During the annual World Press Freedom Day panel discussion of Stellenbosch University's Department of Journalism on 10 May 2021, expert panellists shared their views on the media's reporting on the COVID crisis. The discussion was themed “Other things happened too: The stories the media missed since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown" and was livestreamed on YouTube.

Panellists were Dele Olojede, Africa's first Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist; Henriëtte Loubser, editor-in-chief of Afrikaans news at Media24, and of the biggest subscription-based news platform in the country, Netwerk24, and Lister Namumba, manager of monitoring, research and analysis programmes at Media Monitoring Africa.

According to Olojede, the COVID-19 crisis has in a way distorted the media's focus. “The singular gaze on the pandemic has meant that a number of other important events that affect society have not been attended to." He referred to the crisis of governance in South Africa as an example. “South Africa's capacity to govern wisely and well at the local level, where most citizens interface with government, is in disarray and has completely collapsed. You will never achieve equality if your local authorities are not fixed, particularly so that they can properly govern local public education systems."

To Loubser, the practical impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been twofold. “Firstly, fewer news events took place because of the lockdown, but one could still report on the impact of the pandemic. Secondly, issues went underreported because the pandemic demanded so much time and resources. Such issues include the loneliness of older people, who were isolated even more than the rest of society, and the plight of abused women and children, who were now stuck in confined spaces with their abusers." She added that, post-pandemic, the media will have a duty to highlight these issues, but also the positive outcomes of the pandemic, such as medical breakthroughs.

Namumba too was struck by the lack of diversity in media sources, and in the stories reported during the pandemic. “Yes, the pandemic had to dominate coverage, but there were other key issues as well, which were not getting as much attention – escalating violence against women and children, the effect of the pandemic on the mental health of children and other South Africans, and so forth. There was not much creativity displayed by the media in reporting on the pandemic. There was also a lack of diversity in the sources used, with mostly government-affiliated black South African males quoted in news stories."

Yet focusing on the pandemic to the exclusion of everything else was not necessarily a calamity, said Olojede. “It is perfectly natural for an event of the magnitude of COVID-19 to take away your attention from everything else. It is, after all, a once-in-a-lifetime event that has torn apart everyone's lives. The media just need to ensure that they deliver as full a plate of stories as possible. Are they also covering the poorer areas that are harder to get to, and do they give a voice to different perspectives?"

SU's Journalism students also used the event as a platform to launch their annual newspaper, LIP.

*Photograph by AbsolutVision on Unsplash​