public relations reports do not count as accountability.

Where is the openness and transparency in regard to the BBC editorial processes? How can the public shape or change the guidelines that reporters, programme makers and managers have to consider when producing content or fostering wider social discussions? I once had it put to me by a senior BBC executive that the role of BBC local radio was to ‘own’ local conversations. No mention of facilitating or supporting those conversation, just an expectation that the BBC has a dominant position in local discourse that is held to be prevalent and self-evident.

This lack of local civic engagement and accessibility in the processes that determine what media we are presented with is a significant contributing factor in the growing feeling of disassociation. If local voices and opinions aren’t heard or represented, and local discussions are ignored or compartmentalised, then it is little wonder that the level of understanding of the civic and public processes, which keep are communities safe, is also so poor. There is clearly a point at which formatted and packaged media content becomes meaningless and vapid.

With the Covid-19 pandemic we have reached a point where the meaninglessness of much of corporate and commercial media becomes apparent. The reliance on click-bait and indignation to drive visits, listenership and audience engagement has left us with an anxious and fear-driven climate, where realistic and positive contributions to social discussion get drowned out by sensationalism and fear mongering.

We need, then, to recognise that as with contact tracing, the centralised solutions are not the only options, and that they are often the worst option in the long term. We need to understand that resilient and adaptable local solutions, grounded in local knowledge and awareness, will be better supported if it is carried by people with local knowledge, with local connections, and who can speak to local concerns. There is an urgent need to think again about what makes our news and information sources trusted? If the people who make and produce media on our behalf don’t want to involve us in the conversations about what makes it relevant, and walk the same streets, sit in the same cafes, and use the same public services as we do, then why do we allow them into our lives?

We need to boost local media in its many forms, both community and commercial, both in terms of the cash that is available for local service, and the recognition that is given to them by local public authorities, civic and community services and charities. If national government isn’t capable of supporting a localised media infrastructure, then we need to look to local government to enhance and provide support for local community-focussed media that can foster trusted, accountable and inclusive forms of reporting, discussion and engagement.

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://decentered.co.uk/are-anti-local-media-policies-harming-the-pandemic-response/

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