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Journalists are supposed to write the first draft of the story. However, when future historians study the 2020s, I suspect they will marvel at how we underestimate the most important stories of our time. I include myself in that failure. Which stories are the most important and why do we miss them?
Any analysis should not start from conspiracy theories, but from an understanding of how journalism is structured. The world’s most influential media organizations are based in New York and London. Their powerful domestic economies and the English language give them a global reach that not even large national media outlets like Brazil’s Globo can match. Furthermore, the United States and the United Kingdom allow more freedom of expression than, say, China or the Gulf States. Reports from the FT, BBC, The New York Times, CNN and wire services are picked up by media outlets elsewhere, most of which only have the resources to cover their own countries.
The journalists who set global news agendas tend to have higher incomes, degrees in the arts, and little personal experience of social catastrophes. These characteristics underpin the failures of the media. Our complacency and lack of scientific training encourage us to downplay the most important story of all: climate change. For example, the recent academic study showing the unexpectedly rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet received little coverage. The weather only tends to feature prominently in the news when disasters affect Westerners, especially the wealthy.
Climate has an additional disadvantage on the news agenda: it makes for an unsatisfying story. It’s a story with a dragon (global warming) but without a human dragon slayer to cheer for. Every week, new reports repeat the depressing and increasingly tedious fact that the dragon has grown. But it won’t lead the home page until it eats more rich people.
The knee-jerk reaction is to blame mischievous journalists for hiding the truth from a public that is desperate to hear it. It’s about ignoring today’s second-by-second interaction between journalists and their audiences. When I joined the Financial Times in 1994, we didn’t even have a website, so we had no idea what articles readers were reading. Today, all major media organizations 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 the majority prefer culture wars to climate wars. This is not surprising, because consumers of mainstream English media tend to be wealthy English speakers with no scientific training, as do journalists.
The same dynamic underpins other forgotten stories. Future historians may wonder why journalists ignored the mostly unnecessary deaths of five million children a year, according to estimates by the website OurWorldinData, from preventable diseases. But again, these children are not dying in New York and London. Few global media outlets have correspondents in the most affected poor countries, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the Central African Republic. Journalists and audiences at major English-language publications tend to be white people who feel greater empathy for white victims, according to the “ingroup empathy hypothesis” used by social psychologists and neuroscientists. In any case, the news reports exceptional events. Daily death is not exceptional.
The boring repetition of horror also exacerbates the lack of information about the current wars in Sudan and Ukraine, and the carnage occurring on the ground in Gaza. (There has been much more comprehensive coverage of international relations regarding Gaza and Western protests over Gaza.) Add to that more specific factors. Bias toward white victims initially encouraged coverage of the Ukrainian war, until the conflict lost narrative momentum. Once the Russian dragon started eating the dragon hunters, the audience died down.
Meanwhile, Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon have their own unique dynamics. The 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 does not allow international journalists to enter Gaza and has killed 123 Palestinian media workers, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. That leaves few reliable sources on the site. Even death counts are compiled solely by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which, as Israel keeps repeating, is under the theoretical control of Hamas.
There have been some brave reports about the war in Gaza. But it is easier and cheaper to report on the American culture war over Gaza. And the public seems to prefer that. I am not excusing the failures of journalism or my own. Blame us, but also blame the public.
Email Simon at simon.kuper@ft.com
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