A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic

by Laura Dodsworth

  Maybe the journalists also suspected the video was set up, but the lure of clickbait was too great. Journalists should verify their sources: was this video verified? I contacted the journalists who wrote the articles about the video for the Mail Online, The Sun and The Metro to ask about its provenance, and what they had done to check its authenticity. None of them replied.

  Another disturbing video showed people in China being dragged from their homes by officials in hazmat suits. Had they refused to quarantine? Were they knowingly infecting people? The video tells us that the Chinese government had started doing door-to-door temperature checks. Were these people being taken because they had a high temperature? Is the whole thing real or fake? We have no idea, yet the video will have played its part in stimulating fear.

  Headlines referred to ‘zombies’, ‘killer bug’ and ‘apocalypse’. Over and over, these Chinese Covid videos were described as ‘disturbing’ by newspapers and commentators. Horror film and End of Days references seeped through. A Sun headline ‘Zombieland’ travelled with the speed of a virulent sneeze through the copycat global media.

  In 2020 we learnt that fear sells better than sex. If it scares, it airs. If it bleeds, it leads. Finally, the obsession with women’s physical charms took a backseat, but maybe because it was carjacked by fear porn. I could almost reminisce about the days of quaint media sexism and objectification – oh, if all we had to worry about was a celebrity up-skirt shot, or bare boobs in The Sun, rather than daily death tolls!

  Some news outlets and commentators wondered if these videos were proof that China was hiding how bad the situation was, rather than exaggerating it. But how plausible were they? The epidemic never transpired to look like this. People haven’t suddenly fallen flat on their faces, to be immediately surrounded by hazmat-suited medics anywhere except these videos. They depicted a totally overblown horror-story vision of Covid-19. If the rest of the world had Covid, China appears to have had ‘Stunt Covid’.

  The videos were shared many millions of times, but it’s impossible to quantify now, as in some cases they have been removed, including the probable first sources on Chinese social media sites such as Weibo and TikTok. The videos originated in China: were they a prank or were they a psyop (a covert psychological operation)? The fact-checking website Snopes investigated the source of the videos and couldn’t find them before the event they supposedly showed, so they might be from January 2020 and that’s all we know.

  Whether they were plausible, prank or psyop, the videos planted the seed of an idea that the virus had terrifying consequences. They also – at least inadvertently – ‘seeded’ the idea of a very strong medical and authoritarian response. There will be more on the importance of ‘seeding’ in Chapter 7, ‘The tools of the trade’. If you don’t remember the videos, or didn’t watch them, I do urge you to view them to compare this early glimpse of ‘Stunt Covid’ with what actually transpired.

  This book focuses on the UK state, Covid and fear, and this chapter is about the UK’s media and social media, but it’s relevant to mention another Chinese influence before continuing. While I don’t wish to plunge you into the murky waters of anything that could be labelled ‘conspiracy theory’ so early in our journey into fear, the fact is the Covid stunt videos might suggest an attempt to create fear, and there is yet another reason to suspect deliberate spreading of misinformation.

  It is difficult to ascertain the extent of undercover social media propaganda, but a 2017 study How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument2 estimated that from 250,000 to two million Chinese people are hired by their government to post approximately 448 million ‘fake’ social media posts per year. These undercover pro-government commentators set out to be ordinary citizens as they steer conversations in the ‘correct direction’ for the Chinese Communist Party. They are referred to as the ‘50c army’ as they are reportedly paid 50c per post.

  Propublica3 analysed fake and hijacked Twitter accounts and found more than 10,000 suspected fake Twitter accounts pushing propaganda about Hong Kong. Accounts then switched their focus from Hong Kong to Covid-19. These tweets were not aimed at the Chinese living in China, as Twitter is blocked by the Great Firewall. Some were in Chinese and aimed at ethnic Chinese living overseas, but many of the tweets were in English. They were aimed at us. And they waged an unofficial PR campaign in support of the Chinese government’s handling of Covid.

