'Whether we acknowledge it explicitly or not, many of us still expect the media to identify and rank the priority of things happening in our world. But that is a role news outlets no longer feel the same responsibility to fill.'

If you look at the front page of the New York Times on the day after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, you might notice something surprising. There was, of course, extensive coverage of his murder and the narrowly failed attempt on the life of his Secretary of State, William Seward. However, that front page also had stories on a diplomatic spat with Portugal, a British parliamentary debate on a proposed excursion to the North Pole and a warehouse fire in Rochester.

Though its catchphrase would not be coined for several decades yet, the Times already strove to publish “all the news that’s fit to print”. By 1913, the newspaper had begun publishing an index of its articles and, according to Wikipedia, librarians began to dub it the “newspaper of record”. In a sense, the Times and similar newspapers came to play a social role certifying what was significant and what was not.

A lot has changed since then. Few news outlets nowadays, including even the Times, would want to be burdened with that semi-official responsibility as they seek readers in the hard-scrabble fight for media survival. Indeed, if a news organization thinks it “owns” a particular story — that is, has achieved dominance over its rivals — it will play it hard even if it squeezes out other stories. On the home page of the Globe and Mail on Wednesday, for example, there were a number of pieces about the Jody Wilson-Raybould affair — a story the Globe broke. However, there was no mention at all that two of the world’s nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, had taken to aerial bombing and shooting down military aircraft.

When CNN launched in 1980, it was essentially a 24-hour newscast, and if there was a criticism it was that once it had reported on all the news that was fit to broadcast, it would fill the air with news too trivial to deserve mention. Today, neither CNN nor its rival MSNBC has anything resembling a newscast anywhere in their schedules to interrupt the stream of Trumpishness. The crisis in Venezuela gets coverage because it has a strong Trump angle, but the crisis in Haiti — a nearby country in which the United States has had deep historical involvement — goes virtually uncovered.

There is a maxim that comes from 20th century American academic studies of the media that “the news doesn’t tell the public what to think, but that it tells them what to think about.” That is to say, that the media sends signals by its coverage about what the public agenda should be, even if it leaves citizens to make up their own minds about the issues on that agenda.

Whether we acknowledge it explicitly or not, many of us still expect the media to identify and rank the priority of things happening in our world. But that is a role news outlets no longer feel the same responsibility to fill.

On Twitter this week, my Carleton colleague, Stephanie Carvin, called out the Canadian media’s obsession with the Wilson-Raybould story, describing it like a “peewee hockey where everyone just follows the puck in circles.” She pointed out that while literally a score of political columnists produced multiple pieces on JWR, there was relatively little attention to some national security stories she thought were important: the hacking of Australian political parties, against which Canada does not have defences; developments in the Huawei dispute; and “self-proclaimed white nationalists demonstrating on Parliament Hill”.

Journalists have always chased the puck, myself included. But the heightened perception that they are doing that is only partly because the media does not have the same commitment to breadth of coverage that it once did. After all, we only know about hacks in Australia and a demonstration on the Hill because someone reported on it. In fact, the internet gives us an unmanageably large pool of news to consume — so much that we take matters into our own hands.

Twenty years ago, most of us would have been only dimly aware of the sheer volume of stories on the Raybould/SNC-Lavalin affair. Most of us would have read a newspaper or two in the morning and perhaps watched a newscast at night. Today through social media such as Twitter and aggregators such as National Newswatch we are alerted to many, many columns and commentaries that would have escaped our eyes back in the day. In other words, to an extent we self-curate ourselves into a bubble and then lash out when we start to suffocate.

What troubles me most about this combination of trends is how it has affected the social and political urgency of addressing climate change. For reasons I’ve discussed before and which the Washington Post’s media critic, Margaret Sullivan recently explained, climate change is not well suited to traditional “news values”. Both climate change itself and the policies needed to address it, are gradual, incremental and complex — three things the news hates.

I think you could make a pretty strong case to argue that last fall’s ominous warning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that unprecedented action to limit carbon emissions was required in the coming decade, should at least have triggered a serious policy debate about whether the measures we are undertaking now are adequate. Perhaps I missed something, but the conversation I have heard since that report is pretty much what I was hearing before: whether existing plans go too far. In the United States, where they are much further from policy action, there has at least been a debate at the political margins about the still somewhat mysterious Green New Deal.

If you turn back to a different point in history, to Britain in 1936, there is another lesson worth learning. The newspapers were not obsessed, as you might imagine, with the rise of Nazi Germany, which would within three years draw Britain into the most deadly war the world has ever known and threaten for a time Britain’s very existence. No, the newspapers were heavy with news and speculation about King Edward VIII’s proposal to marry an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson. It was the obsession of the press, the political elites and the general public. In retrospect, it is hard not to think this was a misallocation of attention and energy.

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