Why we have given up on world affairs

In a recent angry interview, Lauren Wolfe, director of the American-based Women Under Siege organisation, demanded to know why the media initially ignored the snatching of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls by the Boko Haram terrorist group.

She agrees the incident is now front-page news and the lead on many television bulletins around the world, especially as it has been followed by further abductions and an hour-long rampage by Boko Haram forces in the village of Gamboru Ngala which resulted in the death of more than 150 people.

But Ms Wolfe has a point when she says that the extent of Boko Haram’s atrocities was only revealed by social media spreading out from Nigeria, across Africa and eventually to the attention of the West. Traditional news outlets have been playing catch-up ever since.

Why is this so? I believe the answer lies in people’s changing demands for news and the media’s efforts to satisfy them.

When I began in journalism almost half a century ago, my first ‘local’ paper had extensive national and international coverage; that has shrunk to almost nothing.

When I joined the Canberra Times in the early 1980s, the responsibility of the deputy editor was almost solely to oversee the newspaper’s international coverage which extended to two to three broadsheet pages of news supported by comment and extensive weekend features, often by the paper’s own correspondents or ‘stringers’.

Every month a report was circulated to the international sub-editors desk, analysing the previous month’s coverage with such comments as “strong reporting and analysis of the European summit, but very little from South America”.

Today the Times’ coverage has shrunk to a single page on some days, almost exclusively sourced from wire services. Analysis and follow-up are virtually non-existent.

In his book, The Great War for Civilisation, Robert Fisk notes that in 1997 a group of Palestinian sympathisers based in Scotland decided to mark the 50^th anniversary of the partition of Palestine by publishing a day-by-day account of events in the region drawn largely from the pages of the Scotsman newspaper at the time.

They were able to piece together a comprehensive account using news reports and background stories including “from a Special Correspondent recently returned from the Middle East”.

While the Scotsman’s website still purports to report on international news, it is mainly of the superficial ‘cookie-cutter’ type provided by the agencies. Very little ‘Special Correspondents’ report to even the larger local papers these days.

I don’t want to be too critical of the media, which is going through a difficult period of transition. Research has shown that consumers have apparently become more parochial, interested mainly in what goes on in their local communities and in national affairs only when it is likely to have a direct impact of them.

Today international affairs in all but the largest media outlets consists mainly of agency contributions heavily weighted towards  sport, celebrity gossip and the occasional odd ‘man bites dog’ story. Even natural disasters have to be on a massive scale if they are to be more than one-day wonders.

So it should really be no surprise that it was the efforts of those most immediately affected taking to Facebook, Twitter and the like to express their outrage that finally persuaded traditional media to bring their resources to bear on the Nigerian abduction story.

World leaders have also reacted. Offers of help are flooding in – from the United States, United Kingdom, France and China among others. Hopefully this will be the beginning of the end of Boko Haram which for the last five years has been thumbing its nose at the inept efforts of the Nigerian Government to control it.

It’s a tough and dangerous world out there. Too often we try to ignore it by burying our heads in our own comfortable little piece of sand.