Admit it. You know you regularly choose to read entertaining trash over reminders of how the world is turning to shit. Amber Allott investigates if we are entirely in control of our ignorant habits, or if they are the result of capitalism and political manipulation within the media.
‘How Penny says no to Rod during ‘that time of the month,’ ‘The Smart Money’s on a Bay Wedding for Richie McCaw and Gemma Flynn,’ ‘Baked beans and sausages leave Marlborough man wanting more,’ and, ‘Pregnant Kiwi woman twerks through her contractions. You only have to glance at the headlines of any of our major news publications to determine what is really important to New Zealanders. Crammed down the bottom of the web-page, or into the skinny columns down the side of the newspaper are climate change, disease epidemics, the war-torn middle east, the ever-increasing child poverty rate, and countless other stories about how our world is broken. Perhaps not in a way that affects you or me in the immediate future, but in ways that are hurting millions of others all the time, and will eventually hurt us too.
Maybe you are one of the many who skim vacantly over these articles, or hits like and keeps scrolling when they pop up in your Facebook feed, but don’t feel too bad; you’re certainly not the only one. It’s possible that the fault isn’t even yours. After all, the media outlets are the ones choosing how to display and address these stories. Is this how the media have always done things? To what extent does our behaviour dictate what news we see? Are New Zealanders, as a culture, becoming apathetic to global issues? And, of course, does the responsibility to educate and to be an agent of positive change lie with the media, or with the individual?
The newspaper, in its current form, began to come into existence in the early 17th century. It has been the primary medium of journalists until very recently, when circulation began to drop in response to news being made accessible via television and the Internet. The first English-language newspaper ever printed was the Oxford Gazette, later renamed the London Gazette. Its first edition came off the press on the 7th of November, 1665, was a mere two pages long, and can be purchased online for about $250,000 US. At the time, London was overrun with cases of the Bubonic Plague, and thus the papers’ content included a ‘Bill of Mortality;’ a report on the number of Londoners who had died of the plague that week. Other stories involved military and naval news, debates in the House of Commons, overseas dispatches, and the possible impeachments of several MPs for treason. The front page featured a story about the Reverend Dr Walter Blandford’s election as Lord Bishop of Oxon.
Perhaps it was because of the difficulty and expense of using a printing press at the time, but reporting in the Gazette seemed only to feature news of political, military, and religious importance, as well as health-related news that was of great significance to London’s public at the time. Leaping forwards a couple of centuries, and over the ditch to the United States, we can examine a 1957 issue of The New York Times. The New York Times has won 117 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper in the world, and is regarded as a ‘newspaper of record,’ a title awarded to newspapers with a large circulation, who are commonly viewed as being authoritative and of a high professional standard. Furthermore, the paper boasts the motto, “all the news that’s fit to print,” which is printed in the top left-hand corner of every edition. In the years following World War II, American entertainment reached an all time high. With musicians like Elvis in the spotlight, rock and roll was on the rise, and cinema was entering the golden age of science fiction. If the media of any era had good reason to shift their focus to celebrity news, it was the media of the 1950s. And yet – when an issue of the New York Times from March the 26th, 1957, is examined, there is no such shift. Front-page news consisted of news of the senate, the U.N., a deadly blizzard, political news, and international intelligence. The only story remotely addressing entertainment is approval by the city commissioner to present Broadway musicals under the stars in Central Park.
So, how and why do the modern media choose what they report on? Do news editors have exclusive control over what gets reported? In reality, there are many factors that influence this process, the most significant being political pressure, and maximising profits. News editors may be forced to succumb to pressure placed onthem by police, government, or other entities, to include or exclude certain stories, alter facts, and mislead their readership. Even when a news source is entirely free of governmental restraints, they are likely still operating as a business. This means that in order to outperform their competition and maximize profits, what they publish has to catch and hold the attention of a wide variety of consumers. In critically-acclaimed 2014 film, Nightcrawler, a news editor describes to a freelance worker what her station looks to buy; “We find our viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs. What that means is a victim or victims, preferably well-off and/or white, injured at the hands of the poor, or a minority.” When her boss, at one stage, complains about some of the footage she intends to show, saying that people will be eating breakfast, she responds, “and they’ll talk about it at work.” What this implies about the news industry is that the headline stories are the ones with the most shock value – those that will grab the attention of the public; the news that will keep them talking, and keep them watching, whether that involves the private lives of beloved public icons or gruesome crimes. These stories keep the money rolling in.
