Power, Media and the Covid-19 Pandemic

Framing Public Discourse

Stuart Price, Ben Harbisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000532616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection provides an in-depth, interdisciplinary critique of the acts of public communication disseminated during a major global crisis.

Encompassing contributions from academics working in the fields of politics, environmentalism, citizens' rights, state theory, cultural studies, journalism, and discourse/rhetoric, the book offers an original insight into the relationship between the various social forces that contributed to the 'Covid narrative'. The subjects analysed here include: the performance of the 'mainstream' media, the quality of political 'messaging' and argumentation, the securitised state and racism in Brazil, the growth of 'catastrophic management' in UK universities, emergent journalistic practices in South Africa, homelessness and punitive dispossession, the pandemic and the history of eugenics, and the Chinese media's attempt to disguise discriminatory practices. This is one of the first comparative studies of the various rationales offered for state/corporate intervention in public life. Delving beneath established political tropes and state rhetoric, it identifies the power relations exposed by an event that was described as unprecedented and unique, but was in fact comparable to other major global disruptions. As governments insisted on distinguishing their own propaganda from unregulated disinformation, their increasingly sceptical 'publics' pursued their own idiosyncratic solutions to the crisis, while the apparent sacrifice of a host of citizens – from the most dedicated to the most vulnerable – suggested that inequality and exploitation remained at the heart of the social order.

Power, Media, and the Covid-19 Pandemic is essential reading for students, researchers and academics in media, communication and journalism studies, politics, environmental sciences, critical discourse analysis, cultural studies, and the sociology of health.

PART I The Pandemic: historical, medical and racial configurations

1 Killing fieldsPandemics, geopolitics and environmental emergency

DOI: 10.4324/9781003147299-2

Graham Murdock

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet … a storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned … this storm is what we call progress.

(Benjamin, 1973: 259–60)

The maverick Marxist critic Walter Benjamin wrote these reflections on the movement of history in the spring of 1940, just as Hitler’s army began its inexorable march across Europe. Forced to leave Paris he fled south, crossing into neutral Spain on foot, dying days later in a hotel room in the coastal town of Portbou, whether by his own hand or murdered by Soviet agents remains open to question (see Schwartz, 2001). His image of the angel, borrowed from a painting by Paul Klee, remains a magnificently resonant evocation of the political and human catastrophe of fascism. Reading it again recently, however, I was struck by how powerfully it speaks to our present situation, as we confront the unfolding impacts and implications of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Commentators looking to construct a chronology have increasingly reached beyond the immediate ‘chain of events’ that begins in China, in December 2019 in Wuhan’s wet market, to excavate the history of previous mass infections. There are startling continuities but there is something more. It is now clear that the succession of pandemic events, stretching back over a century to 1890, can only be fully understood when we see the ‘wreckage’ they have caused as the product of an accelerating environmental catastrophe propelled by an exploitative relation to the natural world, and legitimated by a master discourse of economic progress. We can usefully begin with the pandemic of 1890–93 with Britain at the zenith of its economic and political power.

‘Unusual sickness’

The first weeks of 1890 saw a pandemic sweep across the country. There were three further outbreaks, in 1891, 1892 and 1893. Taken together, they were directly responsible for 125,000 deaths, with associated conditions such as pneumonia, bronchitis and circulatory diseases, accounting for many additional fatalities, including 2,200 in the first outbreak alone (Mussell, 2007: 12). On 25 November 1889, The Times printed a telegram from St Petersburg reporting a “most unusual increase in sickness supposed to be influenza”. Five days later, the newspaper reported that influenza (‘for want of a better term’) was rampant in the city and spreading into the rest of the country (quoted in Mussell, 2007: 12). The extensive transport links provided by railway networks and steamship connections carried the infection into Continental Europe and across the channel. By the time it reached London, the initial hesitation of The Times about attributing the pandemic to influenza had disappeared and it was universally referred to as the ‘Russian Influenza’.

The Times, long thought of as the country’s newspaper of record, found itself competing with a number of new titles, all aggressively seeking to maximise their readerships with stories that resonated with national prejudices. In November 1889, a German physician had argued that the pandemic originated in Bokhara on the old Silk Road connecting China to Europe. Other commentators pushed the origin further East. In January 1890, The Times carried a story claiming that the infection was due to the wind-blown dust from the desiccated corpses of dead Chinese, killed by flooding on the Yellow River, one of the country’s major waterways (Honigsbaum, 2010: 305). In 1877, in one of the world’s worst recorded natural disasters, huge volumes of water had swept down the river devastating town and cities and leaving between one and two million dead.

