Emma Kelly successfully presents part of the problem with media portrayal of world events. Half the problem is that the media, just like any other business, report what customers want to see, read or hear. In turn, this changes what customers see, read or hear, making us (the other half of the problem) more receptive to seeing, reading or hearing about it, until the dust settles enough after the initial ignition of collective conscience to move on to the next tragedy or cat photo. However, this isn’t the whole story.
Crunching the Numbers
The whole business of media portrayal of news is information. However, media outlets, whatever they are, have a number of scarce resources and constraints upon them, including but not limited to:
Pages in a newspaper before it becomes a loss maker due to production costs
- Time for a broadcast
- Ready for print time
- Number of journalists to trawl social media
- Number of journalists with feet on the ground
- How fast Journalists can get to the scene of incident
- How many editors are available to vet and edit Reuters or Associated Press feeds.
- …
These create a natural non-linear system, as multiple events vie for space in the media channel on each day, and they certainly do happen in multiple places each day. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the number of terror attacks and where they occurred in 2014. English speaking nations suffered attacks in a tiny proportion of cases.
Homophily
As Emma rightly says, numbers have shown us in the past that we are not interested in stories too far outside our cultural horizon. Studies have shown we build affinity, trust and empathy with people who are just like us. This doesn’t necessarily involve race at all, since it can just be introverts in an extrovert circle (As comedian Andy Parsons would say, “everyone has one weird friend. If you don’t know who it is in your group, it’s probably you”) but sometimes it does, subliminally or not. What this says to people is they are not worthy of our empathy. Until poor young Aylan Kurdi’s body washed up on the shores of Turkey would never have gone viral if it wasn’t posted, wasn’t a child and parents of children hadn’t seen it. Out of sight out of mind. That was the moment people empathised and took interest in the plight of Syrian refugees. All 16 million of them at the time.
Media Gossip Monster
When you have only 30 minutes to report the news that matters to people, if you are funded by advertising which requires large audience figures to justify the airtime spend, or you are funded by the TV license-payer, you need to present to the world the most engaging stories possible. Without it, you risk your revenue stream.
Additionally, we’ve seen the media of other countries in our travels around the world and the same thing presents itself. Al Jazeera, which has London and Middle Eastern station HQs amongst many other outposts, presents different stories to each audience with very differing degrees of graphic nature in it’s footage.
Look at it this way. If you go round to a friend’s house that you’ve not seen or spoken to in 3 months for a cuppa. You’re there perhaps an hour. In that hour, you can’t possibly discuss the intricate details of each and every event that happened to you in the 3 months. Some of it is irrelevant to the listener whilst other are massively important. So you concentrate on subjects that you engage each other with. It’s gossip!
Proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you’re interested in how bad it was in 2014 (2015’s data will come about I’m sure), take a look at the image below. It’s a sad thing to say, but if you need the truth you have to do what people like Professor Noam Chomsky are doing and go and find it. Just be sure to leave your pitch fork at home.
Axelisys’ Team Love Numbers! Formed in 2011, Axelisys works with some of the biggest household names in the UK and across the world to deliver knowledge and effective working practise. Our clients include organisations in inter-governmental roles, utilities, environmental services, financial services, insurance, leisure and tourism, higher education and the third sector.
