Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig: The Void in Our News Diet
We all accept that “news” is what happened yesterday (or this morning). However, as with many other conventional wisdoms, there’s more to it than that. As an example, if astronomers found a gigantic meteorite that was on target to smash into Earth in another year, wouldn’t that be news? For sure. Similarly, if the latest data showed that Israel was headed sometime in the future for socio-demographic disaster, shouldn’t that be news? Hard to deny that.
However, would your favorite news purveyor provide details every day until the proverbial “hits the fan”? Probably not. And that’s a problem for editors – and news consumers as well, as I noted in my blog post here a few months ago (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/politics-isnt-the-only-news/#comments-1308158). Keep on reading; I promise to get to a hugely important Israeli example soon enough.
Traditionally, news reporting has been divided into two categories: hard news and soft news. The former involves war, the latest economic stats, violent crime, political turmoil, and the like. Soft news, on the other hand, involves lighter fare: sports, culture, and general public “gossip” (celebrities, marital scandals et al). All these happened “yesterday,” or at least were discovered very recently. Which leaves a huge void in the middle – highly important, impactful information that has a longer timeline. I have called this “general news” (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.profslw.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/General-News.Journalism-article.1.2010-1.pdf )
Is that type of news important? Here’s an exercise you can easily try. Go back a year in time on any internet news site you wish and randomly choose ten “hard news” items. Then read them carefully and ask yourself to what extent they really were – and continue to be – “important” or still relevant. Then go back and do this again – but this time randomly choosing ten “general news” items as I defined above (harder to find, but worth the effort). Now ask yourself the same relevance question. You’ll find that in most cases, the general news beats the hard news for importance and consequence.
Why, then, are virtually all newspapers and news sites full of hard news and not general news? Look in the mirror: we (the public) are at “fault.” That last word has quote marks because there is no moral fault here – rather it’s a “bug” in human psychology. We have evolved over the eons to be attuned to immediate danger; the rustling in the tall grass ahead will have grabbed our attention a lot more than any lack of rain these past few days that even might continue into the foreseeable future. After all, it could rain tomorrow. But the grass rustling? That might well be a tiger lying in wait within the marshy meadow ahead. If we’re not careful about that, there won’t be any need to find drinking water next week! In short, we’ll deal with the “future” when it arrives – even if the short-term issues grabbing our attention are mostly minor, irrelevant, or even non-existent.
Add to that another aspect of human psychology: we’re far more attuned to news about people than about inanimate things, even if the latter will impact our lives far more than the person “in the news.” That’s why, for example, politics almost always trumps science (pun intended). Political news is all about wo/man against wo/man; other news involves dry statistics (economics), or complex matters (technology) – all usually involving a large number of mostly faceless or not so well-known people. That’s why any science news story hoping to grab our attention will always start with a “face” – a specific person affected by or contributing to the issue being reported.
The problem with this – here too we’re back to looking in our mirror for “blame” – is that if we read the full news item, we’ll tend much more to remember the personal vignette in the “lede” (yes, that’s how it’s spelled: the opening sentence or paragraph of a news article) than the more important elements of the overall story. Someone’s home fell off the cliff into the sea because of rising sea levels? That poor family will stick in our minds for a long time; climate change that caused the tragedy, much less so.
Here’s a contemporary Israeli example: the haredi demographic time bomb. While the news is full of reports about this or that ultra-Orthodox violent protest against the proposed draft law under consideration today, the main issue of the rapidly increasing number of haredim in Israel is hardly mentioned. Such “general news,” however, is far more important than any protest with haredim sitting on a major highway artery. Non-haredi Jews in Israel have less than three children per family (still well above Western birth rates); the haredim have more than double that! With the present trend, they will constitute 25% of all Israelis in a mere fifteen years – and they are the least economically productive population sector in the country. One can just imagine the negative effects: economic (about half their males are economically useless), social (greater demands for segregating women in public places), political (many more MKs to push religion and state legislation), military (a crushing burden on the secular and national-religious sectors who do serve in the IDF), and so on. That’s easily THE biggest long-term, internal threat to Israel, bar none. But when was the last time you read a serious news report regarding this domestic, existential threat to the Jewish State?
Again, none of this is to “blame the media” (unfortunately, these days a common sport among segments of the population) but rather to note that they are generally doing what “works for the audience.” Nevertheless, to take their profession seriously, the media will have to balance “popularity” with “importance” – or to put it more colloquially, what we (readers) want has to be counterweighted by what we need. Just like your dinner (steak, but with broccoli – and a caloric, but still healthful potato, added to the plate), so too news providers need to find the right combination i.e., today’s visceral hard news and fluffy soft news supplemented by important, long-term general news.
