Switching Off the News

Enough! When even a self-declared media junkie like me is turning down the never-ending firehose of information, disinformation and opinion to spare his sanity, you know we must be near some sort of tipping point. But is our exhaustion with 'news' part of the plan?

Yes, from politics to economics to climate change and the plight of the media itself, the headlines are unremittingly depressing. Yes, nothing ever seems to change and we seem to be stuck in a cycle of self-reinforcing spin and partisanship. But it's also true that the sense of futility and helplessness many of us feel is the desired outcome of those who seek to render us passive and acquiescent.

Staying informed is important, but much of the news that is pumped at us 24/7 is drained of context. We're encouraged to absorb it piecemeal and see it all as disconnected from everything else. Hard questions are avoided and a big picture perspective rarely taken. And if cynicism and surrender are our responses then that is mission accomplished for those with the power to effect real change.

If passively absorbed, news tends to immbolise us. Consuming more of it becomes like eating an entire packet of chips - the law of diminishing returns. In this, the legacy media and digital platforms are not seeking so much to inform us but to 'engage' us and to keep us endlessly doom-scrolling.

So is it any wonder that people are shaking their heads in dismay, deciding it is all too depressing and that nothing they can do will change anything?

This is not conjecture, by the way, but a real trend. The widely respected Reuters Institute Digital News Report has found a global move toward passive consumption of news. People aren't engaging and are reluctant to act or speak out on what they see or read.

With trust in news falling and growing scepticism among the public about the algorithms used to select what they see via search engines, social media, and other platforms, the Reuters survey found people are disengaging. While there were hopes around the turn of the century that the internet could widen democratic debate, fewer people are now participating in online news.

"Despite the political and economic threats facing many people, fewer than half (48%) of our aggregate sample now say they are very or extremely interested in news, down from 63% in 2017. Meanwhile, the proportion of news consumers who say they avoid news, often or sometimes, remains close to all-time highs."

At first glance, it seems surprising that at period of such existential crisis for the human race - via climate change, geopolitical tension, escalating inequality, the threat of further pandemics and diminishing faith in democratic institutions - people should be increasingly switching off the news.

But on the other hand, it's really not that surprising at all. As observed by Caroline Fisher, an assistant professor in journalism at the University of Canberra, people feel worn out by the news, particularly after the years of lockdown during Covid. Many also feel disempowered and are exhausted by a stalemated two-party political system where nothing ever changes.

"When big news breaks, there is an initial increase in (people watching it). But after a while people do start to turn away from it because it's very repetitive and it's grinding and it wears people down," Fisher told the ABC. "They have to make decisions then about how much they can cope with in those small gaps in their own lives."

Growing passivity and avoidance in this context makes perfect sense. But it also suits those in power. In their influential 1988 book 'Manufacturing Consent - The Political Economy of the Mass Media', two US academics - finance professor Edward S. Herman of Wharton and linguistics professor Noam Chomsky of MIT - identified how populations are rendered passive by a media propaganda model that uses the medium of 'news' to harvest our attention and construct consent.

As it turns out, however, that model of selling audiences to advertisers and using the revenue to subsidise journalism started to come apart not long after Manufacturing Consent was published. The internet and the digital revolution destroyed the media's business model. Big digital platforms built much better mousetraps for engaging the public and selling ads without having news fill the gaps. But instead of differentiating themselves by reinvesting in public interest journalism, much of the legacy media - run now by 'content producers' - has employed the click-bait tactics of social media and joined the culture wars by manufacturing outrage.  This all smells like market failure, but it has consequences beyond the share prices of media companies.

And so it is that without a common 'town square' and with digital and legacy media alike pursuing niche audiences through clickbait-driven algorithms, the public switches off.

In the meantime, the government, as a matter of political convenience, falls in behind the legacy media owners by painting the social media companies as the sole villains in all this, when the truth is the legacy media are just defending their patch. This is a demarcation dispute and if it's anyone's job to manipulate the public with lies and confected outrage it's them.

My own view in all this is there is no going back to the traditional 'Voice of God' news bulletin, where an anonymous editor ranks the 'stories of the day' and where journalists inside the tent avoid calling out lies and deception. People have seen how the sausages are made and are rightly cynical about the news production process. That is one benefit the digital revolution has given us.

As well, the people whose names dominate the news have becoming much better at news management - often with the help of former journalists squeezed out by a dying media and now employed as highly-paid spin-doctors. Social media channels like X (formerly Twitter), YouTube and TikTok allow decision-makers and opinion setters to bypass traditional media anyway. So often, the real conversation is going on elsewhere.

In this sense, the public is not so much becoming passive but actively looking for alternatives. The rise of the independents movement and alternative media in Australian politics is evidence of that. But we seem for now to be in this in-between phase where the traditional institutions of media and politics are working from old worn-out scripts that the public stopped believing in long ago.

Change will come, but I wouldn't be switching on the 6 o'clock news to find out about it.