News has moved on – but we can’t ignore Ukraine

ONE of my big bugbears in life is the nature of the news cycle. It underpins so many other things that sometimes I feel like a broken record, pointing it out again.

There’s a clue in the word “newspaper”: The vast majority of what you read is “new”. If it weren’t new, it wouldn’t be news.

There’s a natural human tendency to be drawn to what is new, what’s unexpected.

It sells papers, puts eyes in front of TV screens and generally makes the economics of the news cycle work better than other things. It comes with a problem. Remember the days when yellow and blue flags were the order of the day, when an outpouring of people were prepared to open their homes to refugees from Ukraine?

And now ... nothing. It’s not that we’ve forgotten, it’s just that the news cycle has moved on.

We’ve been concerned with Hamas’ terror attacks on Israel, Israel’s heavy-handed response and Iran’s attack on Israel.

What’s new is prescient. It’s dangerous. And yet, whilst our eyes are turned away, things are not going quite so well in Ukraine.

Russia is making advances. Ukraine is having, for the moment at least, to ration ammunition.

Artillery, in particular, needs to be able to fire frequently and regularly in order to be effective.

The consequences of a Ukrainian defeat would, for us in the West, not be pretty.

If Russia can defeat Ukraine, what is next?

The tide needs to be turned. Fighter jets were needed a year ago. Now, perhaps, it’s something else. It’s the ground war which matters most at this stage.

The United States has finally approved another aid package to Ukraine.

I don’t know whether or not that will be sufficient.

The attritional nature of a war, when Russia has far more population and is able to call up far greater numbers, must surely still be concerning.

It seems that Ukraine is now stuck between a rock and a hard place: surrender is unthinkable; victory seems further than ever from their grasp.

They have no choice but to continue to fight, and they need resources in order to be able to do so.

I fear that our political leaders succumb to the same shorttermism that creates the news cycle.

It’s a product of a consumerdriven liberal democracy that we have such a news cycle. It’s not a bad thing (at least in the Churchill sense: Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others which have been tried from time to time).

Having a free press within a democracy is absolutely essential.

Does it cause problems? Well, yes, sometimes – but any other form of press, any censorship or State control, is far worse.

Perhaps we need simply to accept the fact that a free society will never be ideal.

It’s not going to be perfect, but it’s for sure less bad than any of the alternatives.

Which brings me back to another question of our own personal responsibility.

We can’t expect the news to do everything for us. If you’re the type of person who posted on social media in support of Ukraine, well, you’re still able to do so again – even when it’s out of the news cycle.

Those little actions we took before, can still be taken even when there’s no ‘hook’ in the news to hang it to.

The mainstream media may have little choice but to follow the dictates of what’s changing on a local, regional, national and global scale on a day-to-day basis.

But maybe we don’t need to. Maybe we should consider it to be our personal responsibility to remember and continue to keep these things in the public consciousness.

In a democracy, we all share in the responsibility for what happens to our nation – and the world – for better, or for worse.

Jonathan Arnott is a former member of the European Parliament for the North East.