The year the media lost its mind

A laughter epidemic spread rapidly through a school in Kashasha, Tanzania, during early 1962, forcing the school to close. Affected students could not stop laughing and were wholly unable to concentrate on their lessons. By the time the school was shut down, 95 of the 162 pupils had succumbed to uncontrollable laughter.

After the school's closure, compulsive laughing fits tore through the home villages of several students. Over the next 18 months, debilitating laughter forced 14 schools to shut and more than 1000 people to be struck down with the bizarre condition. While the epidemic raged, the original school was sued for allowing its students and their parents to transmit the laughter to surrounding areas.

Finally, as mysteriously as the laughter had arrived, it petered out.

We all know that there is no such condition as contagious, uncontrollable laughter. The experiences of the afflicted Tanzanians are now categorised as a form of mass delusion. At the time that meant nothing to the incapacitated, laughing villagers who were suddenly unable to live their normal lives. For them, until the delusion wore off, reality had shifted.

Eight years earlier on the other side of the world, several residents of Bellingham, Seattle, woke one day to find holes, pits and dings in their car windscreens, leading them to raise the alarm about vandals targeting cars in the town. The rate of damage quickly became so great that residents blamed everything from a sand flea infestation to secret nuclear tests.

Police were powerless as the windscreen damage spread to nearby towns. In panic, the Bellingham Mayor Allen Pomeroy contacted the Washington Governor and then President Dwight Eisenhower, pleading for emergency assistance.

Within two weeks of the first case, the Seattle police crime laboratory stated that the damage was, “Five per cent hoodlum-ism, and ninety-five per cent public hysteria."

The police theory was that more and more people were hearing about the phenomenon in the media, checking their own windscreen, and connecting pre-existing wear and tear to the sensational media stories. The towns were collectively imagining the whole event.

Within two days of the lab report becoming public, cases suddenly stopped. There had been no marauding vandals, no sand fleas, and no secret nuclear tests.

These examples of mass delusions demonstrate the variety of human irrationality, but also something else: How susceptible we are to suggestion, and how profoundly we can affect each other's reality.

The recent Australian election saw commercial media and the ABC fall victim to mass delusions of their own. These fictions originated with Scott Morrison and the Murdoch press.

Despite the cascade of evidence that the previous three years had delivered — Morrison's ability to lie, his utter incompetence regarding large projects, the white-hot rage of many segments of the public towards his hollow announcements and aggressive personality — the press quickly fell into line during the election campaign and adopted Morrison's chosen attack lines as established truths.

The gospel became:

1) People didn't know who Anthony Albanese was.

2) He wasn't up to running the country.

3) His policies may hurt the economy and dramatically increase debt.

These messages were repeated ad nauseum by senior journalists at outlets ranging from The Guardian to Sky News, with the ABC also centring these messages when discussing Albanese.

No acknowledgement was given to the fact that these messages had originated with Morrison and the fiercely pro-LNP media agenda setters at The Australian.

Likewise, not a single outlet published an in-depth piece on Albanese's long ministerial career to educate their audience about his actual record, his performance, and his demonstrated beliefs.

No articles included interviews with his many colleagues about their decades together, revealing the kind of person he was, and the insights that long, close working relationships can provide.

Journalists were happy to ask loaded questions to members of the public in marginal seats, have the messages of Morrison and News Corp confirmed, and report that they were true. No footnote mentioned that news outlets enjoying near-monopolies in these areas were screaming the messages day after day on their front pages and at the top of news bulletins.

By accepting Morrison's claims as their own, journalists ignored his history of fabrication and became blind to the public's repeated messages via polls that Labor was the preferred next government, and Albanese was viewed more favourably than Morrison.

In a country that is only beaten by China and Egypt in its concentration of media ownership, no journalists wrote about their industry's role in cementing Morrison's attack lines in the minds of the public, and also the media's role in vastly exaggerating their support.

On the issue of Albanese's supposed lack of leadership experience, no journalist countered that Scott Morrison had only been Prime Minister for nine months before the 2019 election. Anthony Albanese had been opposition leader for three years when the 2022 election was held.

There was no media narrative in 2019 that the public did not know who Scott Morrison was. In the election of 2022, the public had seen Albanese in a leadership position for nearly four times as long as they had seen Morrison leading his party before the 2019 election. If there was any truth to the nebulous idea that the public 'did not know' Albanese, surely the media would recognise that it was their own failing, and set about educating the public on the identity, personality, background, and values of the opposition leader.

That never happened in any meaningful way. The media was happy to simply repeat Morrison's attack lines while doing nothing to inform the public otherwise. Every day, Morrison's attack lines became pre-packaged stories for lazy, incurious journalists.

The election result relieved the public and surprised the media. Emerging from their mass delusions that Morrison was a supreme campaigner and Albanese was unknown and untrusted, the media struggled to grasp that the public had chosen 'bumbling' Albanese. No journalist reflected on their view of reality being wholly shaped by Morrison and News Corp.

Like Morrison's many lies preceding the election, his toxic campaign fictions remained truths for far too many gullible, blinkered journalists. To them, the public had delivered a shock result.

To the public, the result was a confirmation of reality, not a rejection of it. In the days after Labor won, journalists showed remnants of their mass delusions, exhibiting some threads of the false reality that had not yet fallen away. Several referred to Morrison as the Prime Minister. A senior ABC reporter described Prime Minister Albanese as using Morrison's plane to travel to a QUAD leaders meeting in Japan.

The general mood among the press was obvious confusion. Some insulted voters, but most suppressed their skepticism. The accepted dogma became that Morrison had lost due to his personality. The idea that Albanese had won the election in his own right with personal honesty, promises of accountability, and a major policy platform, was simply too far from their understanding of reality to accept.

That's how a mass delusion works. One day, it all ends, and everyone realises that reality is very different to what they thought it was. There is a vague memory that one person, just one, started something a long time ago, and it seemed so real that it became the sufferer's whole view of the world.

But it wasn't reality. Eventually, in the weeks after the election, the delusions faded as invisibly as they had appeared. Political reporting started again, almost normally, with a sheepish glance back at the past, at their shared delusions of Morrison the supreme campaigner and Albanese the inexperienced risk, before they were buried deep by all of the journalists who had got it so wrong, and they never acknowledged it again.