Recently I have been writing about victims, real victims. They are the dead and injured from the Christchurch mosque attacks and the hundreds whose lives were directly affected by those hideous acts of terrorism.
It has made me more than usually sensitive to the ways victims are portrayed by media and, the more I have thought about it, the more I have seen how much news organisations have invested in suffering. They are heavily subscribed.
Much of it is unquestionably legitimate: The creation of victims is one of the consequences of war, crime, natural disaster, illegitimate exercise of power, and human nature. In highlighting the plight of such victims, media help to validate measures that help to prevent the acts that create the causes. And it attracts media audiences.
This attraction is the problem, because I fear that journalists approach some ‘victims’ wearing blinkers that blind them to anything that might detract from a picture of suffering, misery, oppression and injury.
The Covid pandemic has produced a heartrending number of genuine victims but, to that devastating total, media have added a few whose ‘victim’ label is just a little askew.
These are people with a grievance – the little man and woman against the system – who differ from other complainants because there are outstanding questions which leave one wondering about the strength of their victim status.
Let me ask a question: Have you seen or heard one of these grievance stories and muttered to yourself: “But why didn’t they ask about…and if they did ask, why isn’t it in the story?” The answer might affect your perception of the grief and suffering that the stories so graphically portray.
Last week I asked myself that question more than once.
The first occasion was a result of the open letter, published in the Weekend Herald, that New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis wrote about how she sought help from the Taliban when she had been unable to return home to give birth because she could not get a spot in Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ). I am a huge admirer of Bellis’ work in Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East – and I had great sympathy for her in her present situation – but unfolding coverage of her plight had questions nagging me.
- What countries other than Afghanistan – say, Australia – were potential ‘safe havens’?
- Did she recognise the potential propaganda value to the Taliban in granting her that ‘haven’?
- Could the couple have married in Belgium (where her partner was born) and Bellis apply for the relevant visa to stay there legally?
- Why did she not seek consular help to get a flight within the MIQ window offered?
- Why, when her open letter sought answers from the New Zealand Government, did she threaten breach of privacy proceedings when details of her case were discussed?
I emphasise, these are questions. I do not know the answers but, if they were asked by journalists, I didn’t see the responses.
Charlotte Bellis’ case has been polarising. I think most New Zealanders have great sympathy for her and wanted to see the system accommodate her needs. However, unanswered questions – to say nothing of her relationship with the Taliban – prompted negative reactions.
She had stated in her open letter that it was ironic that the Taliban granted her a haven when her own country did not. It was equally ironic, I felt, that in the same week she made that comment, the Committee to Protect Journalists revealed in New York that an Afghan journalist Abdul Qayum Zahid Samadzai had been arbitrarily arrested by the Taliban before being interrogated, beaten, then released after 36 hours in custody with a warning to stop reporting for his Pakistan-based news organisation. His interrogators asked about his contacts with other members of the press, particularly female journalists.
MIQ has been the source of numerous stories of anguish and frustration. They point to undoubted failings in the system and victims present a graphic way of highlighting those inadequacies.
Weighted against those legitimate cases are the bleating of the self-entitled whose social media outbursts about the woes of being in MIQ or having to spend even longer in the south of France have been dutifully gathered up by media outlets. Most people can judge such stories for what they are worth.
In yet another category are MIQ victim stories that start by giving you feelings of sympathy and even outrage, only to lose some impact as those unasked questions start to crop up in your mind.
Take, for example, the story of a Bay of Plenty couple who are required to repay $16,000 because their enforced stay in Australia exceeded the maximum amount of time superannuatants can be out of New Zealand without forfeiting their National Superannuation.
Personally, I think the government was remiss in not regulating or amending the New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income Act to allow for a general moratorium on the provision during pandemic restrictions on entry into the country. MIQ has created a nightmare for senior citizens who have found themselves on the wrong side of the border and proposed legislation from the Opposition to alleviate the situation didn’t gain traction.
However, as I read the story of the Bay of Plenty couple’s plight – they are stuck in Queensland – questions came to mind.
The couple own houses on both sides of the Tasman, spend part of the year in each country, and have at least two cars. Their stay in Australia had initially been longer than anticipated because the husband had heart surgery and had made a return visit there for further surgery. They had been reliant on their pensions “as the interest rates on investments are so low”.
These facts in the story raised questions. Was their overall financial situation such that suspension of the pension and having to pay back $16,000 to the Ministry of Social Development created unacceptable hardship? Why did they not qualify for an exemption under Section 23 of the Act, which allows for absences of up to two years for medical treatment for which the Ministry of Health is granting assistance? Couldn’t they argue the reciprocal health agreement between the two countries fell under that MoH criteria? Why did they elect to return to Australia for follow-up surgery when the state of the border was questionable?
I have no doubt that this elderly couple are in a highly stressful situation, and one that doctrinaire bureaucrats could readily alleviate, but their status as victims of a rapacious Ministry of Social Development might be diminished by answers to those questions. Alternatively, the answers could restore their pensions.
The pension repayment problem is a real one and I felt better examples of the hardship were contained in a Sunday Star Times story last weekend in which Te Ara Ahunga Ora Retirement Commissioner Jane Wrightson called for an amnesty. The story outlined the case of a retired social worker who had done as much as humanly possible to get an MIQ slot and to show she had not rorted the system but still got hit with a bill.
MIQ has become something of a media cause célèbre, with some news outlets now characterising it almost as a crime against humanity. Damien Venuto in the New Zealand Herald referred to “the stench of MIQ” and expatriate New Zealander Dan Wootton, who made his name on muckraking British tabloids, in separate tweets described both Charlotte Bellis’ situation and the case of a man on hunger strike in MIQ as “unimaginable cruelty”.
For the record: Charlotte Bellis now has her emergency spot in MIQ and the hunger striker has been given permission to home isolate with his dying father. In both cases there is little doubt that publicity helped to resolve matters. It is equally clear that a more pragmatic approach by MIQ officials could have avoided the problems in the first place.
Yet MIQ seems to be a two-sided coin. On the one hand we have the victim narrative that meets the media’s desire for an unhealthy diet of suffering. On the other we have support for MIQ which, despite its many imperfections, is seen as holding back the tide of Covid infections from beyond our shores.
Both sides of that coin give rise to extreme reactions. We have stranded expatriates choking tearfully on their words as they describe their frustration at being denied entry to their own country. Yet we have others using abhorrent language to describe those who might bring the pestilence here.
The lead headline in last weekend’s Sunday Star Times (pictured above) read: “They weren’t even treating me like a human”. It related to the vitriolic social media reaction to a woman who went online to complain about 18 months of thwarted efforts to return to New Zealand. She and others had been interviewed by Virginia Fallon who detected a growing ‘meanness’ by people in New Zealand towards would-be returnees.
In that article, Clinical psychologist Karen Nimmo said people’s emotional responses are always influenced by the psychological, environmental and social conditions around them. The uncertainty of Covid had escalated emotional responses and, when this happened en masse, it caused a ripple effect. Anger and anxiety were valid emotions but she drew the line at the meanness that was increasingly being displayed on social media.
I detect few signs that journalists are displaying the sort of meanness of spirit that the anonymity of social media encourages, but I do see signs of the anger and anxiety rubbing off on their coverage. They are displaying the same human characteristics that are showing through in a general population that has already endured two years of hardship and faces the prospect of a third.
Anger and emotion make audiences sit up and pay attention. Victims feed the rather base human need to know that there is always someone worse off than me. Covid-19 is the virus that just keeps on delivering.
A technical issue has prevented The Tuesday Commentary from being available as a podcast this week. It will be uploaded when the issue has been resolved.