Page - 205 - in VULNERABLE - The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19

205The Media Paradox and the COVID-19 Pandemic experience, academic or actual, in understanding politics or econom- ics, the courts, or the broad outline of the health care system, or cul- ture or sports or whatever—but not medicine per se, and certainly not pandemics. Who can blame them? Do elected officials have this knowledge? Pandemics do not happen often. Outbreaks in recent times have sometimes been rather localized—SARS in Toronto, Ebola in Africa—and based on different viruses than the coronavirus. SARS caused 774 deaths worldwide in 2003 and only 43 in Canada.5 The WHO declared that pandemic over six months after it began.6 Once it became obvious that COVID-19 was a virus many times more serious than SARS, the media was thrust perforce into reporting and explain- ing something new, ubiquitous, challenging, and foreign. The media is at an immediate disadvantage when faced with such stories, since only a handful of reporters are knowledgeable about public health and diseases. Any journalist can gab about poli- tics, even if they do not really know much about what is going on, but such gabbing is essentially harmless background noise. Reporting on a pandemic where lives are at stake and the economy shudders is a different matter. Lacking expertise in reporting on pandemics (with a few nota- ble exceptions), the media performed, as best it could and sometimes admirably, the essential duty of reporting the “facts” as they could be known. The media reported daily what public health officials and political actors said, and why they said it. Since public figures through- out the crisis spoke with forthrightness and dignity, sticking to facts however unpalatable, the media did not feel, as in other instances, that partisan or tactical considerations lay behind public utterances. The media, by and large, trusted these non-partisan public figures because the media itself had no access to conflicting information and did not ascribe ulterior motives to those in positions of authority. In general, trust in public figures is especially pronounced when it comes to medical and provincial officers of health, most of whom are women. These officers spoke frankly but with empathy and won almost universal respect. Political leaders are enjoying a jump in pop- ularity. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s and most of the provincial 5. “Summary of Probable SARS Cases with Onset of Illness from 1 November 2002 to 31 July 2003” (last visited 27 May 2020), online: World  Health  Organization <www.who.int/csr/sars/country/table2004_04_21/en>. 6. “SARS Outbreak Contained Worldwide” (5 July 2003), online: World  Health  Organization <www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2003/pr56/en/>.