An article circulates like wildfire at this hour. It is titled “Vi fedjlede”, “We have failed” in Danish, signed by a journalist from Ekstra Bladet, a national newspaper, and accumulates thousands and thousands shared. “One of Denmark’s biggest dailies is apologizing for its coverage of the pandemic by publishing only official government messages without questioning them,” it reads. one of the messages most virals of the day. Is that so?
Words. The article is not exactly an apology, but a kind of widespread criticism of Denmark’s response to the pandemic. “For two years, both the press and the population have been hypnotically attentive to the authorities’ figures,” writes its author, Brian weichardt, in the first line. “We have not been attentive enough” questioning the authorities about the difference between “hospitalized with coronavirus” and not “due to coronavirus.”
“We Failed”
One of the largest newspapers in Denmark is apologizing for its journalistic failure during COVID-19 by only publishing official government messages without questioning them. Via @Niemandsknecht https://t.co/0DfZAOXduT
– Jan Nieuwenhuijs (@JanGold_) January 11, 2022
The context. Weichardt provides a figure: “The official hospitalization figures have turned out to be 23% higher than they actually were.” He refers to a recent controversy in Denmark in which the government lowered the income figures for covid when considering, later, that many were “with” covid. A nuance that, in the author’s vision, aggravated the reality of the pandemic to the public, facilitating a permanent and very heavy state of “mental alertness” for the population.
The column later charges against the excessive confidence that the government placed in the vaccine (cases have risen this winter in Denmark, 79% of the population immunized, as in Spain). “There is something that does deserve the term super. Be it vaccines, hospitals or a mixture of both, it depends on each one. But of course the communication from the authorities to the population does not deserve it,” he concludes.
What does it mean? On the one hand, it is not “the opinion of a newspaper”, as it is being shared, but a column of a private journalist. Nor are they an apology, but a criticism of the government. The newspaper, Ekstra Bladet, is a tabloid (think of Bild) whose coverage tends to be hectic and sensational. The general tone of the article underlines other common lines of thought in Europe: a “not-was-for-so much” that criticizes the “state of alert” induced by governments, not the press.
Why is it shared? What is interesting is not so much the article or the situation in Denmark itself, but how the rest of the world has interpreted it. A good part of the shared on Twitter come the Anglo-Saxon sphere and they are redirected towards the local press. “One of Denmark’s leading newspapers apologizes for its journalistic failure to replicate government messages without question. Looking at the New York Times”, writes a conservative opinion highly critical of US restrictions and who usually refers to the “covid cultists“.
Motivations. The column, on the one hand, reaffirms a spectrum of opinion fed up with the restrictions and that it considers that it is time to turn the page against the coronavirus. In the United States and other countries it has always been highly mobilized. On the other hand, it highlights a general perception in a large part of the global population: the media have acted irresponsibly in the face of the pandemic. They have exaggerated, they have distorted, they have agitated, they have informatively over-exploited the covid.
The receptivity of the networks to a remote Danish opinion piece illustrates the extent to which journalism is perceived as part-of-the-problem around the world. In Spain we can think about Red Hot or the news and the presentation of the contagion figures in an apocalyptic and dramatic tone, without contextualizing with respect to previous waves or without taking into account the hospitalization data. For an audience that has been settled in pandemic fatigue for months, the sense of artificial turmoil and sheer ruse to gain an audience is clear.
You see this and what the hell are you saying. The music, the cante of figures without context, the label, the little tone. They are enjoying it, sowing terror among a mentally crushed population and they are going to go out of their way. Speechless. https://t.co/e4yDCiyu7v
– Daniel Lázaro (@danilazarom) December 21, 2021
Image: NATO / Flickr