The misinformation pandemic is killing people. Time for News Corp to stand down — and stand up

Over the weekend, as thousands broke onto the streets of Australia’s locked-down cities to protest public health safety, it appeared that maybe we’ve been getting this pandemic wrong: it looks like the real danger is the pandemic of misinformation, and the Delta variant of COVID is just a symptom.

The main vectors of the misinformation spread? Same as it ever was: Facebook and News Corp. But are they creating demand? Or simply serving the comorbidities of conspiracy theorising, self-entitlement and social resentment they’ve long cultured?

This coming Sunday, the misinformation pandemic threatens to spread, with the dangerous Sky after dark variant arriving mainly on the Southern Cross Network in 17 regional markets across Victoria, southern NSW and Queensland.

The misinformation doesn’t just resonate with an extreme anti-vax minority; it is heard and amplified by overlapping groups from the vaccine-procrastinating and the vaccine-hesitant before being mediated through the vaccine-need minimisers into the hardcore anti-vaxxers.

Worse, by legitimating criticisms of public health measures, it acts to drag people through the stages of radicalisation. The result? The thousands organised and mobilised (largely on Facebook) onto the streets of Australia cities.

So far, the leading media sceptic voices on Sky have been more subdued than their Fox siblings in the US, more commonly interspersed with “Sure, get vaccinated, if you want… I did” asides, although always matched with a knowing nod, a de-legitimating touch of “I know a lot of our audience disagrees” to the hesitant and procrastinating.

In the US, Fox’s job of dismantling popular support from masking to lockdowns is done, at least among its core audience in the Republican heartland. In Australia, there’s still work to do.

On Sky, just two days after being required to read — hostage-video style — an apology for earlier misleading comments in an interview with COVID-minimiser Craig Kelly, Alan Jones was back on Thursday night with more heated-up rhetoric in a 13-minute rant about the NSW lockdown (TL;DR: “alarmism and hypocrisy”).

Meanwhile, stay-at-home orders are “extreme, untried China-style restrictions in free countries, propped up by propaganda… an epic disaster,” according to a pinned tweet on the feed of The Australian’s Washington correspondent Adam Creighton.

Fox has long moved past attacking lockdown. They’ve sailed past “just asking questions” to promoting and amplifying anti-vax messaging. In a two-week study early this month, Media Matters found that almost 60% of vaccine-related segments on the network included claims that undermined vaccination efforts.

Early last week, as the Delta variant saw cases surge, Fox seemed to pivot, with a recorded “get vaccinated” public service announcement and a Damascene “I believe in the science of vaccination” declaration by prime-time host Sean Hannity on Tuesday night. However, within 48 hours, faced with a revolt of their long-radicalised viewers, the pivot was over. “I never told anyone to get a vaccine!” Hannity assured viewers on Thursday night.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, COVID-minimisers and anti-vax groups stalk the hesitant and the procrastinating, often hiding in groups behind code that tricks the algorithm (“dance parties” = anti-vaxxers; “gone swimming” = vaccinated). Across Facebook Groups and WhatApp, the so-called Disinformation Dozen bring the content makeweight, with two-thirds of the misinformation liked, shared and forwarded across the platforms.  Over the weekend, the BBC reported hostile states (mainly Russia) were attempting to feed misinformation through influencers across social media.

Out of sight, the rhetorical tools of fake news, long tested through climate denialism, are being taken out of the box, given a trustworthy solidity through slick videos and out-of-context media grabs to promote conspiracy theories (even the 1918 flu was a government bio-weapon!) to support a movement.

 It’s a flood. It’s a pandemic. As US President Joe Biden said: “It’s killing people.”

The challenge for fact-based media is to both rebut the fake news of misinformation and avoid amplifying it. Unfortunately, when it comes to vaccines, too many journalists have brought the “if it bleeds, it leads” sensibility to health reporting, deciding that any of the tragic side-effects of Australia’s AstraZeneca workhorse need to be not only reported but headlined and amplified, over and over.

Shorn of the right context, even “true” facts can misinform and, in the time of COVID, fatally mislead.

Australia has its own special misinformation challenge: the difficulty of access caused by the vaccine rollout feeds both hesitancy and procrastination. It’s been providing plenty of justifications for “not me, not yet”.

The longer people have to wait, the longer they hesitate, the likelier they are to become marks of the anti-vaxxer con. The psychology of the mark suggests only News Corp will be able to cool them down — but at risk of losing their most enthusiastic audience.