A few hours after I was assigned to write about the media’s silence over the Crimea situation, a Malaysia Airlines plane was shot down over eastern Ukraine. While the international political scene is still trying to find an explanation for the disaster, the families of the 298 victims will now finally be able to grieve. The initial density, then absence, and now permeation of Ukraine coverage raises the inevitable question over the quality and reliability of our 24/7 news culture.
How could the media stay relatively calm after the “worst” was supposedly over in March — in order to concentrate on the unfolding events in Syria and Gaza — while the local situation in Ukraine evidently still deserved attention and urgency? Whether or not the downing was an accident or the result of a successful act of terrorism, reporting of the crisis further exemplifies how the public is being fed peaks of a disaster rather than the whole story with context and follow-ups.
But the Crimea conflict didn’t only arise in February 2014. Decades of complicated cross-territorial conflicts between Russia and Ukraine hardly fit — nor should they — into a 300-word news story or a 1:30 television package. The same applies to Israel and Gaza, and most other complex political situations.
The actual problem originates from the nature of breaking news and our consumption of it, not from journalism as such. It’s tempting to draw conclusions about the overall state of the international media when we read CNN or BBC push notifications, shake our heads about their definition of news like the new lifestyle blog of Blake Lively or the inquest surrounding Peaches Geldof’s death, while the phones of plane crash victims are being answered by strangers with an “Eastern European accent.” Online news is increasingly defined as the quick fix that will generate a historic amount of buzz on social media.
Now we could blame the news conglomerates, much like a number of media theorists do. We could blame the ruthless economy that forces newspapers to cut down on real journalism jobs and and instead turns news into easily consumable, outrageous snippets of reality. Dry foreign policy analysis isn’t overly sexy, and supposedly doesn’t stimulate our brains in the same way as pictures of baby cats.
Our behaviour is at the core of the problem. Derek Thompson recently argues in The Atlantic that while audiences often claim to be interested in the “hard, ugly truth,” the majority still click on lists, quizzes, or that picture gallery of new burger recipes. “Ask readers what they want, and they’ll tell you vegetables. Watch them quietly, and they’ll mostly eat candy,” Thompson writes. Commercial news companies ultimately use this data for editorial decisions, which would explain the rise of BuzzFeed-type articles on traditional mainstream media. Strictly speaking, if we prefer cat pictures over extensive timelines of the Ukraine conflict, then maybe it shouldn’t come as a shock if that’s what we get.
But this is not a world that can afford to judge the media in those black and white terms; in the same way, the media should resist the important vs. insignificant evaluation when covering conflicts in Crimea, Syria and Gaza. Because the truth is a lot more grey than many of us would like to admit.
Many knowledgeable foreign correspondents and analysts work hard to evaluate the current states of a conflict, and they will do everything they can to get their story and their viewpoint in the paper or online. But sometimes another catastrophe — and there appears to be a saddening density of them in 2014 — is thought to be more worthy of leading the news agenda. And unfortunately, that’s how the media business works.
The passion of these journalists inspires me to learn more about the country or the situation they are currently covering. And though it’s the one thing that’s so often deemed as the decay of a healthy news culture, social media allows me to take part in their research, frustrations, and debates.
So consider following Jason Burke, Rob Crilly, Anne Barnard, Declan Walsh, Lindsey Hilsum, and Nicholas Kristof. Ask questions, dig deeper. Resist the Disney character quiz; instead, educate yourself on the world around you.
An attitude like this will positively impact the results of audience behaviour analysis that Thompson highlights. It will set a positive example of engagement, interest, and perhaps most importantly, compassion. We live in a globalized world with instant news, so let’s make this a good thing.
Photo (Flickr CC) by DieselDemon.