The claim that the pandemic was caused by dust from dead Chinese was roundly mocked by the radical MP Henry Labouchere in the liberal English weekly, Truth, in January 1890, together with the underlying assumption that contemporary plagues always originate in the East:

the disease always goes from East to West, never from West to East. In this point of view … the recent opening of direct steam communication between California and China, must be regarded in the light of an unmitigated disaster … now that the circle of communication is complete there is nothing to prevent it spinning round the world perpetually.

(quoted in Mussell, 2007: 14)

Medical opinion was less dismissive. Writing in the British Medical Journal the following year, James Cantile, a senior doctor working in Hong Kong, drew on his clinical experience to “contend that influenza is endemic in certain parts of China, and occasionally during the present century has spread to the rest of the world” and that “the Russians are right to style the disease ‘Chinese Influenza’” (Cantile, 1891: 491).

China occupied a central place in the British Imperial and Orientalist imagination. Humiliating military defeats in the two Opium Wars had forced China to open its internal market to Western capitalism, creating permanent tensions. British stereotypes of Chinese people were almost uniformly negative, presenting them as both deceitful and threatening. Seven years after the pandemic subsided, Chinese resentments erupted in the insurgency of the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901, which was brutally suppressed by a 20,000 strong expeditionary force from Britain and seven other Western nations, including the United States. Despite this emphatic victory, anxieties around China’s latent power persisted. Surveying the country’s massive size and population and recalling its long history of technological innovation, from banknotes and moveable type to cannons and gunpowder, many commentators saw a sleeping giant waiting to rise and displace the Western powers as the dominant force in the global system. The visionary American writer, Walt Whitman, articulated this growing sense of unease in his epic poem cycle, Leaves of Grass, published in 1900 and rapidly adopted as one of the key works in the American literary canon. China is not named but he pictures the new century heralding a dramatic reversal of national fortunes as “The perform’d America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me / The unperform’d, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me” (Whitman, 1900). An article circulated around the British Home Office in 1911 was more direct, predicting “a vast and convulsive Armageddon to determine who is the master of the world, the white or yellow man” (quoted in Lovell, 2014). Concern around this contest for ‘mastery’ was to resurface with the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States which had long since displaced Britain as the dominant Western power.

In 1889, however, a sense of British national superiority and exceptionalism still prevailed, informing The Times’ report of the initial outbreak of the pandemic. Russia was portrayed as an undeveloped and backward region and St Petersburg as “the most insalubrious of European capitals” in “the unhealthiest country in the civilised world” (quoted in Mussell, 2007: 12). In contrast, Britain saw itself as a triumphant demonstration of a conception of ‘progress’ that combined relentless capitalist expansion with scientific and technological leadership and civic responsibility. The reforms in sanitation that “had protected London from the cholera outbreaks that had recently decimated other European cities” (Honigsbaum, 2010: 303) were cited as proof. This claim to national exceptionalism was severely dented in December 1889 when the Conservative Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, succumbed to the pandemic and his condition proved to be more serious than initial official assurances had indicated. He recovered, but over the course of the pandemic, other prominent members of the political elite were infected. They included William Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal opposition, and over seventy Members of Parliament. Nor was the monarchy immune. The elderly Queen Victoria was shielded, in strict isolation, but her grandson, Prince Albert Victor, second in line to the throne, contracted the virus at a New Year’s shooting party and was dead within two weeks.

These very public invasions of the pinnacles of power tapped into deep-seated anxieties over threats to the country’s economic and political pre-eminence. The economy was badly dented by the long agricultural depression that had begun in 1873 and only finally ended in 1896. In November 1890, Barings, one of the City’s most respected banks, came close to defaulting and had to be bailed out by the government. London was still the capital of the largest empire on earth but the claim to be the ‘workshop of the world’ was increasingly challenged by competition from Germany and the United States.

The pandemic underlined the contradictions of global connectivity. The same rapid rail and steamship transportation routes that moved the resources, goods and labour required by globalised capitalism also enabled diseases to spread with unprecedented speed. The pandemic took “only four months to circumnavigate the planet, peaking in the United States 70 days after the original peak in St Petersburg” (Valleron et al., 2010: 8778). Initially dismissed as seasonal flu in the American press, the six-day Atlantic crossing soon brought the infection to Manhattan and the Eastern seaboard spreading rapidly across the continent on the coast-to-coast rail connection completed in 1869. Altogether, the virus claimed 13,000 American lives out of a global total of around one million (Daugherty, 2020).

