A wrap on Newsmakers

Kate: When did it click that this was the thing that you should be doing?

Chris: You know, one of the priests in the seminary, a guy called Jimmy Esler who was a tremendous canon lawyer. And what had happened before and he became, he was in the, studied in the same year, I think as Gough Whitlam. So going back a very, very long way and he had been hopeless at everything, he said. But then he found the law and just couldn't do it badly. And it was one of those things when I got into journalism, I found that it just felt like a natural fit to me.

Mia: I am an absolute monster for content. I cannot get enough content. When I was growing up, I loved magazines, but the magazines I loved, which were like Dolly, Cosmo, Cleo when I got a bit older, they only came out once a month, and that wasn't enough. So I would buy everything from Women's Weekly to just everything, Women's Day, New Idea. Like I'd buy everything because I just loved the medium and I loved content. I could never get enough of it.

Kate: What are you most hopeful about?

Nick: I'm hopeful across the board, so I'm hopeful that the, the consumer confidence cost of living inflation, all these, all these sort of metrics that are important soften and that we can go back to growth and we can go back to sort of putting our shoulders back and head up and saying, OK, we, we've got some confidence and we're going out, we're sort of, you know, building, building our economy and, and building our businesses and, and living living life in sort of a, a positive state rather than sort of a, a sort of defensive state, which is what we're seeing at the moment.

Kate: We hear a lot from our audience that this is just so hard to watch the news. The news anxiety is really real for people. How do we make sure people are still engaging with news?

Leigh: When you're watching the news, the nature of the news is it is going to emphasise the least likely thing to happen to you. So for example, when I was at university, we were taught a hundred helicopters might fly safely today, but the one that crashes is the one that is going to make the news. So basically we emphasize the aberration, not the most likely thing to happen. It's why everyone got so scared of dying of COVID during COVID because we talked about COVID deaths front and centre all the time, where actually for everyone under the age of 50, your chance of dying of COVID is really unusual. Same with vaccines, your chance of dying of a vaccine side effect, it's possible, but it's not probable. So I think when you see things on the news that rattle you, Dreamworld rollercoaster accident, young people dying from COVID vaccines, anyone dying from COVID, terrorist attacks, gun massacres, whatever. It helps to remind yourself the reason I'm seeing this on the news is because it's unusual and it is the least likely thing to happen to me. It could happen to me, but it almost certainly won't.

Kate: You were the political editor at Channel Nine during the pandemic.But you finished up towards the end, you say that you were sort of dismayed about the fact that we allowed doctors to sort of run the country. You did sort of mention your profession though as well and the way the media handled it all, how, how did you feel about that? 

Chris: Well, for a large part, we the media, we were the police force for the government, you know, it was that all of these people who were complaining about vaccine mandates and look, you know I said before the whole thing began, if there's a vaccine and it's efficacious and safe and you don't take it, you're an idiot because I had two uncles who had polio. So, you know, and saw one who was crippled for life, right? The polio vaccine was a miracle. Vaccines are a miracle. So I was, but that said I can understand why someone might have an issue with that and decide that they don't want to do that. It's not for me to judge them. You know, it is, it when the government basically says it's going to take your job off you if you don't get vaccinated. Well, that's a pretty big call now.

Kate:  I asked you to have a think about what you thought the most overlooked news story is at the moment.

Leigh: I think our Australia's response to the COVID pandemic, because that was so life changing for so many people, the policy responses that we adopted. And pretty much by the time we got to the end of the pandemic, everyone was tired of hearing about it. And so I'm not persuaded that we've actually had a proper examination of what are the long -term costs of the policies that we adopted and why did we choose that path. And so I think that that's something that should be looked at because we don't know when there could be another pandemic coming down the track. And every time I see a news story talking about mental health issues, children's education issues, or I think back to people that I interviewed on the program during that period, like people whose parents were in aged care and how we handled aged care, I feel like we have not done enough to get to the bottom of that, the way media covered it. The way politicians handled it, the reliance on epidemiologists and chief health officers. I just think the whole response across the whole area needs a really, really close deep dive look.