Some Thoughts on Journalism

There are lots of problems in the world that a person can devote time to getting informed on, or solving. Because we all have different personalities, skill sets, and positions in life, we will each be interested in and suited to solving different kinds of problems. I might be a schoolteacher who can work to improve the experience of my students, and you might be a climate scientist who works to predict the effects of our efforts to slow greenhouse gas emissions. The types of issues I need to be informed about might be things like racial achievement gaps, economic disparities between the different neighborhoods in my town, and the effects of stress on learning outcomes. These are very different from the issues that you should be aware of, like the limitations of the Paris climate accords, the importance of the oil trade, and the difficulty of accounting for Scope 3 emissions. 

It might be great if everyone be informed about all the problems of the world, because oftentimes our actions have effects on problems that we aren’t as directly engaged in solving. For example, we vote for politicians who have plans to solve all sorts of problems, and being fully informed about all the problems that the government is trying to address would help each voter to pick the politician that would address them.

But of course, we can’t be informed about everything. So the next best thing is to be informed about the issues that are most relevant to each of us. I’ll focus on being informed about school-related issues, and you’ll focus on being informed about climate-related issues.

If you accept this premise, then the ideal journalistic system (Terminology alert! “Journalistic system” is a phrase which here means “anywhere people hear about the issues, like newspapers, Youtube, blogs, TV”. Maybe “the media” would be a better phrase, but that sounds off to me in this context) would deliver the relevant news to the right people, in the right proportions. If I’m a schoolteacher, I should probably be much more worried about barriers to educational achievement than about corruption in the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia. 

So to an extent, a beneficent journalist shouldn’t want their story to be widely read and distributed if it will distract from the problems that are more important to reader. But this is not how journalism works — journalists and publications are incentivized to have each of their stories be as big as possible. So this is a flaw in the media system we have: Journalists want each of their stories to be big, not for their stories to be big in proportion to the importance of the problem they address. There’s an incentive for them to have everyone read their story on health effects of vaping or of Ghosn’s escape from Japan.

I don’t have any particular solution to this problem, other than to realize that it’s easy to think the issues that receive the most airtime, whether among friends or on the front page of the New York Times, may be taking your attention away from other issues that you are more able to address. That doesn’t mean that the high-airtime issues aren’t issues — we each just need to prioritize.