COVID-19: News Coverage 😷

At least in Brisbane it was shown delayed during the Morning Show as they were on an ad break. It was live on 10.


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and what is that supposed to achieve? Victoria is probably near its peak now with 130 people in ICU, what do we need 4000 more ICU beds for? Should be a good news story that the worst case scenario predicted from 2020 never eventuated.

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This has been clearly explained many times. I’d expect a journalist who’s been in the job for decades to understand and a former Health Minister in Davis to also understand. Whilst the government used a bit of spin initially, anyone utilising common sense should see through it.

Funding has been allocated and spent to purchase equipment and plan for a makeshift ICU to be setup at MCEC should it be required. This was done prior to the vaccines being developed and only days after we closed our international border and began setting up the quarantine systems around the country and a couple of weeks following the Ruby Princess debacle.

The equipment and plan is still valid, staffing will be the greatest hurdle, obviously we don’t have that many ICU nurses sitting by waiting for patients.

What’s more concerning is the Victorian Liberal’s fetishism around this and the way some off Broadway journalists continue to push it as an issue. They must want to see a lot of very sick and dying people to require the government to bring these beds into the system. At this point in time we don’t require 4000 ICU beds.

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OK, international comparisons are good, and yes Australia generally did very well, but it doesn’t change the facts that

  1. International quarantine is a federal responsibility & Morrison dropped the ball, leaving the states to do his job
  2. Hotels were never designed for quarantine; like apartments they have too much shared space, air flow, etc. resulting in quite a few people having caught COVID-19 in HQ, and in leaks into the community
  3. Morrison broke his promise that all Australians could come home by Christmas 2020; he didn’t build up quarantine (like he went slow on vaccines) but imposed arrival caps (the latter may have been demanded by states to not overwhelm hospital systems, but it is also because HQ wasn’t good enough to catch/stop COVID-19 coming in).

Proper outdoor cabin quarantine facilities are now being built, over a year late.
On a cost-benefit basis, Morrison should’ve built plenty of them last year, they would’ve paid for themselves by now, just from not having so many/so long lockdowns.

Morrison’s ‘ignore it & hope it goes away’ attitude to problems has bitten the country time and again (like the climate, the Black Summer bushfires when he snuck away to Hawaii, COVID-19, and more).

The media shouldn’t be letting him off. He’s failed his responsibilities and the media are failing theirs when they don’t point it out.

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What’s his point? Does he want beds to be set up right now and collect dust?

I’m not well versed in this, but aren’t the beds ready to go if needed? It’s not like hundreds would be needed in such a short period of time.

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Yes. It’s a very strange angle of attack from the Libs and the Twitter Right.

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12:30pm QLD conference




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QLD News bulletins tonight’s graphics to explain the road map.

Seven - 5.30 GC and 6pm had the same - very difficult to understand and read

Nine Gold Coast - simple and basic, easy to understand text based

Nine 6pm - huge effort on the graphics, perhaps overkill

10 - basic text message

ABC - text based, no effort in the main message report with later Casey Briggs report the usual graphs but not specifically related to the plan announced to day.

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Is media coverage of COVID-19 too negative?

Part of it is readers. During negative events, like pandemics, news demand dramatically increases. News organisations respond to the desires of their audience.

Fuck me, I wasn’t expecting to see a mea-culpa about the coverage, but this takes the pissy biscuit. Large swathes of media in this country have driven and contributed to some frankly shithouse reporting (and holding of account) that has contributed to many losing faith in the 4th estate.

The last nearly two years has seriously damaged the relationship many people have with media in this country, a lot of that will be irreparable, at a time when not only it is important to seek out trusted sources of information but that the task of doing this is made much harder by the increase in the dissemination of misinformation (especially online).

The performative nature of the daily press conferences (especially in NSW and VIC) were bad enough, but a number of outlets whose continual return to the well of the same “experts” (who quickly resorted to doomsday predictions) without acknowledging or addressing that a number of them had simply had their shithouse opinions broadcast unchecked across the nation and ended up stoking FUD and turned out to be incorrect.

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This was from Media watch this week

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Some of the graphics used tonight for the changes to guidelines in QLD.




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Front page of tomorrow’s The West Australian

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Gee I wonder what might have fueled these anti-vaxxers over in the west ? Surely not this headline from last May I’d imagine?

They’re a pack of hypocrites but I guess it’s better them getting on board in the end than not at all.

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Taken via abc news, 10 news first and nine news via YouTube and Facebook

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Both local Gold Coast bulletins choosing to overlay their coverage tonight with massive animated viruses despite also reporting “calls for calm”.


Nine’s bulletin opening title including the graphics.

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Also seen tonight.

Nine News Sydney Update


Nine News Brisbane promo


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