When News isn’t News
Or, wouldn’t it be better if there wasn’t quite so much of it?
Do you sometimes think there’s too much news? By that, I don’t mean the actual news: headlines, happenings, events. No. What I mean is too much coverage of the news.
And do you sometimes think, that it is this incessant, twenty-four-hour obsession with reporting the minutiae of every, single depressing inch of a story, that has become the driver of the news itself? Turning a bad news story into a catastrophe and whipping up public panic until it makes a situation much worse than it ever was to begin with.
As you have probably guessed, by now, I do.
Let me explain.
I grew up in the 70s. That jolly era of the winter of discontent; IRA bombings and terrorism; the three-day week and Margaret Thatcher becoming Prime Minister. Just a few of the events that made it the decade what it was. But, of course, to counter that, we also had Punk Rock, David Bowie, Grease and flares(!), so it wasn’t all bad.
And, yes, we knew about these things. We weren’t uninformed.
Young as I was at the time, I watched the news. It was part of growing up. We ate tea, watched The Six o’Clock News and, if you missed that, there was the ITV flagship, News at Ten, or the BBC’s 9pm version. That was pretty much it — for a long time. Couple that with only three television channels, until 1982 when Channel 4 came along.
But still, we kept up with world and local events.
Much of the stuff going on was every bit as awful as today’s terrorist incidents, economic problems and poverty (mainly because we, as humans, aren’t very good at learning from the mistakes of the past). But the point I’m making is that there was one crucial difference between then and now. Then the news came in discrete, predefined time slots. It was packaged up and presented in those slots, and it didn’t escape to become the ever present, 24/7 entity that it is today.
It stands to reason that, if you have round-the-clock news coverage, you have to fill it with something. Ofcom’s 2019 annual Media Nations report states that, in the decade leading up to 2018, public service broadcasting (PSB) saw an increase in output of news and current affairs programming of 691 hours. This includes both national and regional news coverage. But this is only PSB, which is made up of the ‘traditional’ broadcasters: the BBC group of channels, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. This does not include Sky Broadcasting itself, and the channels it hosts or, crucially, anything that is accessed online. Then there’s the programming whose whole raison d’etre is what is going on in the world, such as Jeremy Vine’s morning show on 5, or the BBC’s Question Time. Many of these harness that insidious craze all news programmes are currently in love with, the Vox Pop. Where the ‘man in the street’ is given the opportunity to voice his opinion on just how awful everything is.
Now, for the sake of this article, I’m going to simply stick with PSB television news, mainly because, as Ofcom tells us, in the current climate of Fake News, this is where most people place their trust for accuracy. I’m going to further narrow this to free-to-air stuff and exclude the rolling, 24-hour news channels, such as the BBC produce.
So, a look at the schedule for today, from midnight last night, to midnight tonight.
Over the five PSB channels, there is a total of 28 hours and 15 minutes of news and news related content. BBC 1 came out on top, with 46% of it’s output devoted to news and current affairs (admittedly boosted by it’s 12:25 am to 6 am showing of the BBC’s rolling news channel); ITV came in next, with a third of its output in this category; Channel 4 was a minnow, with 0.4%; and Channel 5 at 13%.
That’s a helluva lot of news!
Except, I am willing to bet that the coverage doesn’t include a variety of important news and events, all clamouring to be aired. No. I reckon, given that I am writing this on March 3rd 2020, it will be an endless regrinding and rerunning of stuff to do with Covid-19, and today’s budget speech. There maybe a bit on the American run to the polls. Maybe a smidgeon of Prince Harry being duped into a divulging a bit too much to a Russian posing as Greta Thunberg — by the way, on another day, this would be the main, eternally repeated story. No. What most of the entire news content — over a whole day’s worth, when you add it up — will be related to, is the Coronavirus. And that’s the problem.
Psychologists tell us that repetition of a message and persuasion are linked. Repeat something enough — like the importance of hand-washing — and you will persuade someone to carry out that behaviour.
That’s a good thing, right?
Well, yes, it is. But what if the message you are repeating over and over, has the effect of persuading people that things are worse than they really are? And what if this is also couched in language that emphasises the negative impact of the message — words like panic, danger, threat? It could lead to some unfortunate consequences. Pretty bold claim? Let’s unpack it a bit.
Take the whole recent toilet paper shortage thing, for instance. For some reason — and I am still not entirely sure why — Australian people suddenly became a nation of nervous poopers and cleared the shops of loo roll. So, that’s a country, thousands of miles away from us, who decided to respond to Covid-19 by buying toilet paper. Weird, but it was way over the other side of the world.
Remember, there are a lot of scheduled hours of news programming that need filling here, so, as seems to be the case, like in the BBC breakfast news programme, for instance, such an item is reported over, and over, and over again. It gets picked up by other news sources and becomes viral, until, as we have seen, it results in a compulsion for UK residents to clear our shelves of toilet paper. Tell someone something enough times, and they will be persuaded that they need act. So they did, and headed to the supermarket.
The whole loo paper thing may sound comical, but that’s my point in a nutshell. There is too much news coverage. Most of it is not news. It is simply one story regurgitated over and over by news producers who have a seemingly endless tunnel of news programming to fill. So, they have to keep repeating things until the things they are repeating become the news themselves. This is exactly what we have seen with other events in recent years. Show someone telling us bad things about anything enough times and we will believe it, even if what we are hearing is not factual or is simply someone’s subjective viewpoint.
And that isn’t news and it isn’t a good thing.
Back to where I started, then. The 70s. Short, directed news coverage. There was no time or space for repetition. You got the message and then you moved on and dealt with it. I’m not daft enough to say that everything was rosy then, and I certainly don’t advocate a return to the past. But maybe we should carry out a bit of self-regulation. Watch the news once a day. Stop clicking on stories online so much. And, for goodness’ sake, stop buying loo roll because someone, somewhere, on the other side of the world, thought it was a good idea.
If you’re interested on how specific word choices can affect you, this is an excellent TED talk by Elizabeth Loftus; https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_how_reliable_is_your_memory?language=en
