In
February 2021 journalist Tom
Cowrie
wrote an article titled Living
for the weekend: infected hotel quarantine worker’s busy itinerary
which
was published in The
Age
on Thursday 4 February.
It
discussed in
great detail the
weekend travel of a man who had left his place of work for
a three-day break after
showing a negative result to a workplace COVID-19
test and had
gone
about his daily life on days off.
He
was doing nothing wrong or unlawful in those three days. However he
reportedly
became
a person of interest because
sometime after
he returned to work on the
Tuesday
he
began to feel unwell and tested
positive
for
COVID-19 on
the Wednesday.
I
did not see the alleged responses to this particular article in The
Age as
I barely registered the piece at the time.
However,
it seems that The
Age
Editor Gay Alcorn and Tom Cowie were very upset by readers’
responses.
Normally
I would be most sympathetic to editors and journalists caught up in a
sustained negative reaction. Especailly
one which allegedly carried death threats.
However,
something doesn’t quite compute and the two
articles set out below rather explain why.
The
first short two paragraph article states that the journalist was taking a short break and implies that the editor is
leaving Twitter
for good.
Alice
Coster
writing in the Herald
Sun
on 6
February 2021 at Page 19:
Age
editor GAY ALCORN and reporter TOM COWIE have been badly mauled on
Twitter for detailing the travels of the innocent 26-year-old hotel
quarantine worker who tested positive for the mutant strain of the
virus that could have shut down the city.
Mauled
as in a shark attack. Trolls called Alcorn and Cowie “racists and
bigots” bent on “going after the working class”. Cowie’s
Twitter page says he’s “taking a break” from Twitter and Alcorn
says she’s “baffled” and “reluctantly, I’m out of here”.
The
reality is that The
Age
editor’s Twitter
account remained active as of 2:27pm on 8 February 2021 and only the journalist
has taken a break from his account.
The
second longer article implies that The
Age
editor is removing the newspaper’s
Twitter
account.
This
was Nick
Tabakoff
writing in The
Australian online
on 8 February 2021:
‘Death
threats’: Age editor snaps
Who
would have thought a story about a worker visiting a kebab store and
Kmart could cause such dramas?
The
Age editor Gay Alcorn has stormed off Twitter after she revealed to
Diary the paper received “death threats” over its much-debated
feature about a Melbourne COVID-19 quarantine worker’s weekend
moves.
The
story traced every after-hours footstep of the COVID-positive
quarantine hotel worker through Spencer Street institution Kebab
Kingz (even publishing its “4.5 star” reviews on Google), Kmart,
Bunnings and other locations.
But
after Alcorn tweeted out the story on Thursday, along with a
tongue-in-cheek message about the worker’s “busy” social
schedule, Twitter erupted into furious criticism and in many cases,
abuse.
Some
of the milder tweets accused The Age of both “snobbery” towards
the worker, and of blaming him for the outbreak. One that we can
print came from ABC News Breakfast host Michael Rowland, who asked:
“What are you trying to get at with this story?”. Meanwhile,
author and former Age columnist Marieke Hardy sarcastically tweeted:
“Fantastic. Great move. Well done Gay.”
After
other much less printable messages, Alcorn — in two late-night
tweets the same day — finally had enough. She dramatically
announced her break-up with Twitter: “(I) am out of here.”
Speaking
to Diary on Sunday, Alcorn said her Twitter exit was not an
over-reaction, but a response to the fact that the author of the
controversial story, Tom Cowie, had received death threats.
“People
don’t have to like an article,” she tells us. “They can say it
was awful or lacked nuance or could have been done better. But the
frenzied and increasingly enraged Twitter reaction was totally
disproportionate, ending with vile private messages threatening
violence against a reporter, threats we take seriously.”
Alcorn
says she had tried since becoming The Age’s editor last year to
embrace Twitter, and adopted a philosophy that “we must engage with
our audiences and think deeply” about criticism.
“But
in the past few years, Twitter has become so abusive and furious it
is all but impossible to have those conversations. The usual response
that: ‘It’s only a few people, most Twitter users are great’,
no longer feels true.
“People
have told me that they wanted to respond to the fury but were too
nervous to do so for fear of being abused themselves.”
Alcorn
is now turning to “ways to speak with our readers and subscribers”
that don’t involve Twitter.
“They
won’t always be comfortable conversations, but hopefully they won’t
end with death threats,” she says.
As
of 4:51pm on Monday 8 February – four days after the reaction to Cowrie’s
article began – the newspaper's Twitter
account was still active.
Quite
frankly, given the misstatements of fact in the latter two articles and the tenor of the original story it is hard to call The
Age
editor’s decision to promote the original article in the manner she
did on Twitter. Neither were done in the best of taste as the man involved had done
nothing to deserve ridicule.
As
for the Herald
Sun
and The
Australian –
I have to wonder if before they went to print with this story the
newspapers even checked whether these alleged death threats and “vile
private messages threatening violence” were
reported to the police.
A
verified complaint made to police would give readers some confidence
that parts of these two articles were indeed truthful.
