The unvaccinated received a wave of press coverage over the weekend, which they used to rehabilitate their reputations and campaign for the return of their freedoms. Other groups made vulnerable by Covid were lower down the media's pecking order.
Make influenza great again protester with gas mask in front of fire Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
On Wednesday morning TNVZ’s Breakfast featured a student with Type 1 Diabetes, a man with a heart condition, and a woman with cancer.
They were on the show to speak on the anxieties they felt about the government’s looming decision to drop vaccine mandates and other Covid restrictions.
The story was a welcome outlier in the week's media coverage.
In the days prior, the media spotlight fell on a group with a very different perspective on Covid restrictions: the unvaccinated and anti-mandate campaigners pushing for the return of their freedoms.
On Sunday, Stuff ran “Faces of a Protest” which delivered details of some of the 250 people arrested at the Parliament occupation.
That article was at least valuable in demonstrating the protesters weren’t just working class, as some had claimed, but included a collection of entertainers, self-employed businessmen, Hollywood producers, osteopaths, and teachers.
The Herald ran a similar but more soft-focus story.
It profiled three protesters who ran the line that their peaceful stand against mandates had been hijacked by thugs or soured by police incitement.
Not to be outdone, Stuff also carried a long read about “ending the mandate pain” which gave space for unvaccinated people to explain how mandates had “ruined the magic of being a New Zealander”.
These stories were essentially safe spaces for their subjects to present their version of events virtually unchallenged. Some resembled the PR set pieces sometimes set up to restore a celebrity’s damaged reputation.
Hear Hayden talk about these stories on Midweek Mediawatch here
They included some questionable claims published almost unchallenged.
For instance, Christchurch real estate agent Brendan Shefford told the New Zealand Herald the protest was “moving” and peaceful, blaming its eventual descent into violence on “thugs” that showed up at the end.
In fact, footage shows protesters lit the fires on Parliament’s lawn and, as the commentator Morgan Godfery wrote on Twitter, these supposedly peaceful protesters walked by a tree with a noose on it, and speakers bloviating about ‘Jewcinda’ or hanging politicians.
They must have at least suspected there was a dark side to proceedings, he said.
Shefford also claimed that the government could have beaten back Covid by encouraging more people to exercise, rather than focusing on vaccination.
That false assertion went unchallenged.
Meanwhile, Stuff’s feature on mending the “mandate pain” blithely asserted that the unvaccinated Auckland property developer Ben Visser was “no conspiracy theorist himself”.
That claim arguably needed interrogating.
Even if Visser was articulate and sensible, he has still decided not to take a medicine that will protect him against a virus that has now killed at least 6 million people worldwide, and according to excess death figures, likely several million more than that.
It’s likely he’s taken at least some spurious information on board from sources that are conspiracy-adjacent.
By failing to employ a truth sandwich, Stuff and the Herald’s stories depart from what’s regarded as good practice when reporting questionable claims and misinformation.
But they’re also just galling for many readers.
Herald data journalist Keith Ng articulated that feeling of annoyance in a series of tweets. He wrote that these stories go out of their way to recognise the pain felt by anti-vax protesters while failing to acknowledge or address the feelings they provoke in others.
In his eyes, that includes a “sense of betrayal” over the sense that the unvaccinated are undermining our national effort to combat Covid, usually for spurious or unexplained reasons.
It can stick in the craw to see a damaging decision glossed over or accepted unquestioningly.
Ng also speaks of a sense of provocation: of the relatively common belief among even the more “reasonable” anti-mandate crowd that those that get vaccinated and comply with Covid restrictions are “stupid, cowardly, blindly obedient sheeple", and that they are the “smart ones, the brave ones, the ones who are truly free”.
It's legitimate for journalists to tell these stories. Unvaccinated people have been excluded from society in historic ways, and it’s worth covering their experiences.
But it’s also worth noting they aren't alone, and others don’t get the same amount of recognition or PR.
In the media, we speak less about other groups who are isolated or made unsafe by Covid outbreaks, and who are put further at risk by the decisions of anti-vaxxers.
We don’t write as much about the experiences of cancer patients, unvaccinated children, or disabled people in the context of Covid.
They don’t get a series of full-page spreads in the Sunday papers to express their feelings of betrayal or isolation. They don’t get reporters knocking down their door to broadcast their problems to the nation.
Maybe that’s because their problems are seen as mundane, or a fact of everyday life. Maybe it’s because they’re not as loud. They’re certainly not camping out on parliament’s lawn, throwing bricks, or burning tents.
But the lack of attention must sting because, unlike anti-vaxxers, these groups don’t have a choice about their vulnerability to the virus. They can’t head down to the local pharmacy and get rid of their immuno-compromised status by way of a free, safe injection.
They’re far less lucky, and deserve at least as much sympathy from the media as those whose freedoms have been temporarily curbed by their own choices.