  Fake Twitter accounts, including bots, unleashed pro-China propaganda when Italy locked down. Italy was the first European country to sign up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a global trade, infrastructure and cultural network, generally considered to be a way to extend China’s economic and political influence. China’s medical aid to Italy was described as a ‘Health Silk Road’ by President Xi Jinping. Twitter was flooded with #forzaCinaeItalia (Go China, go Italy) and #grazieCina (thank you China). These hashtagged messages of support are thought to be from Chinese social media propagandists, the 50c army, not genuine Italian citizens. Is it a coincidence that Italy was the first country in Europe to lock down? And that this followed Italy and China’s trade and development agreement? Did this social media campaign influence the public and the politicians?

  Michael P. Senger wrote for The Tablet4 about China’s online propaganda campaign. He noticed that these 50c army Twitter users were going a step further, taking ‘a darker turn’, by criticising US Governors who did not issue statewide lockdowns, deliberately trying to influence US policy.

  On 11 March 2020, in an interview with the BBC, David Halpern, head of the UK’s Behavioural Insight Team, talked about the plan to ‘cocoon’ the elderly until herd immunity had been acquired.5 The concept of herd immunity is well-established in science and had not been considered controversial until that point. Interestingly, by 13 March Chinese state-affiliated Twitter accounts were criticising the approach:

  ‘Sweden will not test people with mild symptoms. UK and Germany tried to build a “herd immunity”, which will expose many people to the risk of death. These countries are unwilling to invest more resources in epidemic control. What about human rights? What about humanitarianism?’6

  This is rich from the country that literally welded people into their homes and instigated a brutal and experimental lockdown. And that’s without getting started on wider human rights violations, such as the internment of Uygur people in Xinjiang. As a Chinese satirical song that also did the rounds on social media goes: ‘After brainwashing, wash your hands and your face.’

  Some things naturally proliferate on social media: they ‘go viral’. Fear is one of those things. In 2020 it was given wings. Understanding who helped it fly, how and why should be of immense concern to our government and to all of us.

  Other countries mimicked China’s lockdown. Confusingly, the World Health Organization didn’t recommend lockdowns, yet at the same time lauded China’s approach. The West was largely horrified by footage of Wuhan residents trapped in their homes, yet we enacted a similar totalitarian policy. The Sun reported that ‘devastating footage appears to show coronavirus patients being welded inside their homes and “left to die” as China battles to contain the fatal disease’.7

  The newspapers which shared Chinese videos without verifying their authenticity lacked journalistic rigour. What followed throughout 2020 and into 2021 was an incessant onslaught of doom-mongering through TVs, newspapers, radio and the internet. In the rest of this chapter I will look at the reasons why the UK media might have reported the epidemic in the way it did.

  The constant Covid news and daily death tolls meant they dominated our thoughts. In all likelihood, Covid, death, lockdown and the effects of restrictions have been your brain’s main go-tos. The availability heuristic, or availability bias, describes a mental shortcut which means that we recall the most immediate examples of things. When a matter is extremely pressing, it crowds out our ability to think of other things. If Covid deaths are talked a
bout every day then you think about them every day, at the expense of other types of deaths, but also at the expense of much of life. Our cognitive roadmap was redrawn in 2020. You may have been driving, but the government and media had control of your satnav.

  The media has a responsibility to inform us, but it also has a responsibility to be balanced. The coverage of daily death tolls, the ghoulish headlines and the scary graphs permeated our brains. Some of the people I have interviewed told me about the considerable effect that the media had on their perception of the world and their subsequent mental wellbeing.

  The media should serve the public trust and owes its readers and viewers the best available version of the truth, ascertained by careful questioning. The British public expect the highest standards from the BBC, which is probably why it hurt so much that it spread alarm, exemplified by Sarah’s mother (p37). Of all the news providers, it is the BBC we would most expect to take a careful step back from the furore and fear and offer a balanced perspective.

