I will post some more of the Times article as it is quite apt, not the whole thing though,
"It is aware that its own upper-middle-class centre-left bias is not the whole country, so it retreats to the lowest common denominators that we all can agree on. In this crisis, that amounts to: it’s all very sad, and dying is bad!
I think most of us want less monomaniacally depressive coverage and a spirit of concerned inquiry that sets trends and numbers in proper context.
Is the 100-plus frontline NHS staff deaths out of 600,000 patient-facing workers a lot or a little? How does it compare with elsewhere? The BBC could look at the experiences of countries such as Italy that might be coming our way, interrogate the different schools of thought among scientists and, while reporting criticism of the government where deserved, look behind the blockages and slow responses to identify the institutional factors that might lie behind them. Too much centralisation? Too little?
I have not, in the main, been a government-basher, but its communications strategy has contributed to the infantilisation of the public. There should have been more open admission of failures.
People know this is an impossible situation, and admissions of failure are a sign of strength, not weakness (see Emmanuel Macron and various German ministers). The robotic praising of the public for staying at home like good children should have been replaced with a more galvanising message, telling us how we can do something useful, even if it’s just to bash out a couple of face masks on an old sewing machine.
We don’t want false optimism but we would like to hear how the government and its experts are weighing up the various trade-offs for ending lockdown.
The emotionalisation of public discourse is sometimes put down to the feminisation of society, but what we are experiencing is more accurately (and gender-neutrally) attributed to what the American writer Matthew Crawford, in his new book Why We Drive, calls “safetyism”. To invoke safety is to claim the high ground of public-spiritedness, and it is difficult to argue for any course of action that might in the short term reduce human safety.
The feminist writer Louise Perry agrees: “The safetyism idea sounds right, and I’m sure it’s gendered to some degree, since women are more risk-averse, on average. But I wonder if low tolerance of premature death is a natural consequence of living in a very safe society, rather than the product of any particular ideology.”
Some of what we now need is just old-fashioned political leadership. Our leaders must cut through the fear and paralysis that results from our overemotional public conversation and set a course out of the lockdown that is measured — underpinned by data and arguments that we can all see. And the BBC can then report it calmly and rigorously, as in the olden days."