US elections are not the only important topic this year
If you’re worried that your social media news feeds seem cluttered with snippets, commentary and late-night comedy clips about the US election campaign lately, you’re not alone. For months, much of the world has likely had to endure a barrage of posts praising or criticising every speech made by the rival presidential candidates and their running mates – not to mention every blunder made not just in the current week or the past month, but at a time when they may not have even been thinking about a future career in politics.
The media’s new fixation on US politics may also be due to the fact that the programming of the world’s most popular social media platforms is being done by young people who are most familiar with the politics of “red” and “blue” states. There is also no question that the US-based social media giants have considerable data-driven control over the mix of news that even the residents of Ruritania get to see. Still, the algorithms cannot be blamed entirely.
There was a time when the world’s largest newspapers, magazines and news agencies had offices in key cities and regions run by highly professional journalists who managed to publish exciting stories under pressure, night after night – long before the invention of the Internet and email.
It wasn’t that there was a lack of US political trivia in the mainstream media in the West at the time, but by and large the content of the morning paper, the TV news or the weekend magazine was an eclectic mix. Even the most hardened foreign correspondent knew that people who paid for a newspaper deserved to read honest news, whose relevance and prominence were determined not by budget constraints or the publisher’s political leanings, but by the sound news judgment of professional editors.
The glamour associated with international reporting was reflected in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film The Foreign Correspondent and Graham Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American, which was based on his own experiences as a war correspondent in Indochina (now Vietnam). By finding the connections between seemingly unrelated events because they experienced things first-hand, good foreign correspondents presented the world as a whole in the reports they sent to their headquarters.
But like all good things, the heyday of foreign reporting had to come to an end. “For more than two decades, the foreign correspondent profession has been reliant on artificial intelligence and a victim of budget cuts and digital technologies,” wrote Northwestern University historian Deborah Cohen in a 2022 article for Northwestern Magazine titled “The Case for Foreign Correspondents.” “Few news organizations still maintain foreign bureaus abroad; most rely on freelancers,” she wrote.
Many people who have lived through the transition from print to digital now feel that international news is dominated by minutiae of American life, and that this is all too often tainted by political bias. They are also aware that the American (and European) news industry is increasingly falling into self-centeredness and virtue-mongering, at the expense of reporting on developments and events whose impact on humanity as a whole is far more tangible than any real or alleged mistake by a U.S. presidential candidate.
Just think of some recent developments that many people barely noticed in their social media news feeds because the issues in question probably couldn’t keep up with the “stimulus” of a US election campaign.
The AFP news agency quoted Sudan’s de facto ruler, army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, as saying at the weekend that his government would not take part in peace talks with rival paramilitaries in Switzerland and instead vowed to “fight for 100 years”.
International news reporting may not be up to scratch financially, but it is not completely extinct yet.
Arnab Neil Sengupta
The Associated Press reported Friday: “Last month, international experts said hunger in a vast refugee camp in Sudan’s Darfur region had escalated into famine. And about 25.6 million people – more than half of Sudan’s population – will face acute hunger, experts from the Famine Review Committee warned.”
According to a CNN report on August 22, “Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers are cracking down on women’s voices in public with tough new laws. The laws…cover aspects of everyday life such as public transportation, music, shaving and partying. Among the new rules, Article 13 concerns women: It states that women must veil their bodies at all times in public and that face covering is essential to avoid temptation and not tempt others. Clothing should not be thin, tight or short.”
A report in the UK’s Guardian on the same day stated: “Thousands of Rohingya have been forced to flee their homes in Myanmar and take dangerous boat trips to safety after being attacked by armed rebels, activists and officials say. After wresting control of large parts of Myanmar’s Rakhine state from the military, the rebel Arakan Army has turned against the Rohingya minority in the areas it controls, shelling villages, forcing them to flee their homes and reportedly rounding up groups of men.”
An August 24 article in the UK’s Daily Telegraph states: “Since January, (Houthi) attacks have not only steadily increased, but they have also become more diverse. Drones and cruise missiles have been accompanied by hijackings and ballistic missiles. Recently, the Houthis have begun supporting their attacks with small arms fire from speedboats. The Greek-flagged tanker Sounion is the latest victim. It was attacked four times on Wednesday, leading to a fire on board.”
One possible explanation for why social media news feeds are full of election trivia despite the abundance of hard news on politics and world affairs comes from the Financial Times. A March article about America’s fragmented conservative media landscape titled “Far too much news” noted that the election “may be defined by the absence of a single star, a single broadcaster or a single source of information. Audiences are spread across a variety of smaller and mid-sized platforms. News business models are changing, and all parts of the industry, from television to digital to print, are under financial pressure.”
The situation today is clearly a far cry from that of 1936, when American writer Ernest Hemingway, traveling to Spain to cover the civil war there, struck up his famous friendship with Martha Gellhorn, one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. In her book Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War, Northwestern University historian Cohen calls the period from the 1920s to the 1940s the “golden age of American foreign reporting.” “After World War I, U.S. newspaper publishers began setting up their own offices abroad, vowing they would not fall for European propaganda again,” she wrote in her 2022 article.
Nearly 80 years after that “golden age,” international news coverage may be in a bad financial state, but it is far from extinct. The war in Gaza and the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah have dominated headlines since Hamas’ deadly attack on southern Israel on October 7 last year and during Israel’s devastating military retaliation. It would also be unfair to complain too much about the waning media interest in the humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan, sparked by the violent power struggle that has been going on since April last year, given how difficult it is to keep a depressing story in focus for so long.
Still, bombarding international audiences with digital content about the US election campaign could lead to even more cynicism and fatigue. The best revenge might be to ignore the news altogether, even if that comes with disadvantages.
- Arnab Neil Sengupta is a senior editor at Arab News. X: @arnabnsg
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this section are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab News.
