As a professional journalist, I have always eaten up news in all forms, from written to televised. Like all consumers, I have my personal preferences on where I get my news, despite the difference in focus, because I try to remain balanced in my viewpoints.
A couple of weeks ago, Nicole Carroll, president of news at Gannett, reflected on how three of the chain’s local papers had ended up at the center of two massive recent stories, both touching on huge issues in American public life, both devastating. On one day, Austin American-Statesman, in conjunction with the local TV station KVUE, obtained and published surveillance and body-camera footage showing a gunman entering a classroom before killing 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and police dithering in the corridor outside for over an hour. Around the same time, noise was growing around a story, first published by Indianapolis Star in early July, about a ten-year-old rape victim who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion due to Ohio’s restrictive laws. The next day, Bethany Bruner, of Columbus Dispatch, confirmed the story from a courthouse where the man who confessed to raping the child was being arraigned. “The truth is hard to endure,” Carroll wrote, but “our job is to report the truth.”
The initial publication of both stories had proven controversial, albeit for different reasons. American-Statesman defended releasing the Uvalde footage on grounds of truth and transparency, noting that it had removed the sound of children screaming as it was “too graphic”- but some local politicians and victims’ relatives slammed the decision as traumatizing and disrespectful; a state House investigation had been due to release the footage soon anyway, but victims’ families had expected to be able to watch it in private first. (Some liberal commentators slammed the decision, too: on "The View," Whoopi Goldberg mimed spitting on American-Statesman). Meanwhile, right-wing politicians - including Dave Yost, Ohio's attorney general - and commentators poured scorn on the Star's abortion story, suggesting overtly that the ten-year-old rape victim did not exist. When the Dispatch confirmed the story, right-wing media figures pivoted, without skipping a beat, to her attacker's immigration status.
In my view, the controversy was, in both cases, misplaced. That is obvious with the latter story: nakedly partisan actors exploited an utterly horrific allegation with a characteristic lack of basic decency. (The headline of a dismissive Wall Street Journal editorial on the story about the ten-year-old’s abortion - still - refers to it as “too good to confirm,” phrasing that was amply disgusting before the paper had to add an editors’ note and correct the record in a separate column.) The case of the Uvalde footage was more nuanced: having chosen to remove children’s screams, the paper conceivably could have altered it in other ways, too - blurring the gunman’s face, for instance, or removing the sound of the gunfire that occasioned the screams - and more generally, the wishes of victims’ families deserve respect. But they are not absolute, and here, releasing the footage was clearly in the public interest. If it ever seemed tenable to allow officials to control the terms of release, the appalling lack of official transparency since the shooting demanded otherwise.
Beyond the specific factors at issue in these publication controversies, the two stories mentioned above can also be seen as feeding into a much broader debate - or web of overlapping debates - that has coalesced around the media’s wider coverage of devastating events as those have stacked up in recent weeks. Some of these debates have addressed how we should think about covering shootings and abortion post-Roe: the question of whether news outlets ought to show graphic footage of shooting victims, as they have avoided in the coverage of Ukraine, for example, or the question as to the types of abortion experiences that should be centered in national stories.
Some related debate have gone broader still, rooted in the overall grimness of the news cycles not just of recent weeks, but of recent years, with their pandemic, war, climate emergency, police killings, assaults on democracy, and so on. One, prominently, has centered the question of “selective news avoidance,” or the fear - supercharged by a recent Renters Institute finding that 42 percent of U.S. respondents actively avoid the news sometimes or often - that the news has grown so overwhelming that Americans are increasingly tuning it out most of the time. That figure, journalist and author Amanda Ripley wrote in a widely-discussed op-ed forWashington Post, includes some people who themselves work in news - among them, Ripley herself. “It’s hard to generalize about the news media,” but “it’s fair to say that if news sites were people, most would be diagnosed as clinically depressed right now,” Ripley wrote. Extrapolate from the Reuters Institute data, she separately told The Guardian, and “we can estimate that roughly 100 million American adults are not getting their news needs met.”
