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In recent weeks and months we have been told that the media’s handling of Covid-19 has caused an erosion of public trust in Britain’s press. The Twitterati of all persuasions have taken this

opportunity to (virtually) bellow at the top of their lungs that any line of questioning, or angle of reporting with which they don’t agree, is part of a giant media conspiracy, and no

wonder the public don’t trust the press. Except, they do. Sort of. Certainly, the media are trusted no less than they were before the Covid-19 outbreak began. Recent YouGov polling shows

that, in most cases, trust is higher in the media now than it was at the beginning of December. So why does this false narrative persist? Is it possible that the collective bunch of

Westminster-weirdos (myself included), still let ourselves believe that Twitter is the public? Perhaps it could even be that our own political leanings cloud our judgment of neutrality. On

seeing the YouGov polling numbers, we might ask why people were so vehement in believing that the public didn’t trust the media’s reporting of Covid-19. But another question is perhaps more

revealing — why did people so vehemently _want_ to believe that the public no longer trust the media? As with everything in the last few years, it seems that increased partisanship has a

very large part to play in this matter. The ever-expanding role of social media in how we gather and ingest our news has left us surrounded by people who already agree with us. Brexit

polarised the country more than any time in living memory and the overwhelming victory of the Conservative Party at the end of last year didn’t just heal those divisions overnight. It has,

however, lead to a hugely divisive attitude towards the media. On the right, we now see that any criticism of the Government is met with accusations of “being out of touch” with the nation,

or of being “elite”. On the left, we see any questions by journalists that don’t set out to trip up the government critisised for being too easy, and the correspondents who put them accused

of being “mouthpieces” of the establishment. Indeed, my fellow contributor on this very website, the former Labour spin-doctor Alastair Campbell, has been bemoaning the state of the media

and suggesting his own questions for the daily government press briefings — all with entirely neutral intentions, I’m sure. His advice to the media was that “your role is to elicit

information, and challenge government on behalf of the public.” He wrote this despite notoriously hand-picking the media representatives who were entitled to interview his former boss Tony

Blair during his time as Prime Minister. To his credit, he got almost universal support for these statements. However, to pin this on an individual is disingenuous and I mean no offence to

Alastair on this. He is certainly not alone in his desire to cause maximum damage to the government — it is the very nature of opposition. The issue is with those on both sides — be it the

loudest government cheerleaders, or their leading detractors — who don’t realise that the role of the media is neither to support government nor to defeat it. In a time of national crisis,

the job of the media is to give the public information and answers to the questions they care about. So in this time of fear, uncertainty and confusion let’s stop bewailing the media for not

asking the very specific questions we want, but support them as they try to provide some much-needed clarity to the British public.