No news is bad news
FOR all the angst about polarisation and disinformation, something very different is in fact going on in news consumption: the mass-media age is ending. We’re returning to a time when most people get almost no news. Growing numbers of citizens are oblivious to current affairs, much like most ordinary Britons before the first popular newspaper, the Daily Mail, appeared in 1896. Opinion-formers who lead the political conversation tend to overlook this shift, because they, by definition, care about news. What happens to a society when the majority switches off?
Of course, there never was a golden age when everyone followed the news. George Orwell wrote on May 28 1940, as the British army’s evacuation from Dunkirk began: “People talk a little more of the war, but very little . . . Last night, [his wife Eileen] and I went to the pub to hear the 9[pm] news. The barmaid was not going to have it on if we had not asked her, and to all appearances nobody listened.”
Still, for about a century, people in developed countries bought newspapers.
Perhaps they did so chiefly for sport, the weather and cartoons, but they absorbed current affairs by osmosis. Their radios and TV sets gave them hourly news.
Now, the internet’s destruction of media is nearing completion. Many people who moan about “the media” hardly see media any more. In 2023, for the first time, cable and broadcast TV combined accounted for less than half of all television viewing in the US, says the media research company Nielsen. Netflix and YouTube are winning that battle. Fox News has shrivelled to a niche retirees’ broadcaster.
The US has lost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists since 2005. Britain’s former Conservative leader William Hague noted, in a requiem for local newspapers this month, that the once-mighty Birmingham Post, in a city of 1.15 million, now sells 844 printed copies a week. No wonder it took a fictional TV drama to excite the public about the wrongful convictions of British postmasters, after media had reported the scandal fruitlessly for years.
The cliché used to be that people had moved to social media for news. Well, they have moved to social media, but increasingly not for news. After all, why let journalists you don’t trust tell you about politicians you don’t trust? Meta says news now accounts for under 3 per cent of what users see on its biggest platform, Facebook. Instagram, too, has deprioritised news. TikTok won’t even show political adverts.
This suits the growing tribe of people who find the news depressing, boring and repetitive. Brexit, for instance, feels so 2016. Politicians are being outcompeted by rival celebrities in the attention economy. If the BidenTrump contest were a reality TV show, it would have been discontinued in 2020. Even Trump has lost his shock value, and some of his wit.
Pundits wonder why voters aren’t giving Biden credit for the improved economy. Well, few voters see economic statistics any more. Non-visual events such as the Chips and Science Act attract even less attention than climate change.
Only spectacular news videos break through to apolitical people. This happened at the US-Mexican border and, initially, in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, until the content grew repetitive. The Ukrainian war is a particular international turn-off, says the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report. As for Gaza, the western protesters chanting, “From the river to the sea” and the people who obsess about them are both minuscule unrepresentative minorities. Westerners mostly ignore the war (though when asked by pollsters, people who bother replying express opinions that they hadn’t been thinking about five minutes before).
A few serious news media will survive as specialinterest publications, like ham-radio magazines in bygone days. Their content is mostly argued about by welleducated men with polarised views, notes the Reuters Institute. Politicians will disproportionately woo this group, ignoring the apathetic mainstream.
The no-news era will change politics. “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be,” wrote the American founding father Thomas Jefferson. Expect rising abstention at elections, as is already happening in France. Polarisation pushed turnout in the US’s 2020 election to 66 per cent, the highest since 1908, but that should prove a peak. Internet influencers may displace TV personalities such as Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy as election-winners. And with citizens losing interest, leaders will find it easier to dismantle democracy à la Viktor Orbán.
We marvel at Russians, switched off and immobilised while their government commits horrors. That could be us very soon.