Two an a half years ago, just as I was about to launch this website and formally begin the HerSayMedia journey, the world shut down. Social encounters stopped, human contact itself being potentially deadly. Unimaginable numbers of people went on to die.
In the weeks leading to 23 March 2020, when the British lockdown came into force, I had been planning a media training workshop for trade experts. It was a group of female economists who belonged to an online network and were converging on London for the first time.
Delegates from Canada, Belgium and various other countries started dropping out due to new travel restrictions. Then, a week before the official order to stay at home, the venue we had booked cancelled the engagement and shut down. I wrote to the rest of the group to suggest we postpone our plans and wait for the wave to pass. “See you in a few weeks” we told each other in the emails that followed.
It seemed impossible that the medieval plague seen on our TV screens engulfing Italy would soon be on our shores. It also seemed inevitable. I’m only beginning to realise now how much time we ended up living suspended between these two states in the thirty months that followed. It is still too hard, at some level, to put one’s arms around the experience.
Twenty twenty-one brought a very enjoyable temporary stint at the British Academy – entirely remotely as new waves of infection raged on.
From my perch there (and by ‘there’ I mean sitting in a hastily purchased office chair at my kitchen table) I saw remarkable changes in the way news interviews were conducted and witnessed the public rise of some truly amazing female experts in epidemiology, mathematical modelling and public health.
My observations about this period could fill ten blogposts but as I relaunch HerSayMedia I wanted to focus on just a few.
Communication is not broadcasting. Nightly the Government reeled off instructions to the nation from a podium, with the aim to show themselves busy and in charge, the focus firmly on (often questionable) good news announcements. But all day long, on every news programme, experts explained the latest data and the evolving situation to the best of their knowledge and ability at that point, acknowledged people’s frustrations and fears and gently dealt with interviewers’ wishful thinking.
I’m thinking of sad-eyed Prof Christina Pagel, director of UCL's Clinical Operational Research Unit and a member of Independent SAGE, patiently explaining infection curves to broadcasters pushing for early re-openings and a bit of patriotic boosterism.
Good communication requires compassion. You can take a hundred media training courses to learn what to wear, how to hone your message, what to do with your hands. But no one can teach you how to show you care about the people at the other side of the information you’re sharing, especially if you don’t. Good expert communication is not point-scoring, showing off how much you know or how right you are/were. It involves putting yourself in the shoes of your inexpert, fascinated or frightened audience and talking to them like human beings you care about. A few men do this effectively – Money Saving expert Martin Lewis springs to mind. All really good female experts somehow manage to.
I’m thinking of Prof. Devi Sridhar, who holds a Personal Chair in Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, changing the pictures in the background wall of her house at each Zoom interview to keep the children watching entertained (a young viewer spotted this pattern and their parents were delighted when Sridhar confirmed this was intentional).
Authority does not reside in the setting. The then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, standing nightly in a £2.6m Briefing Room at a lectern festooned in crime scene tape-like warnings, saw his authority ebb with each new killer wave he had been telling us would not happen.
Meanwhile tired experts in drab casual gear spoke to us from their cluttered kitchen and messy bedrooms, their clip-frame art and their children’s sports trophies peeking in the background.
The public increasingly sensed the difference, I think, between those wanting to appear in charge and give good news and those spending every waking hour of their day applying actual expertise to a stream of non-compliant datasets.
Although Covid keeps being described as being ‘over’ the pandemic is ongoing and we still don’t know how ‘this’ ends. New disasters are befalling our nation: the threat of fiscal and financial meltdown, the spectre of blackouts. The thing is, it never ends. Life is continuously challenging and endlessly interesting and strange and scary.
We need, more than ever, compassionate and engaging experts on our screens to help us make sense of the world to the best of their knowledge and ability at any given point. Be that expert.
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