ABSTRACT
Journalists bear an ambivalent relationship with numbers – statistical data in particular – due to a peculiar range of epistemological and cultural challenges. Medical and health statistics that are inundated in the news, for instance, have led to unnecessary worries, false hopes and meaningless lifestyle changes. The cultural theorist Kathleen Woodward discusses this at length when espousing the concept of “statistical panic”. Woodward’s “statistical boredom” concept chimes, again, with the psychology literature, especially its concept of psychophysical numbing – the tendency in which our sensitivity to something diminishes as its magnitude increases. Readers can see the statistic that gives them an overview of the scale of the crisis. Both the verbal and visual elements combine to touch at a collective experience of the pandemic – one that draws on past experiences before the first lockdown and the potential of being able to engage in these important activities again afterwards.
