The stories that matter get lost in this frenzy of 24-hour news
Rolling coverage and social media mean we no longer have the attention span for more serious issues
YOU will have noticed that Donald Trump is the US President . If, for some unfathomable reason, this fact has temporarily slipped from your mind, there’ll be a news bulletin within an hour or two that will plant him back at the centre of the world that the current affairs industry wants you to live within.
B r i t a i n’s news programmes sometimes seem to give a similar amount of publicity to the current resident of the White House as they give to the tenant of our own 10 Downing Street. And while I believe Mr Trump is getting too much attention over here, it’s peanuts compared to what he’s receiving over there.
On one particular day the news network CNN devoted 92 per cent of programming to the nation’s entertainerin-chief. With 12 hours and 19 minutes on Trump-watch there was only one hour and eight minutes left for everything else happening in America — or, indeed, anywhere across planet Earth.
While you might think CNN’s focus is justifiable given that the nuclear codes are within reach of those orange fingers, I see plenty of evidence to suggest that CNN’s editorial judgment is all about money. The net work’s audience numbers often double when it covers Trump, and doubled audiences mean extra advertising revenue and the record profits it has enjoyed ever since the hotelier moved into political real estate. Why cover the meltdown in Venezuela, the replacement of US jobs by robots, or any one of many huge (but complicated) developments in global affairs when years of declining audience numbers have finally ended?
Trump certainly doesn’t mind the attention. He, after all, is watching them watching him. Some estimates suggest he consumes four to five hours of news shows each day. Journalists on Air Force One report that CNN, MSNBC and his favoured Fox News channel can invariably be heard at top volume from inside his section. And his tweets often bear direct correlations to topics that broadcaster have just covered.
Many of us would rather the most powerful man in the world spent less time goggle-boxing and more time reading his briefing notes, meeting ambassadors or scientists and, perhaps, even reading some history. But, and here’s my big challenge to all of us who overdose on news: if there are better things for him to do with his time than watch pundits, polls and politics, aren’t there also better things that we could be doing with our own time, too?
I’m not saying that a basic awareness of what’s going on around us isn’t useful. It is. When journalism is completely absent we end up with more tragedies like Grenfell Tower. Malpractice and corruption all flourish under cover of darkness. A healthy and free press is a good thing but it should not become too dominant in a society. When it does, the biases that characterise news can infect a society’s whole way of thinking.
Those biases are not so much a tilt to the Right over the Left or to liberalism over conservatism or vice versa. The biases in news are more fundamental and intrinsic. They are biases to the shiny new things rather than to the more familiar important things. To the negative over the positive — hence the unofficial “if it bleeds it leads” motto of every newsroom and why the majority of the population in most advanced countries are ignorant of the huge global advances in fighting hunger and disease of recent decades.
Then there’s the preference for the controversial over the consensual — exemplified in how the likes of Katie Hopkins in Britain and Bill O’Reilly in America can command high fees.
And, critically, there’s the bias towards the political over the technological, cultural and religious. Why, for example, is it nearly always a Government or shadow minister who is interviewed in the prized 8.10am slot on Radio 4’s Today programme? In a parallel and superior media universe it would be the producer of Channel 4’s Hollyoaks getting grilled about the impact of that programme’s controversial plot lines on teenagers’ values. It would be an executive of Facebook on child safety issues. Or, perhaps, a board member of the Bank of England on its interest rate policy’s effect on pensioners’ savings.
My key concern about the power of 24/7 media is on attention spans, however, and I’m not the only one who is worried. Interviewed for a new documentary, Justin Webb, a presenter of the Today programme, talked frankly about the distracting impact of rolling news services and social media. He argued that we’d be better governed if ministers and other public figures cut themselves off from the news cycle for large chunks of the day. His BBC colleague Jonathan Dimbleby agreed. He fears that competition between news organisations to serve up the latest piece of news “gossip” to their viewers or listeners was “undermining of our ability to focus on what matters”.
When the BBC has come through the self-destructive issue of who earns what from licence fee payers it needs to do some soul-searching on whether, as a public service broadcaster, its news output is different enough from profitdriven outlets like CNN. Should it combat the culture which judges politicians by the latest opinion polls, CEOs by their latest quarterly results and football managers by their last half-dozen games or, actually, is it part of that culture?
The biggest beneficiaries of western short-termism are our economic rivals in the far east. While, for example, Trump is tweeting about the media and the media is tweeting about him, China is organising its $900 billion One Belt, One Road series of infrastructure investments to encircle the globe. It has knitted old US allies into a new Pacific area free-trade zone. And it is beginning to show signs of winning the space race. In times when global power is shifting I recommend reading less news and more history.
Tim Montgomerie is the editor of UnHerd.com, which launches tomorrow with a focus on the future of the news industry
The biases that characterise news can infect a society’s whole way of thinking