With the world so rife with war and conflicts, with enormous environmental problems to which there is no easy solution, and with diseases tearing across entire countries, it’s only natural for newsreaders to become jaded and apathetic to such things. Is apathy really the culprit, however? To investigate, a survey was conducted about public awareness of significant issues, with questions regarding climate change and related health issues, events in the Middle East, global health and education, and New Zealand politics. All questions were based on headlines from the New Zealand Herald that had been published in the last week. Of the respondents, 46.67% claimed that they watched or read news stories daily, with 40% claiming to read them once to several times per week. Only a single respondent admitted to reading them less frequently than monthly, or never. One hundred percent of those who answered were aware that it is health problems related to air pollution that is killing more people annually than malaria and HIV combined, a fantastic start. Accuracy dwindled on the second question; 64.29% believed that the deadly weapon New Zealand soldiers have recently started training Iraqi troops to use was the frag grenade, rather than the correct answer, the bayonet. 71.43% of participants believed that it was Andrew Little who has voiced his concerns about the failings of the current electronic bail system, rather than Winston Peters, and the numbers of correct responses only got more dismal from there on out, with questions regarding criticisms of the recently-released US health guidelines, the CEO of Netflix announcing a $100 million dollar fund for education, and the effects of Tropical Cyclone Chapala.
Despite the lack of awareness of the articles used in the survey, those who completed it indicated that they are quite concerned about the issues that these articles address. On a scale from one to five, with one being ‘Not at all interested,’ and five being ‘incredibly invested and concerned,’ the average result was four, with no answers whatsoever below three.
In New Matilda, an Australian independent news digest, Dr Lissa Johnson published a recent article on the science behind why people are not more concerned about, as she phrases it, “the death of our planet and democracy,” or rather, polls showing that an overwhelming number of Australians would re-elect their government, despite disagreeing with them on a large number of policies regarding environmentalism. She proposes that a psychological theory known as ‘system justification,’ may come into play. System justification is, essentially, when people view the systems on which they depend, such as the government or media, in a favourable light, just as they view themselves and their social groups.
This theory, which is supported by hundreds of studies, meets the needs of the public in three major ways: existentially; belief in social, economic and political order makes people feel safe and secure, epistemologically; there is an order and meaning to life, and relationally; everybody is connected as a community through a shared reality. As Johnson puts it, “The more that a person feels dependent, powerless and vulnerable, at the mercy of a system over which they have no control, the more terrifying it is to think that the system is deeply flawed. Put simply, if you are relying on the system to survive, believing that it is good and just helps to keep your fear, insecurity, futility, alienation and meaninglessness at bay.”
When this is considered, a great number of us are engaging in self-deception. Because if the systems we rely on are flawed, then we are left without the security they provide. So, when people come along attempting to point out these flaws, they are often seen as attacking the security and peace-of-mind of everyone else. Is it any wonder, then, that so many people would just prefer not to know? To be able to skim over stories of how climate change could drive us to extinction, how international trade deals could leave us unable to protect our environment, and how the documented number of civilian deaths in Iraq since the war began in 2003 is believed to be over 170,000? Nobody could really blame you if you preferred to read light-hearted fluff about celebrities, or watch gruesome crimes unfold on the daily news, knowing that they will most likely be resolved by police. No need to worry, right?
Wrong. We need to care. If the past can teach us anything, it’s that social movements work. When ordinary people band together and take action, they create meaningful change in the world. This is the only world we have so far, and we have a responsibility to it, and to everyone else here to care, even when it feels hard, or seems boring. Because when it becomes okay for one person not to care, it becomes okay for others, and apathy spreads like swine flu through a pigpen. The media are not absolved of responsibility here either; the blame can never be placed entirely on the individual. They also have an obligation, especially the mainstream media outlets, like the New Zealand Herald, The Press, One News, and Stuff.com. They get to decide what they put in the spotlight, what we see the most of, and they need to make a change. Because they ARE the news, and what they are bringing to us should be newsworthy, all the news that’s fit to print.