The battle for clicks dictates too much

I often ignore when people - who are often in the media themselves - give out about the media sensationalising things.

If something is important enough to enough people, it’s a story and it should be covered. Of course, people often have varying ideas on what should be covered.

As a journalist, you get used to people asking you to cover their local tiddly winks competition or the village fair or whatever else they have an interest in that may be too specialist or exclusive for most people. We try to cover the news that is most interesting to the greatest amount of people. That does mean sometimes we can’t cover your son’s communion or your daughter’s under seven soccer match. Those events have limited appeal to most people, despite how amazing your son or daughter is!

However I did think people complaining that the media had gone over the top on the latest Covid-19 variant had a point. Discovered last week in South Africa some of the coverage around the latest major Covid-19 variant Omicron was way over the top.

Kudos to ‘The 96FM Opinion Line’ who had a sensible discussion about it on Monday with Professor Jack Lambert, Consultant/Full Clinical Professor in Infectious Diseases and Genitourinary Medicine at the Mater and Associate Professor at UCD School of Medicine.

It was calm, measured and conducted with a relevant expert. Dr Lambert essentially preached caution but said we should wait and see what impact it has. Other media was less calm. There were numerous headlines suggesting that Omicron is the worst variant yet - we can’t and don’t know that yet. A number of different publications including the Guardian had stories with headlines like ‘How bad will the Omicron Covid variant be in Britain?’

Last week The Irish Independent had a headline that read: “Health minister’s deep concern for ‘worst’ strain of virus ripping through Africa”.

Obviously the battle for clicks dictates many things but it’s reckless to put out such scaremongering when people are so on edge already.

Yesterday tests confirmed a case of the Omicron coronavirus variant has been confirmed in Ireland. This week has seen a major change of direction in Government policy. Pupils from third class and up in primary schools are required to wear a face mask or covering.

The Department of Education has even told schools that any child who claim to be exempt, must back it up by a medical certificate. It says that where a medical certificate is not provided, a child or staff member will be refused entry to the school, although they have allowed schools some discretion.

Still with cases surging in primary schools, it does seem like a practical idea even if the Government could have provided each class room with a good air filter by now.

It’s not like they’ve been caught on the hop, we are nearly two years into the pandemic at this stage!