In other news . . . what we have been missing: The stories which slipped under the radar
We have become a nation preoccupied. But other big news events continue to happen as we take on coronavirus.
On March 17, Hashem Abedi was convicted of 22 counts of murder for his role in the Manchester Arena attack. Normally this would be headline news, but it didn’t even make the front page of the next day’s papers.
“Health cheque for all Brits” was the headline on the front of The Sun, referring to the Government’s economic package to protect against the economic impact of the coronavirus.
“Rishi’s £350 billion kiss of life,” was the Daily Mail’s take on the day’s news, while “This won’t beat Britain” was the rallying cry of the Daily Mirror.
None of them mentioned the Manchester bombings. Coronavirus took up the whole of the Telegraph’s front page, too, and it was the same story for The Guardian, The Independent and The Times. The Daily Star responded, as only the Daily Star can, with “Stick it up yer virus.”
Hashem Abedi, said to have worked closely with his 22-year-old brother Salman Abedi in the attack at an Ariana Grande concert in 2017, is still awaiting sentence.
Yet his case seems to have been largely overlooked amid the daily coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.
It is not the only one. Ever since Jo Moore, a spin doctor in the Blair government, infamously circulated a memo suggesting September 11, 2001 – the day of the Twin Towers terror attack – would be ‘a good day to bury bad news’, there has been an understandable scepticism about the way some stories slip under the radar.
On the other hand, the nation has been so preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic over the past three months, that it is hard to see how many news stories would get the attention that they would in more normal times.
Big news becomes, by comparison, mundane when the world is attempting to come to terms with a global pandemic that nobody knows how to deal with.
Covid-19 coverage:
For example, on March 19, the Bank of England cut interest rates to 0.1 per cent, the lowest base rate in its 325-year history.
This has major ramifications for savers, borrowers, the value of the pound, export markets and as an indicator of the general health of the economy.
But the move went largely unnoticed, as speculation mounted that Britain was heading for lockdown.
On April 1, the National Living Wage was increased by 6.2 per cent, from £8.21 to £8.72 an hour.
This would normally be a significant move, but given that millions of people had been laid off from their jobs, or placed on the Government’s furlough scheme, it made barely a ripple on the national consciousness.
Sir Keir Starmer’s election as leader of the Labour Party on April 4 was greeted with little fanfare, apart from on The Observer, where it was the lead story. It also made a small story at the bottom of the front page of the Sunday Telegraph, but the fronts of the tabloids were all filled with reports of the Queen’s address to the nation about the Coronavirus pandemic.
Sir Keir himself stayed clear of any triumphalism. His victory statement was entirely preoccupied with being seen as a leader fully behind the nation’s virus fight.
The collapse of department store group Debenhams, forced to call in administrators for the second time in a year on April 6, put 22,000 jobs at risk. But the news came hours after Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been admitted to hospital 10 days after being diagnosed with coronavirus, which kept the troubles facing the retail giant off the front pages.
The announcement that 12 of its stores would not reopen once the lockdown restrictions were eased, but that deals had been struck to save 122 of its other branches, were met with similar indifference. The news simply passed many people by.
On April 30 it was announced that the fashion chains Oasis and Warehouse were to cease trading with the loss of 1,800 jobs, after administrators failed to secure a rescue deal.
The news came on the same day that the Prime Minister said he would be revealing his plans to ‘restart the economy’ the following Sunday.
Conor Burns resigned as trade minister on May 4, following reports he used his position as an MP to intimidate a member of the public.
An inquiry by the parliamentary standards committee heard he had written a letter on House of Commons notepaper to a businessman whose company owed his father money. He threatened to use parliamentary privilege to name the individual, a former senior official in local government, and his company in the House of Commons if the debt was not settled.
Such a scandal would normally be big news, preoccupying those that thrive on political intrigue and love a ministerial scalp.
But not even The Guardian deemed it worthy of a mention on its front page, with the papers mainly focused on the Government’s new track-and-trace phone app, and plans for some youngsters to return to school.
On May 30, the rocketship Dragon was launched in Nasa’s first manned space flight in a decade. The capsule, developed by tycoon Elon Musk’s SpaceX corporation, took astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, to the International Space Station.
It is the first time a private company has ever been paid as part of a commercial deal to take men into space.
It made our main bulletins and even warranted live coverage on our 24 news channels. But how many people were really aware of this big moment for mankind, given the blanket coverage of Dominic Cummings’ lockdown escapades?
Of course as lockdown becomes the ‘new normal’, so other issues start to re-emerge. Maybe the appointment of Tim Davie as Tony Hall’s successor as BBC director-general was never the stuff bold headlines are made of, but nevertheless, its timing on June 5 came at a time when even coronavirus stories were struggling to make the front page.
That day’s headlines were totally dominated by the news that police in Germany were investigating the possibility that Madeleine McCann, the three-year-old who vanished from her family’s holiday apartment in 2007, had been murdered by a convicted sex offender. The suspect, named as ‘Christian B’, was already in prison for the rape of a 72-year-old American widow near to where Madeleine went missing in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz.
Another story that has managed to cut through the dominance of the coronavirus outbreak is the death of George Floyd while being restrained by police in the US city of Minneapolis.
Mr Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was captured on video saying he was unable to breathe while a police officer knelt on his neck. The officer concerned, Derek Chauvin, has been sacked and charged with murder. The three other officers at the scene – Thomas Lane, J Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao – were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
Such is the importance of the issue that it has spread across continents. There has been much talk of a more compassionate world after Covid-19 and this has tested that resolve and questioned the need for more global compassion and equality.
