New York Times front page, Sunday May 24 2020
The front page of The New York Times on Sunday, May 24, 2020 (Image: Sipa USA/Richard B. Levine)

There’s a COVID-sized hole that has suddenly popped up in Australia’s journalism. One minute, news about the pandemic was everywhere. Next minute? It’s morphed into metaphorical fish-and-chips wrapping.

Where’s it gone? And what’s going to fill it?

Sure, there’s still the ongoing reporting about case numbers, vaccinations and health orders. But almost without us noticing, COVID-19 has slipped away as the dominant story shaping the journalism of our time as the country shakes off the past two years.

Australia’s media challenge is compounding. There’s no social consensus over how we should consider the past two years. A triumph of national unity? A harsh two years of social policing? A moment to be celebrated, resented — or just forgotten?

In the traditional media, editors and journalists are tip-toeing across the minefield of the country’s emotions as we transition to post-COVID times. In the “let’s not call it freedom day” reopening in Melbourne this past weekend, the reporting of Victorians coming out into the light was cautiously low-key.

The ABC, particularly its Melbourne-based reporters and presenters, responded by continuing with the corporation’s two-year-long “we’ve got this” enthusiasm. Nine, Seven and the News Corp tabloids nodded it off as a good-news story, something like the weather.

In The Australian it got darker, with Gideon Haigh spitting out “No gratitude, no pride, no relief … just quiet seething”. It’s a key piece for the moment, a reminder for political leaders that thanks are fleeting.

Two valuable political lessons have already emerged from the pandemic. Despite 40-odd years of neoliberalism, in crisis people turn to the government. And, perhaps more surprisingly, governments are — if later rather than sooner — able to read public grumblings to surrender the extraordinary powers they took on to manage the pandemic.

News media have had a more mixed pandemic. The early urgency to understand just what was going on boosted readership and subscriptions, hurrying national media on through the necessary shift to a reader-supported business model (and equally hurrying on the death of traditional local media).

Early media backing for public health lockdowns empowered governments to move quickly to suppress the virus. But the lure of a continuing catastrophism urged on the attractions of policing as a public health solution. And the media’s amplification of AstraZeneca concerns contributed to early vaccine hesitancy.

The media’s “who’s to blame?” storyline (from 2020’s bonking security guards through to 2021’s outdoor pub-crawlers) acted to transfer responsibility for the disease from governments’ long-term underfunding of public health to ordinary people “doing the wrong thing”.

Meanwhile state premiers reached over the media’s heads, talking directly to their audience through daily press conferences and social media.

Now, like political leaders, media organisations are struggling to grasp the public mood, with their uncertainty on show in the print front page and television news lead (which tell us what the publisher thinks is important for us to know) and the home page (more algorithmically driven to tell us what stories readers want to read).

It suggests there’s an enthusiasm to hurry to the post-COVID times where perhaps we can simply forget the lacuna of the past two years with a “well, that was then” shake-off.

No surprises there. It’s the same way society has always tended to deal with trauma. Big social events — wars and disease alike — tend to be tamped down until enough time has passed to blunt the sharp edges. Even the great Spanish Flu pandemic vanished from memory until COVID-19 came rhyming along a hundred years later.

That’s what’s determining the federal government’s pondering over election timing: go now, while people still remember their pandemic management, or wait until next year in the hope people have forgotten all about it.