The unbiased view of journalism – the officially approved Age

I was going to talk about the influence of money on print and digital journalism but a story in The Age over the weekend is too interesting to not to look at as a case study.

Its full (SEO) headline is: “In the ICU where only Maria is vaccinated, others die in disbelief", which as some have pointed out introduces the feel of a religious text.

The opening sentence (or lede in ol-timey journalese) reinforces that impression: “In the middle of a row of unconscious coronavirus patients, Maria Roessen is a rare and wondrous sight.”

You could just as well say she is the “saved” among the “unsaved” – the sheep among the goats.

The gist of this Melissa Cunningham story is that Ms Roessen is the only person conscious in the ICU ward because she is the only one who was vaccinated against Covid.

In Ms Roessen’s quoted words: “If I had not been double vaccinated I would be dead. There are no two ways about it.”

“It was very scary. The staff here are angels. There are no words for them.”

In the old formulaic “straight” style of a news report you should have communicated the nub of the story in the first two paragraphs from a neutral observer’s point of view and the third paragraph should be a quote to back up what has been written.

In features and longer colour pieces, however, these rules are less observed.

The fourth par in this story reads: “But healthcare workers here (in the ICU) are no longer just fighting a war against coronavirus, they are now battling a never-ending scourge of misinformation about the disease.”

This is not a quote, it is the journalist’s summation of what she has been told with some extra spice of her own, such as the word “scourge”.

In some old-style newsrooms this would be called “editorialising” and handed back to the writer with the paragraph heavily crossed out.

It might also attract a polite admonishment along the lines of: “Who gives a flying f…ummm… fornication what you think? You report what people say, not tell us your opinion.”

Admittedly, this old-school journalism is increasingly out-of-favour.

News stories, even in the “serious” press, can contain more editorialising than a month’s worth of Andrew Bolt.

If you don’t like this, and I still often don’t, you can (naturally) blame the internet for making everyone think their opinion matters and has to be heard… ahem.

It could also reflect the cultural collapse of the idea of neutral or objective reporting and/or is increasingly a way to differentiate offerings with so many news sources.

These are subjects for another day.

Anyhow, this piece backs up the contention of “battling a never-ending scourge of misinformation” by telling us second-hand horror stories.

Here is an example: “Others come to the realisation too late that the deadly virus is real, begging for a vaccine before being hooked up to a ventilator”

This is very gothic and graphic but doesn’t give any specific examples to check the claim against.

It is a matter of taste but if I was subbing this with a free hand I would have been tempted to strike out some of these descriptive bits – but again I am a bit old-fashioned in terms of liking the “just the facts ma’am” reporting style (that supposed Dragnet cliche was apparently not a fact, check everything).

I would seriously consider omitting: “While the senior nurse has cared for countless patients with pneumonia over the years, nothing prepared her for COVID-19. It is the primal and desperate hunger for air that is etched in her mind.”

Many a journalist is a frustrated novelist and I would suggest the above paragraph, which contravenes the basic reporting rules of “show don’t tell” and assuming you know the “mind” of an interview subject, is more suited to that genre of writing.

Also, it steals the thunder from a good quote that follows about people having “panic in their eyes”. In general, let the “talent” (interviewee) be the star.

Anyway, it’s easy to be an armchair sub, every story is put out under pressure.

I always look at pieces I have edited with second thoughts or “I shouldas”.

Even beyond the cruel truth of the unvaccinated going disbelievingly to their fate, we are told even more provocatively that hospital staff (“angels”) are being abused by the people they are trying to save or their families.

ICU head Craig French says this:“The level of verbal assault our clinical staff have been exposed to in the last six to eight weeks is something I have never, ever experienced in my career.”

I do not doubt the veracity of what the reporter was told, nor what she saw.

As someone who believes strongly in vaccines and the protection they offer against Covid all the story details are plausible.

However, it still smacks to me of being “set-up” to communicate a particular message – and communicating someone’s message without challenging or questioning it is a concerning thing for journalists to do.

This is summed up by a famous dictum, that has a few variations and supposed authors: “News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising.”

The first question is how did the journalist get “behind the sealed off doors” of the ICU unit?

Obviously, the visit was arranged and you would think Ms Roessen, as a person recuperating, would have been checked beforehand to see that she was willing and able to do an interview.

No other names of patients are given in the piece, although some descriptions are.

This raises another privacy issue, were all the families of those people told a reporter would be visiting? Did they give permission?

Other than staff and the one patient, no one else is interviewed.

Obviously the unvaccinated ICU patients weren’t even able to do it, but could the reporter have found someone unvaccinated outside the ICU to at least allow us to understand their point of view directly rather than second-hand?

What is clear is that both the state and federal government very much wanted people to read this piece.

“A powerful article about the life saving importance of vaccination” tweeted Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt.

“Important story here – only wish The Age opinion writers would listen to their medical writers!” tweeted Victorian Chief Medical Officer Brett Sutton.

It is very defensible for a newspaper to run this type of story “in the public interest” and I do not doubt that most ICU Covid patients are unvaccinated.

However, when government ministers and health officials are giving such effusive praise to a story it begins to feel like “advertising” and they have big budgets to put across their public health messages.

The more concerning of the two tweets is Sutton’s.

It is, of course, totally inappropriate that an official account allocated to his (unelected, bureaucratic and supposedly neutral) position should presume to give public editorial advice to a newspaper.

