A single picture is said to be worth a thousand words. But to contemporary media, a single picture is now often a thousand different realities for consumers hoping to make sense of issues now raging in society— and to politicians trying to find a safe place to land on the issues.

Clarifying images used to be the responsibility of the media, of course. But in its fervour to create social media hits and draw eyeballs to television, the fourth estate has become as reliable as a 1975 Pinto.

Take the notorious George Floyd police encounter. The photo of a Minneapolis officer pinning him with his knee, ultimately killing Floyd, was flashed around the world, shocking all who saw it. Everyone from U.S. president Trump to Al Sharpton decried the callous behaviour and demanded justice for Floyd.

Some took the condemnation further than others. While demands for a thorough investigation were raised, the media were more attracted to riot porn, the street demonstrators and looters who used Floyd’s death to revive the revolutionary grievance menu of Black Lives Matter and Antifa. For those unfamiliar with the demands for reparations, defunding police and overthrowing the right to a fair trial, they are the same ones the media dined on during the Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray and Michael Brown deaths.

So the issue was quickly transformed from the ethics of choke holds and police tactics to a takedown of the western capitalist system. Facts became secondary to the empathy and compassion of the press. Pretty soon, Floyd’s death was yesterday’s news as radicals took to friendly hosts and reporters to decry Confederate statues, football coaches wearing T shirts of a conservative TV network and blacks’ vulnerability to Covid-19. For which there has been a bottomless appetite.

It was suddenly All Racism, All The Time. In the words of James Lindsay, “science, reason, and evidence are a ‘white’ way of knowing, and that storytelling and lived experience is a ‘black’ alternative”. Corporations, sports leagues and the Boy Scouts were made, under threat of extinction, to bend a knee to this critical race theory in the U.S.

In the wake of that Floyd image it became career extinction to ask questions about #BLM, such as “Who is your leader?” “How do you spend your donations?” and “What about black families without fathers?” A Canadian football star at Oklahoma State brought his head coach to a knee for simply wearing an OAN T-shirt on a fishing trip.

It is reminiscent of the horrific 2015 photo of Alan Kurdi, a dead Syrian boy on a beach in Turkey, drowned as his family fled the civil war in Syria. Again, the photo was worldwide within 24 hours. Instead of focussing on the Syrian regime’s excesses, the immigration-sympathetic media used to the photo to bludgeon Western democracies for racism in not allowing enough refugees. Canadian PM Stephen Harper was pelted with demands that Canada do more.

European nations were even harder hit by condemnation. In response to the guilting, the European Union allowed its member states to be overrun with immigrants not just from Syria but from around the Third World. At the peak in 2015, 1.3 million Syrians alone requested refugee status in the EU. Half a million came in total in 2015. Millions more have followed. The social dislocation has been enormous. All sparked by a single picture.

In the last four months the images of Covid-19 have functioned in a similar fashion, with pictures of makeshift morgues and graves awaiting victims. Using the stark pictures of the virus’ toll the media played long on emotion and short on specifics, panicking the population. Even though politicians have long accepted multiple deaths in flu epidemics, it became heresy to discuss tolerable losses from Covid.

Talking about his own mother’s vulnerability a dazed New York governor Andrew Cuomo was left to ask, “How much is a human life worth? That is the real discussion that no one is admitting, openly or freely. That we should. To me, I say the cost of a human life, a human life is priceless. Period.”

But single lives are a footnote in pandemics run by media clicks. By not levelling with voters to protect their own electoral skins from media attack, politicians abandoned all perspective, locking up the healthy to protect the vulnerable. Doom saying became the only acceptable response to the (largely speculative) media blitz.

As I wrote here in May 14 about the almost total absence of mortality under age 20, “… the media indulge the catastrophists in fear mongering. When a condition affecting children popped up in New York City (where else?) causing a few deaths the quarantine freaks grabbed to it like a life preserver. You can understand parents’ fear, especially when much of their leadership and media is selling a clearly disprovable disaster meme. Yet children have always been vulnerable till they developed immunities. The media playing this fear game are the lowest of the low.”

As I wrote last week , newsrooms today have lost their institutional memory. The experienced staff who knew how to play a big story have been let go or have resigned. The new under-30 staff bends like a willow in the wind, applying emotion where cool thinking is necessary. They’re also easy marks for the political operatives of BLM, Antifa or the Green lobby who dazzle them with radical-chic narratives

And that may be the least flattering picture of all.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his next book Personal Account with Tony Comper will be available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca this fall.

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