Ed Yong: Stop with the war metaphors in reporting on COVID-19
Politicians and media around the world have adopted war metaphors to talk about the “battle” against the coronavirus. Healthcare workers have been described as “frontline” workers and survivors are said to have “beaten” the virus. But British science journalist Ed Yong, a keynote speaker at Carleton University’s “Journalism in the Time of Crisis” conference on Thursday, said people should change the way they speak about illness — and not just in the context of COVID-19.
Yong, who in 2018 wrote an article about America’s pandemic preparedness, said: “If you unite strength and fighting with health and recovery, then you automatically create a link between sickness and death and weakness and failure. So you’re saying people who die are weak and losers,” he said.
Yong added: “If you talk about people losing a battle against disease, you are equating death with physical weakness. You are also, therefore, equating that with moral weakness, with mental weakness and all those other kinds. And there is a history of conflating those things.”
The history that Yong refers to is a mid-19th century philosophy known as “Muscular Christianity”, a worldview that called for strict morality and self-discipline as a measure of strength. Yong said misogynistic and imperialist attitudes flowed from this philosophical posture.
And the idea has persisted to the present era.
In a particularly potent example, Yong deconstructed U.S. President Donald Trump’s handling of his own sickness in early October.
“(Muscular Christianity) manifests when someone like Donald Trump starts talking about how his good genes beat the virus. He is referring to the projection of strength — this masculinized, toxic version of strength where it’s all about aggression and volume rather than actual physical and mental strength.”
Trump’s repeated references to “good genes” — including his extended discussion of the idea during a September rally in Minnesota — have been widely condemned, as well, for recalling the dark history of eugenics and giving a nod to ideas about racial superiority.
Watch the whole keynote here.