  I talked to former BBC journalist Sue Cook. She told me she had been surprised and disappointed by the BBC’s one-sided coverage of Covid, and the lack of vigorous questioning. A lifetime listener, she even turned off Radio 4 this year because she couldn’t bear to listen to it anymore. For such a BBC stalwart it was a bitter discovery that the BBC’s ‘standards of truth and impartiality have gone’. She said, ‘My fear is that there is now no solid, consistent media outlet you can trust. You have to cast around and find people you can trust. It might be someone on Facebook or YouTube, and it’s a jungle out there.’

  The BBC has a Charter which promises to ‘provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them’. In the BBC’s guidelines on the ‘Use of Language’ there are specific undertakings in times of terror, war and disaster. One promise is that ‘care is required in the use of language that carries value judgements’.8 Some of the BBC’s coverage of Covid sits a little uneasily with its Charter, although some welcomed the value judgements. BBC Newsnight presenter Emily Maitliss received both praise and criticism from different quarters for her ‘editorialising’ when she criticised Dominic Cummings on 26 May for ‘breaking the rules’. There were 24,000 complaints to the BBC, which agreed she had breached impartiality guidelines.

  The BBC appeared to highlight stories which would create fear, focusing on negative outcomes rather than recovery. One headline read ‘Luton teen speaks of “really scary” time her dad caught virus’. Another read ‘I had my funeral planned in my head’.

  ‘Italian economy takes a body blow’ is a subtle example of a BBC headline on 1 March 2020 which was less impartial than we might expect. ‘Body blow’ is a metaphor that conjures a painful impact on the economy. Rather than leading with a fact about the drop in GDP, or the prediction of recession, this headline is a more colourful, editorialised headline. I asked Cook her opinion: ‘The term “body blow” is acceptable if it describes a literal fact, but not to dramatise and exaggerate. That’s wrong.’ The BBC’s coverage was so remarkably fear-mongering during the epidemic that in January 2021 Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson labelled the organisation the ‘Body Bag Corporation’.9

  I deliberately chose a subtle illustration here because it’s easily forgiven. The issue is it wasn’t an isolated example: it was one of hundreds of dramatised headlines about a single virus. They all add up to create a more powerful impression. Among a wealth of other articles about the epidemic in Italy, this headline created a feeling of ‘doom-mongering’, according to Cook: ‘All the examples from Italy dramatise things to sound important and make people sit up and listen. I wonder whether the content is less important than the dramatic impact. Ultimately, it’s destructive of trust.’ I asked the BBC journalist who wrote the story about this choice of headline and for a wider discussion about the BBC’s Covid coverage, but he declined to answer.

  Sky News reported on 19 March 2020 that army vehicles were brought in to transport dead bodies in Bergamo. This would make you think that army trucks were needed because there were so many bodies. In fact, according to the Italian Funeral Industry Federation,10 70% of undertakers had to stop work to quarantine at the start of the outbreak, so the army was drafted in for a one-off transport of 60 coffins. The startling image of the army transporting the dead was not explained, but it appeared on Sky and other broadcasters and in newspapers here in the UK and around the world, seeding the idea of an almost unmanageable number of corpses.

  One reason that the same stories proliferate globally, and that sources are not always thoroughly fact-checked by news outlets, is the reliance on news agencies. There are three main global news agencies: Associated Press, Reuters and Agence-France Presse. Much of the text, images and video you see in broadcast and print has come from those three agencies. This means there is far less diversity in reporting than you might think, especially on foreign news. If one of the big three agencies doesn’t report on it, as far as most of the Western media goes, it didn’t happen. And agency reporting of geopolitical stories can be subtly deduced from a similarity in tone, as well as the same images and sometimes text.

  Journalists are human and subject to the same fears as the rest of us. We are all made of the same psychological stuff. Perhaps their fears clouded their judgement and reporting. They might not have had time, in the teeth of the crisis, to thoroughly investigate every image and video supplied by the picture desk. Yet the result was weeks and months of relentlessly emotional bad news that lacked context and rigour.

