Like many of my colleagues and friends who have always consumed daily news as a matter of habit and pleasure, there is, of late, a slight feeling of dread upon awakening as I groggily look at my phone to see what new horror has befallen some corner of the planet, or what new global threat has arisen to darken my day.
I wonder about this. It never used to be so, at least through my rose-tinted rear-view mirror (to mix a metaphor). News was interesting, invigorating, edifying and only occasionally dark. Now it seems to be primarily depressing (even horrifying), with all other reactions playing second fiddle.
So I did a little research into what has been holding our attention, news-wise. It turns out that my “ain’t-it-awful” gut feeling is not entirely justified. Over the past year, the four big news stories which have crowded out everything else are: Israel/Gaza/Iran, Ukraine/Russia, everything Trump-related, and AI stories. The first two are objectively dispiriting. The latter two could be either uplifting or not, depending on your politics (Trump) or your position on the techno-optimism/pessimism spectrum.
The statistics are revealing. About 50% of all news stories in the mainstream media over the past year have been consumed by these four topics. Climate change used to be there, but is fading, with news stories appearing about half as frequently as the previous year. One can speculate as to the reasons for this − from retreating interest driven by politically fuelled climate-change scepticism, to simply giving way to more current matters, to climate-alarmist fatigue. Everything else has been reduced to larger and smaller crumbs, which you will only see if you read local or hyper-local news.
Sport is interesting. There are larger audiences (mainly driven by increased female viewership), more fan engagement and growing dollars spent on rights and sponsorships, but other than the big global events like the Olympics or UEFA, global coverage has remained static at about 6.5%.
Spike events
Chinese appearances in global news stories is slightly down at around 6% of global headlines, driven mainly by spike events like Taiwan, BRICS and economic collapses such as the Evergrande property empire mess. Africa is nearly completely absent, as are humanitarian crises like South Sudan. These sad spectacles garnered less than 2% of headline market share.
I seem to remember, in the long-gone days of printed newspapers, that in sitting down to read the LA Times with morning coffee (I used to live in Los Angeles), one could look forward to a veritable feast. There would be five or six stories on the front page, spread over any number of varied subjects, and the editorial team seemed to go to great lengths to keep things fresh every day. We have all seen multiple film scenes of the editorial meeting presided over by a sometimes tough boss. Every journalist would pitch their story. The bosses would ensure that the front page was bountifully diverse.
There are still editorial meetings, I presume, even in the age of online publishing. So it is not clear why the menu has been reduced to so few topics. Trump, two vicious wars and an unprecedented transformative technology are fertile ground, to be sure, but do they really need to crowd the room so completely? It is not as though they are boring subjects (far from it), but I really would like to go through a single day without seeing the US president’s face or reading another boisterous tweet. I also write about (and teach) AI, but damn, can we just stop already? Yes, AI is going to change the world, but really, get a life.
Seem churlish
As a columnist, these complaints seem churlish. The very facts presented earlier in this article were graciously provided by ChatGPT, saving me hours of research on this and all manner of stories. Trump is indeed stomping around in very big boots, and his tariffs, exclusions and cancellations are now reaching into the homes of people very far from the US. And then there are the two wars. We can’t look away, because maps are being redrawn, superpowers are sabre-rattling and nuclear weapons are being polished.
Benjamin Franklin famously wrote “…but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. When I wake up in the morning and scroll through my iPhone feed, it seems that four other things are certain too.
I should get over it.
[Image: reve.ai]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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