The Age story states the inpatient influx of the Covid unvaccinated has resulted in “pressure… being felt in every corner of the hospital”.

It is not surprising, considering we have learnt how the unvaccinated are taking up all the ICU beds and staff are sometimes being verbally abused by them or their families, that underneath the piece the comments section is full of anger.

“The chances you’re never going to get through to these people and how about Dan brings in a new bill to impose a substantial surcharge for those non-vaxxed who are in ICU with COVID?” writes SRT.

There are many other similar sentiments expressed in ways even more harsh or pithy.

However, and this is the beauty of journalism in an interactive digital age, there is one lengthy comment that largely swims against the tide of righteous anger aimed at the unvaccinated.

It is not as emotive and sets out a case meticulously.

I would guess it was written by someone very familiar with Victoria’s health system and its administration.

What “Allan123” does, very impressively, is use publicly available data to explore the ICU situation in Victoria.

I’ll attempt to give the gist but the whole lengthy comment is reproduced below: The Premier’s promise of 4000 new ICU beds was always absurd.

However, data shows Victoria would have benefitted from having an extra 200 ICU beds during the 800-death second wave.

For the current Delta wave the state on average has LESS (my emphasis) ICU beds available than for the previous major deadly outbreak.

By contrast, NSW has twice Victoria’s ICU capacity available.

It would be interesting to compare the relative health budgets but it is unlikely NSW spends twice as much on health.

I will do further articles in “The unbiased view of journalism” series but I finish this case study with a couple of observations.

Two other descriptions of what journalism should ideally do are “speaking truth to power” and “the Fourth Estate“.

Both these terms convey what many think is an essential role of journalism, holding the powerful to account by printing what they might not want you to print.

When ministers and officials are big fans of your journalism, you can be pretty sure it is starting to stray into the definition of “advertising”.

The interviews for the ICU story are likely to have been lined up by government comms people and the reporter’s visit was most probably carefully curated.

In terms of printing something someone powerful might not like you’d have to say the comment by Allan123 contains more journalism than the story above.

Below is the full comment by Allan123

The article on Victorian ICU patients highlights yet again the strained position in our major hospitals.

When Daniel Andrews announced on the 1st of April last year he would spend $1.3 billion to establish 4000 ICU beds, those I have spoken to who work in the public hospital sector, and knew what it would entail, were incredulous. It was implausible to consider establishing 4000 new fully-equipped and staffed ICU beds within a few months when the current capacity was a mere 450. Even if you were able to buy the physical beds and all the associated equipment, where would you put them and from where would you employ the 20,000+ fully-trained staff needed to operate them? It wouldn’t just be ICU spaces, you would also need a multiple of 4000 hospital beds to support those recovering from a spell in ICU, or who were seriously ill but not needing ICU. Victoria last year only reported 14,950 public hospital beds in total. It would require the building of a number of new public hospitals equivalent in size to the Royal Melbourne, or Monash Medical Centre. In essence it was a paper exercise in response to some wildly-exaggerated modelling of the impact of a major uncontrolled COVID outbreak on Victoria. It was a mirage, with little thought given to how it would be accomplished. The best that could have been achieved was an “army hospital” at Jeff’s Shed.

In reality the establishment of 4000 ICU beds was never a serious project. The prompt decisions by the Prime Minister to close international borders and the National Cabinet to impose lockdowns made it unnecessary. That doesn’t mean that more ICU beds weren’t necessary to prevent the public hospital system from being overloaded. We haven’t been told how many physical beds were actually purchased in Victoria but we know from Health department data provided to the Federal government that for the whole of the second wave last year ICU available capacity did not exceed what was already in place at the start of the pandemic. It hovered at around 450 beds. With 19,000 cases and 800 deaths occurring during the second wave it is not difficult to conclude that one to two hundred more ICU beds would have been fully utilised had they been available.

If we look at the current Delta outbreak in Victoria we can see from the Health department data that up until the end of September the state on average had less ICU beds available than during the second wave last year. The data shows that up to one third of the available capacity has been used for COVID patients. It is only in the last few weeks that available ICU capacity has been increased by up to 50 beds. This supports the view that at least 150 additional ICU beds should have been established to avoid impacting on normal hospital operations requiring ICU capacity. It is for this reason that even some category 1 elective surgery has been postponed until next year with surgeons unable to be assured that the necessary ICU capacity would be available.

The comparison data for ICU capacity in the weekly Common Operating Picture reports show that during the pandemic NSW has had almost DOUBLE the number of ICU beds compared to Victoria. The reports for NSW also show that during the current Delta outbreak the utilisation of ICU capacity for COVID patients only exceeded 20% for two weeks with the maximum being 27%. Hence there has been less impact on ICU capacity than in Victoria, which has been above 20% for the last 5 weeks and as high as 33%. Of course, as we learned on Friday, the actual Victorian % is much higher if you include COVID patients that are no longer infectious. According to the CEO of the Austin Hospital on Friday the actual figure for Victoria was 36% but the government was only reporting 22% for that day.

It is hoped that as the current Delta outbreak starts to decline the Andrews government accelerates the construction of more public hospital capacity, including at least 100 more fully-staffed and equipped ICU beds. Based on announced timeframes for new hospitals there is currently at least a two year gap until any material change is expected to occur. Apart from accommodating future COVID outbreaks the additional capacity will be needed to make an appreciable difference to the list of tens of thousands of Victorians who are currently awaiting elective surgery.