  How did the relentless fear in the media affect politicians? They also read the news and live with the same cultural wallpaper, so they are not immune to the effects. In an interesting insight, Matt Hancock, the Minister for Health, revealed in an an interview11 on LBC Radio in 2021 that he had placed large orders for Covid vaccines as a result of watching the fictional film Contagion. This seems to have turned out well for our vaccine supplies, but it’s a remarkable admission about the influence of a sensationalist Hollywood film (about a fictional virus that kills 30% of people who catch it) on the Health Secretary.

  Fear and time are two factors that might explain the fear-mongering, but there are two more. I asked a broadsheet comment writer why newspapers used so many doom-laden headlines. ‘Narcissism and greed drive this,’ he said. ‘Pay rises are linked to the top-performing articles. The journalists who get the highest views for articles and the most subscriptions generated for the paper get the biggest pay rises. You want your stories to get the most views.’

  I asked him for an example: ‘When SAGE came out with the prediction of half a million deaths, the newspaper instantly published it to get the headline out immediately, rather than interrogate it. Within five minutes it’s out there as a headline. Then a few hours later there’s a more sceptical article. But the first story has had the impact, not the sceptical one. When Whitty and Vallance predicted 4,000 deaths a day in October we knew straight away that would be the headline. But a good journalist should say, this doesn’t pass the sniff test, they should research it and not publish it verbatim. Sure, a couple of days later there’s an article dissecting the numbers, but it doesn’t get the same take up as the first story.’ The article gets the views. The journalist gets the pay rise. We have panic. The damage is done.

  Not all journalists fed us a constant diet of fear. Like Sue Cook, I also regretfully switched off Radio 4. I found Talk Radio, which had a broader variety of guests. Talk Radio presenter Dan Wootton’s motto in 2020 was, ‘No spin, no bias and no hysteria.’ I spoke to him about his approach on his radio show and also his column in The Sun.

  Wootton had Covid at the same time as Boris Johnson, meaning he understood it could be a seriously unpleasant illness, but from the beginning he didn’t agree lockdown was the right policy economically, socially or in terms of other health costs. He said he thought that on the day the Office for National Statistics revealed that there had been 26,000 non-Covid excess deaths between March a
nd September in homes,12 the media would ‘get it’ and balance the harms and costs of lockdown: ‘It was close to the Covid death toll at the time. It got some coverage in the newspapers but I remember the news bulletins didn’t do it. The reporting has been focused on Covid deaths and the consequences of lockdown have been ignored.’ I asked why he thought that was: ‘I think there is a groupthink mentality. If the BBC covers a story then ITV and Channel 4 do it too. A lot of journalists will take the easy option.’

  A broadcast journalist who spoke to me off the record said that most people on her editorial team had a different perspective on the epidemic to her. She described herself as ‘fighting the good fight in the newsroom’ but being outnumbered by her team. Maybe they had consumed the information provided by the government more uncritically than this journalist. It was a crusade for her to push for balance, such as for statistics on recoveries to be given alongside deaths, more detailed breakdowns about ICU occupancy in hospitals and PCR false positives.

  The Number 10 press briefings were characterised by bland and unchallenging questions from journalists, such as ‘When will the epidemic be over?’ A Press Gazette reader poll13 concurred. When it asked ‘Do you think journalists have done a good job of holding the Government to account during the daily UK Covid-19 press briefings?’ 70% said no.

  Weak questions fail to hold politicians to account, fail to uncover essential information which should be in the public domain, fail to provide balance (which would settle minds and emotions) and they also damage journalism itself. Another Press Gazette poll14 showed that public trust in journalists had been eroded. When asked ‘Do you think trust in journalism has increased since the Covid-19 epidemic?’ 48% said no and 19% said it had remained the same. Only 33% said it had increased. Another survey15 conducted by Edelman’s Trust found that, globally, journalists were the least trusted source for coronavirus updates.