How the media is failing us

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Journalists are supposed to write the first draft of history. Yet, when future historians study the 2020s, I suspect they’ll marvel at how we under-reported the biggest stories of our time. I include myself in that failure. Which stories are the biggest, and why are we missing them?

Any analysis must start not from conspiracy theories, but from an understanding of how journalism is structured. The world’s most influential media organisations are headquartered in New York and London. Their powerful domestic economies and the English language give them a global reach that even huge national media such as Brazil’s Globo cannot match. In addition, the US and UK allow more free expression than, say, China or the Gulf states. Reporting by the FT, the BBC, The New York Times, CNN and the wire services gets picked up by media outlets elsewhere, most of which only have the resources to cover their own countries.

The journalists setting global news agendas tend to have higher incomes, arts degrees and little personal experience of societal catastrophe. These characteristics underpin the media’s failures. Our complacency and lack of scientific training encourage us to underplay the biggest story of them all, climate change. For instance, the recent academic study showing the unsuspectedly fast melting of Greenland’s ice sheet received scant coverage. Climate only tends to lead the news when disasters hit westerners, especially wealthy ones.

Climate has an additional handicap in the news agenda: it makes for an unsatisfying story. It’s a story with a dragon — global warming — but no human dragonslayer to cheer on. Every week, new reports repeat the depressing and increasingly tedious fact that the dragon has grown. But it won’t lead the homepage until it eats more rich people.

The knee-jerk reaction is to blame knavish journalists for withholding the truth from a public that’s desperate to hear it. That is to ignore today’s second-by-second interaction between journalists and their audience. When I joined the FT in 1994, we didn’t even have a website, so we had little idea which articles readers read. Today, all big media organisations track the precise time each reader spends on each story. This is dangerous. The instinct is to give customers what they want. And it turns out that most prefer culture wars to climate. No wonder, because consumers of big English-language media tend to be well-off English-speakers without scientific training, much like the journalists.

The same dynamics underpin other neglected stories. Future historians may wonder why journalists ignored the mostly unnecessary deaths of five million children a year, as calculated by the OurWorldinData website, from preventable illnesses. But again, these kids aren’t dying in New York and London. Few global media outlets have correspondents in the worst affected poor countries, such as Democratic Republic of Congo or the Central African Republic. Journalists and audiences of big English-language publications tend to be white people who feel strongest empathy for white victims, according to the “in-group empathy hypothesis” used by social psychologists and neuroscientists. Anyway, news stories recount exceptional events. Daily death isn’t exceptional.

The dulling repetition of horror also exacerbates the under-reporting of today’s wars in Sudan and Ukraine, and the slaughter happening on the ground in Gaza. (There has been much fuller coverage of international relations concerning Gaza, and western protests about Gaza.) Add to that more specific factors. The bias towards white victims initially encouraged coverage of the Ukraine war, until the conflict lost narrative momentum. Once the Russian dragon started eating dragonslayers, audiences turned off.

Meanwhile, Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon have their own unique dynamic. Media has always covered Israel obsessively. That means the IDF has had to work hard in its attempts to turn Gaza and then Lebanon into journalistic dead zones. Israel doesn’t let international journalists enter Gaza, and has killed 123 Palestinian media workers, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. That leaves few reliable on-site sources. Even death tallies are compiled only by the Palestinian health ministry, which, as Israel keeps repeating, is under Hamas’s notional control.

There has been some brave reporting of the war in Gaza. But it’s easier and cheaper to report the American culture war about Gaza. And audiences seem to prefer that. I’m not excusing journalism’s failings, or my own. Do blame us, but blame audiences too.

Email Simon at [email protected]

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