Sorry to be gloomy but our twin diseases – Brexit and Covid – aren’t going away any time soon

It’s not the media’s job to be ‘boosterish’ or make anyone feel better about a rotten situation. Have a happy new year, anyhow, writes Sean O’Grady

The two stories of 2020 that journalists had to cover every damn day (Getty/iStock)

There’s a great old saying that a politician complaining about the press is like a sailor complaining about the weather. For a journalist, complaining about the news is much the same, and thus a pretty futile exercise.  

Still, that’s not going to stop me from having a quick whinge about Brexit and Covid, the twin diseases of 2020 that we’ve had to cover every damn day. To put it at its mildest, it’s been a bit monotonous.  

So am I glad that 2021 is on the horizon and we will soon see the back of the pair of ’em? Well, I might be if I thought it was true, but I suspect neither will disappear.

The Brexit trade deal is disintegrating faster than a melting snowman. Its complicated procedures, fudged partial solutions and postponed arguments augur an endless “Brexity” background noise for the next decade or so, a steady whine with the occasional shriek of anguish when some half-hidden horror makes its presence felt, like when the factories close down.

Covid, too, is never going away. Few communicative diseases have been eradicated via vaccination, and viruses are good at mutating and adapting. Sometimes that means they go milder and sometimes more vicious, but the survival of the fittest means they’ll get more infectious, as we are seeing now. Treatments may get better, as with HIV/Aids, and as we’ve also seen with Covid. But coronavirus will also be in the news, albeit at a lower pitch, for years.  

Sorry to be so gloomy but, unlike what certain politicians think, it’s not the media’s job to be “boosterish” or make anyone feel better about a rotten situation, and that includes the journalists themselves.  

Happy new year, anyhow.  

Yours,

Sean O’Grady

Associate editor