In her op-ed, Ripley weighed whether her desire to shut out the news was her problem or a journalism “product” issue, ultimately coming down on the latter side of the fence. “Today’s news, even high-quality print news, is not designed for humans,” she wrote, arguing that journalists could do a much better job of respecting news consumers’ needs for hope, agency, and dignity, including by discussing solutions to grave problems. Judging by the online reaction, Ripley’s column seemed to strike a chord with numerous journalists. But some readers had questions. Do newsrooms really have the power to fix news avoidance? It is unclear to me that this is an actual issue that deserves attention, or whether it is considered as a civic issue vs. an economic issue. I would actually like to see more evidence as to the actual extent of the problem, pointing to apparent caveats in available data on news-consumption trends.
There seems to be general agreement that the news is increasingly, relentlessly overwhelming, or at least feels that way. I found the Gannett abortion and shooting stories to be overwhelming just on their own. But the question as to what we might collectively do about it is indeed tricky. Individual stories in the daily news cycle can often seem gratuitously weighed down by hopelessness, and some of the ideas proposed - and news values stressed - by Ripley and others are valuable, not least those that involve giving news consumers specific, actionable information where it is available, or organizing coverage with greater responsiveness to their priorities. More broadly, though, the overwhelming nature of the news cycle reflects not only an aggregate of individually overwhelming stories, but the profoundly disaggregated way that news from a variety of sources reaches us. The world is in many ways a better place than it was in the past - but the internet has collapsed the space between all the problems, constantly confronting us with dire news from somewhere. This strikes me not as a news “product” problem as much as it is a problem of the modern, global human condition.
The nature of selective news avoidance reflects this and is itself a knotty and multifaceted trend. According to Reuters Institute’s latest data, it is not solely a United States phenomenon; indeed, while it has risen by four percent in the United States since a similar survey in 2017, it has grown at much greater rates in Brazil and the United Kingdom, to such an extent that both countries have overtaken the United States overall (with avoidance rates of fifty-four and forty-six percent, respectively). Within the US, meanwhile, news avoiders expressed different reasons for their behavior: those on the political right were more likely to deem the news untrustworthy, while those on the left were more likely to say that the news makes them feel down or powerless.
These differences in motivation demand different responses from the press. And the extent to which different news avoiders avoid news also strikes me as material here; there is, to my mind, a big difference between “sometimes” and “often.” If the internet age has massively increased our exposure to horrible news, then it has also shifted the burden of managing the consumption of that news onto consumers, where providers once exercised greater control over what their audiences saw and how. In many ways, this is clearly bad. But is it always bad? I am not convinced. I selectively avoid the news when I go on vacation to give my mind a chance to rest and recharge, and also avoid video content that I know will traumatize me when I do not need to watch it. I do not see either of these behaviors as a problem. The endless availability of news does not confer an obligation of endless consumption.
Again, we should not make the news gratuitously overwhelming, and editorial choices that we make every day can certainly help audiences to process and manage their news consumption. But, as Reuters Institute noted, “there will be a limit to how far journalists can go - or should go - to make the news more palatable.” In her reflection on Gannett’s abortion and shooting stories, Carroll identified what I see as this limit: to report the truth, even when it is tough. If Gannett’s papers were right to publish those stories over specific objections, they were also right to do so in this more abstract sense, irrespective of how they would be received by readers.
That might sound obvious - and I have certainly not seen anyone argue, in the course of these recent debates, that the media should suppress tough truths. But the truth is bigger than the verifiable facts we put on a page or show in a video. Powerlessness can be a truth, too: I would argue, in fact, that it is the central truth in both the recent Gannett stories, and a growing one, more broadly, in a country whose institutions are dysfunctional and whose democracy is in retreat. Powerlessness is rarely absolute, and we should communicate that. But many of the horrible stories flooding the current news cycle reflect horrible disparities in power.
And channeling false hope is worse than no hope at all.
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