I have been speaking publicly about COVID since early 2020. I’ve interviewed clinicians, scientists, psychologists, economists, and policymakers across the world. But one question has continued to trouble me more than most:
Why did journalism lose its capacity for critical analysis during the pandemic?
This wasn’t a marginal failure. It wasn’t about one headline or one outlet. It was global, coordinated in effect if not in intent, and deeply consequential. Journalism—an institution designed to interrogate power—largely stopped doing so at the very moment it mattered most.
That is why I recently sat down with journalist and BIG Media president Rob Driscoll for a long-form conversation about journalism itself: what it is meant to do, how it failed under pressure, and what the cost of that failure has been.
When Journalism Changed Its Role
At the start of the pandemic, something subtle but profound occurred. Journalism shifted from its traditional role—questioning, contextualising, challenging—to something closer to message reinforcement.
The media did not simply report what public health officials said. It amplified those statements without scrutiny, often without even basic engagement with the underlying data. Questioning experts became taboo. Context became dangerous. Uncertainty was treated as a threat rather than an honest reflection of real-time science.
In medicine, disagreement is not a flaw—it is the engine of progress. Yet in journalism, disagreement was reframed as irresponsibility. This reversal should concern all of us.
The Collapse of Adversarial Journalism
Rob spoke candidly about his own career in newsrooms and the pressures journalists face: advertisers, audience metrics, editorial hierarchies, and professional survival. None of this is new.
What was new was how completely adversarial journalism collapsed.
Across countries and media organisations, journalists relied on a narrow group of approved experts and rarely challenged claims—even when government data contradicted them. Excess deaths, age-stratified risk, collateral harm, and long-term consequences were either ignored or surfaced far too late.
This wasn’t the result of a single conspiracy. It was something more troubling: a broken media model that rewards fear, outrage, and certainty over accuracy and humility.
Fear as a Business Model
Modern journalism is driven by attention, and fear is a powerful currency.
Rob made a point that deserves repeating:
“most news organisations are focused on the size of their audience, not the intelligence of it.”
During the pandemic, fear kept people glued to screens, dashboards, and breaking news banners. That fear translated into revenue, relevance, and influence. But fear also distorts judgment. It discourages correction. It incentivises doubling down rather than admitting error.
And when journalism chooses fear over context, the public pays the price.
Science Without Scientific Literacy
Another critical failure was journalism’s misunderstanding of science itself.
Science is not a collection of settled truths—it is a process. Hypotheses evolve. Evidence accumulates. Models fail and are revised. During COVID, this natural uncertainty was framed as incompetence or danger, rather than honesty.
Journalists demanded absolute certainty from scientists and punished those who expressed doubt. In real-world medicine, provisional truths are the norm. Journalism, however, presented evolving science as a moral battleground rather than an intellectual one.
Silence Has Consequences
Perhaps the most serious cost of journalistic silence is what is happening now.
We are still seeing excess deaths across multiple countries that do not fit pre-pandemic trends. These patterns demand investigation. Yet the same media institutions that once ran daily COVID dashboards now show little appetite for asking why mortality has not returned to baseline.
When journalism avoids uncomfortable questions, those questions do not disappear. They migrate—to independent platforms, to alternative media, to public distrust.
Silence does not protect trust. It erodes it.
Why Independent Media Emerged
BIG Media exists because Rob reached a breaking point. He described watching pandemic reporting diverge further and further from the data—and deciding that if journalism would not change from within, it would have to be rebuilt from the outside.
Independent media is not perfect. It carries risks of its own. But it arose for a reason: because legacy institutions failed to do their job.
The solution is not to silence independent voices. It is for mainstream journalism to remember what it was meant to be.
Why We Must Talk About This
Many people are tired of COVID. They want to move on. I understand that instinct.
But refusing to examine what went wrong is dangerous. Emergencies will happen again—pandemics, climate events, geopolitical crises. If journalism defaults to obedience rather than inquiry, we will repeat the same mistakes.
This conversation with Rob Driscoll was not about settling scores. It was about accountability, humility, and reform. If journalism is to regain public trust, it must rediscover its courage.
And if the public is to be well served in the next crisis, silence cannot be an option again.
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