Media: consequences of disconnect

By Richard North - July 22, 2024

A quick comparison between the UK “quality” press and the US press, suggests that, if anything, the UK print media has devoted more space to the Biden drama than the American. To judge from the BBC website, I should imagine that much the same is happening with the broadcast media.

I don’t know whether this British obsession with US politics is healthy, but it certainly reflects the obsessive nature of the media in general, where what might be called “issue incontinence” ends up with excessive attention being devoted to a single subject, to the exclusion of much else.

This current explosion of media interest in US affairs is by no means the first in recent times: we went through the same phenomenon about a week ago after the assassination attempt on ex-president Trump.

There is, of course, no question that the matters reported are important and interesting, and that the obsession is shared as much by the audiences as the reporters but – as I complained last time we went through this – many of the stories that will have been spiked by London-based editors will never see the light of day.

Thus, it is once again the case that issues of importance that should have been given some prominence will fade into obscurity, for want of a public airing. And, in that public scrutiny via the medium of the national media is a vital part of the democratic process, we are all diminished by its absence.

The real effect of this is perhaps more insidious than we might appreciate. Because these sudden crises du jour pop up and dominate the news agendas, displacing coverage of other issues, we never seem to resolve matters of ongoing concern.

No sooner have we focused on them than they disappear, the heat and the interest evaporating. And once the momentum is lost, it is very hard to return to them at the same intensity, unless of course, there are new developments in one of other of the fields, which restore their newsworthy status.

One of the classic examples of this dynamic is the conflict in Ukraine which, apart from the sporadic, and mainly political references, has almost completely disappeared from the media agenda. And yet, the occasional disjointed report suggests that fighting continues with murderous intensity, at a level that should be getting far more attention.

The paucity of content, and its sporadic nature, was indicated by a short editorial in the Sunday Times under the heading: “It’s a dire time for Ukraine – Nato must stay focused”.

Dire, the situation is, but the paper – in an attempt to make the piece seem relevant to current concerns – linked this with the views of JD Vance on America’s defence relationship with Europe, expressed last February.

It was then, at the Munich security conference, that he warned that, while he did not think the US should pull out of Nato, Europe needed to “wake up” to the likelihood that Washington would shift its attention to east Asia in the coming decades.

Said Vance, “I do not think that Vladimir Putin is an existential threat to Europe, and to the extent that he is … that suggests that Europe has to take a more aggressive role in its own security”.

Trump’s now running mate apparently rammed his point home in a newspaper column after the conference had ended, arguing that low levels of defence spending in Europe and high levels in the US amounted to a tax on the American people for Europe’s benefit.

In this unidentified column, we are told he wrote: “The question the US must ask is: if our European allies can’t even defend themselves, are they allies, or clients?”

Inevitably, Vance’s comments take on far more significance now that he is Trump’s running mate, and probably that it the only reason we are hearing about them now, with the observation that Vance and Trump share views which fit more neatly into the Maga mould.

Trump, we are told, has repeatedly said he would end the Ukraine war in 24 hours and, about the same time Vance was holding forth in Munich, was saying he would let the Russians do “whatever the hell they want” to “delinquent” Nato members failing to meet the group’s target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defence.

Already, Vance has been a significant actor, playing a key role in delaying $60 billion of military aid to Ukraine in Congress, making the argument (probably correctly) that this sum would not tilt the balance of the war.

The ST, clearly in pompous mode, regards Vance’s remarks about Britain becoming the first nuclear-armed Islamist state after Labour’s election victory as “puerile”, and is even more dismissive of his support for Trump’s borders-based approach to trade, including the use of tariffs, which he thinks will bring jobs back.

The outcome of this review, however, is the expression that the Trump-Vance ticket is worrying for Ukraine and Europe, although the paper accepts that the pair have a point about some Nato members’ failure to pull their weight. A year ago, just 11 of 32 met the 2 percent target.

Bearing in mind that the article heading is about Ukraine, the paper then devotes itself to exploring Starmer promise that the UK will increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP after a review of our capabilities that will conclude in the first half of 2025.

Labour, it says, must not let that aspiration slip. Like Europe, we must hope for the best from our ally across the Atlantic, but it would be reckless, given the changing mood in the US, not to plan for the worst.

Cue now a piece by Max Hastings who seems to continue this theme under the heading: “Every decision on defence is going to hurt”. In the era of Trump, he says, Starmer’s government faces four huge security challenges — and only tough choices”.

Hasting’s concern seems to be about conducting conversations with our European neighbours about how we might defend ourselves if Washington no longer pays most of the bills.

This is in the context of Ukraine losing its war with Russia. Outgunned by Putin’s forces and starved by the West, Hastings cites General Sir Richard Barrons who thinks that Ukraine “may come to feel it can’t win”.

Fiona Hill, British-born but now American and a former adviser on US national security, also gets a look in, cited as saying the Third World War is already in progress, exemplified by the Russian invasion of Ukraine: “It’s the end of the existing world order”, she says.

All of this seems to be part of a narrative which looks as if it is geared to preparing the British to accept the inevitability of war, with the “deadly quartet” of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea very much in the frame – as if it was at all realistic that we could engage directly with these nations.

But somewhere in there seems to be the assumption that we are brought to this more perilous stage by the collapse of the Ukrainian war effort. But if that is a likely prospect, we have rather been missing out on the developments which have taken us from a Ukraine beating off the Russians to a situation where all is lost.

It is that gap in coverage which is effectively leaving us totally unprepared for things to come – we go from A to Z, with nothing in between. There is no hint of a continuous narrative which would take the average reader through the stages which would have us on the verge of World War Three.

Instead, we are being bounced around a kaleidoscope of different issues, from one level of hype to the next. Any element of continuity is missing as we are assailed with reports on a succession of disjointed events, enough to titillate and entertain but without that golden thread of a narrative which leads to understanding.

Presented thus with a jumble of events, it is not surprising that the audience for traditional news sources is shrinking as people turn increasingly to social media where they have some control of the material they view.

Where the alternative is an excitable mishmash of disconnected headlines, people can hardly be blamed for going elsewhere, or turning off completely.