In Britain, Franklin Parsons, the Chief Investigator for the Medical Department of the Local Government Board, enlisted the help of readers of the British Medical Journal to map the pandemic’s key features. The findings were much as expected. Infection was highest among groups working or living in close proximity. Those with underlying lung conditions were more likely to die. Worryingly, it also emerged that many patients had only mild symptoms and were likely to be spreading infection as they continued to work. There was, however, one puzzling feature. A number of those infected displayed damage to the central nervous systems and some experienced depression and psychosis, symptoms almost never seen in influenza patients.

Parsons did investigate the possibility of a link to animals, conducting “extensive inquiries at zoos and stables to established whether the epidemic was related to outbreaks of ‘pink-eye’, a form of equine influenza” (Honigsbaum, 2011: 7). His hunch was correct but he was looking in the wrong place. Research carried out in the 21st century, by Leen Vijgen and his colleagues, has examined mutations in the genetic composition of the human OC43 coronavirus (a cause of the common cold) and the coronavirus found in cows, and produced strong evidence that “they probably shared a common ancestor from around 1890, indicating that the virus jumped from cows to humans at that time” (McKie, 2020) and that the “1889–1890 pandemic may have been the result of interspecies transmission of bovine coronavirus to humans” (Vijgen et al., 2005: 1603).

Zoonotic viral transmission from animals to humans was also responsible for the global flu pandemic of 1918–19 that killed at least 50 million people, with some estimates putting the final figure at twice that. Research has confirmed that the influenza virus was carried by wild ducks and transmitted to humans either directly or through an intermediate animal host, most probably pigs. If people have no prior immunity “when an animal virus becomes a human disease, it has the potential to cause a pandemic “(Humphries, 2013: 58). Recent research has demonstrated that since the 1918 virus was “genetically distinct from any of the hundreds of avian and mammalian influenza viruses collected between 1917 and 2006” it must have been “hidden in an obscure ecological niche” where it adapted “to a new (human) host” (Morens and Fauci, 2007: 1019).

The first two waves, in 1918, coincided with the last months of World War I, with the majority of deaths occurring between September and December, overlapping with the German surrender in November. As a neutral country, Spain was not subject to the strict censorship of news ‘likely to damage morale’ imposed on the press in the main combatant nations, and the uncensored Spanish reporting of the pandemic’s early stages led to it being dubbed the ‘Spanish Flu’. Its true origins remain a focus of dispute.

Carriers: American troops and Chinese labour

One account, advanced in 1927 by Edwin Jordan, based largely on testimony from local doctors, traced the initial outbreak to the American army base in Haskell, Kansas, in the heart of farming country. Emerging in March 1918, it spread rapidly through other camps and onwards to Europe as American troops were moved to the Western Front (Jordan, 1927: 60). This explanation rapidly gained support and became the accepted version. John Oxford’s more recent research affirms that the virus was carried by troops but traces the outbreak that triggered the pandemic to the army base at Etaples in northern France in December 1916, incubated by a combination of overcrowding and cohabitation with pigs and fowl (Oxford et al., 2001).

Other recent research, however, has returned to Cantile’s argument, mustering new evidence to suggest that an ancestor of the 1918 virus had been circulating in Southern China for 50 years before the onset of the pandemic and that it was carried to America and Europe by workers from the region recruited into the Chinese Labour Corps, to dig trenches on the Western Front (Shortridge, 1999). In 1917–18, the British shipped a total of 94,000 Chinese workers to the Front, initially via Cape Town or the Suez Canal and later via Vancouver and then overland by train to Nova Scotia (Humphries, 2013: 72). On arrival, they were taken to a camp close to the Etaples base.

Contemporary accounts record a severe respiratory illness known then as “pneumonic plague” circulating in the Chinese interior in the winter of 1917–18 (Langford, 2005). Alarmed British and French doctors based in their countries’ legations tried to persuade the Chinese government to “institute quarantines along the Great Wall at various railway stations in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I THE PANDEMIC: HISTORICAL, MEDICAL AND RACIAL CONFIGURATIONS
• PART II POWER, CRISIS AND REPRESSION
• PART III JOURNALISM, INFORMATION AND STRUCTURES OF ARGUMENT DURING COVID-19
• PART IV BRITISH POLITICAL DISCOURSE DURING THE PANDEMIC
• PART V HOMELESSNESS AND DISPOSSESSION DURING THE PANDEMIC
• Index