The headlines and dreadlines

Jug Suraiya

Everyone in the whole world — doctors, health experts, economists, businessmen, politicians, people in the tourism and travel industry — are talking about the novel coronavirus, and the highly infectious Covid-19 respiratory disease it causes. But possibly no one is talking about it more than those in the media business, as this exchange between two journos shows:

1st journo: Coronavirus is making the biggest headlines since World War II.

2nd journo: Bigger than World War II. Though it was called a World War, the actual combatants involved were only a handful of countries. This coronavirus has got 70 countries combating it. The only continent which has so far been spared is Antarctica, and that’s probably because no one lives there on a permanent basis.

1st journo: You’re right. Coronavirus is pushing everything else off the front page of my paper.

2nd journo: Same with my paper. Nothing can compete with it. Not anti-CAA protests, Indo-Pak tensions and border skirmishes, the breakdown of the US-brokered Afghan-Taliban peace talks, not Brexit, not even the PM’s latest monthly radio chat.

1st journo: The thing with coronavirus is its total unpredictability. Everything else, anti-CAA protests, Indo-Pak face-offs, Afghanistan, Brexit, even the PM radio chat had become predictable, there was nothing really newsy about any of it any longer. It was getting to be more of the same. You could change a few words and dates here and there, and you could carry last week’s story this week, or even next week.

2nd journo: You’re right. There wasn’t much that was new in the news. But all that has changed with coronavirus. News has become news again, with a vengeance.

1st journo: And it’s not just the daily developments that provide the news. There are different aspects to coronavirus.

2nd journo: Yeah. Like what it’s doing to the global economy, with everything from manufacturing to airlines being hit.

1st journo: Then there are all the sidelines it has given rise to. Like the production of protective face masks and hand sanitisers, all of which are being blackmarketed.

2nd journo: And then there are song-and-dance videos being made about it. And in Italy, one of the worst affected countries, there are a whole lot coronavirus jokes — which can truly be called sick jokes — doing the rounds.

1st journo: Talk about gallows humour. The thing about coronavirus is that it’s making more than headlines. It’s making dreadlines.

2nd journo: Dreadlines? What’s that?

1st journo: Dreadlines are headlines which fill people with dread. And the more dread they feel, the more compelled they are to find out more and more about the cause of that dread. And the more and more they find out, the more dread they feel.

2nd journo: So dreadlines become a self-perpetuating generator of more and more news?

1st journo: Exactly. Because dreadlines encapsulate what news really stand for.

2nd journo: Yeah? And what’s that? I always thought ‘news’ was an acronym for ‘North, East, West, and South’.

1st journo: Wrong. According to the dreadline definition, news stands for Now Even Worse Scare….