The glut of recent stories whose prominence was due to footage that could be easily shared by online communities shows the growing influence of social media on how we gather and respond to the news. Whether it was CCTV evidence of a teenager shoplifting on the same day he was fatally shot by the Ferguson police, or an audio recording of a billionaire NBA team-owner casually airing his racist views, the global court of public opinion has been goaded into a series of summary judgements on made-for-television stories after these go “viral” online.
Looked at case-by-case, social media’s power to reshape news coverage generally seems benign, especially when it focuses on issues that deserve serious attention. Earlier this month, for instance, dashboard camera footage of a South Carolina policeman shooting an unarmed African-American as he reaches into a car for a wallet (after being asked to produce ID!) illustrates the awful level of racial mistrust in many parts of the US, and does so with an immediacy few written accounts could match. Likewise, footage of NFL star Ray Rice punching his former fiancee unconscious in an elevator, has raised hard questions about the NFL’s indifference to domestic violence among its employees, and scepticism about its opportunistic, about-face decision to end Rice’s career prematurely after the leniency of the original 2-game suspension provoked public outrage.
Shocking images, especially those that are widely disseminated online, draw larger audiences than traditional journalism, so there is always a temptation for news agencies to place a greater emphasis on them. Plagued by falling circulation, many newspapers veer away from measured reportage and opt for sensationalism. This leads to coverage that overlooks important facts and omits relevant context. The Islamic State’s barbaric executions earned front-page headlines in many parts of the world, and rightly provoked universal condemnation, but hardly attention was paid to the 22 public executions that Saudi Arabia held in the same month. These mediaeval displays of state power were enacted for relatively minor offences, and they included the killing of at least one person who would have been ruled mentally unfit to stand trial in most Western countries. Why didn’t that get more coverage? (Unsurprisingly, several of the most reactionary jurists in Raqaa, the Islamic State’s chosen capital, are said to be Saudis.)
Dramatic footage creates memorable news, but over-reliance on it overshadows complex stories, many of them with far-reaching implications. When, for example, Wikileaks released its trove of cable traffic, the mainstream press mainly seized on tidbits of gossip rather than information that required analysis. In time, contrary to the received wisdom that Assange’s leaks had little news value, the documents produced a raft of major news stories. In 2010 alone, they shed light on 15,000 previously unreported civilian deaths in Iraq, broke news of US spying on UN officials, and revealed a secret bipartisan agreement in the US not to pursue torture charges against the CIA. Edward Snowden’s later revelations, which are even harder to explain clearly, have suffered a similar fate. The media have made much of fairly minor (albeit suggestive) incidents such as the NSA analysts’ occasional use of their systems to spy on their love interests, but done little to address far more troubling allegations about the extent of US surveillance. Likewise, part of the reason that the many financial crimes that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis have produced so few convictions is because the evidence involved does not lend itself to ‘gotcha’ moments.
Our habitual consumption of news in emotional, bite-sized chunks also skews our understanding of what really matters. The recent leak of celebrities’ nude photographs, for example, said far more about the lack of security of cloud storage than it did about the victims’ supposed exhibitionist tendencies. What should have been a story about the theft of personal property, quickly morphed into tabloid fodder about celebrity indiscretions. Earlier this week, videos showing how easily the case of an iPhone 6 could be bent caused a public relations headache for Apple computers, but only a tiny fraction of consumers were troubled by far more deceptive actions that the company has taken to avoid billions of dollars in US taxes.
Each of these stories re-emphasizes the importance of not taking the depth and seriousness of the news for granted, and the need for well-informed scepticism in the face of a culture that increasingly prefers vivid imagery to balanced journalism.
