Terry Prone: Telling people what deserves their attention has never really worked

The argument was that while the handful of people who died in the submersible were rich, this shouldn’t seduce shallow readers into wanting to know more about it when a clear tragedy had happened in the Mediterranean, involving hundreds more people, all of them poor. One event, the ship sinking, was news; the other, the lost submersible, was not.

Anybody who’s worked in mainstream media remembers how definitive “news” used to be. Like the time, when I was a 17-year-old freelancer, and walked into Hume St, Dublin, to find a crowd gathered, all looking upward because on the roof of one of the buildings was a dirty, dishevelled young man who was threatening to jump. One woman in the crowd told me he’d been up there, weaving to and fro, for more than 10 minutes. She figured that either he would get fed up and come down or lose his balance and fall. Someone, she added, had gone to get a guard.

I ran out of Hume St and kept running until I found a phone box, this being in Neanderthal times before mobile phones. I lined up my small change and rang the newsroom of the newspaper which most often employed me. A news editor listened as I told him of the potential suicide. Then he sighed.

“Terry,” he said kindly. “That’s news only if he actually jumps.”

Crushed, I went back to Hue St to find a guard gently shepherding the man down off the roof and the crowd dispersing. Literally nothing to see here. The bystanders expressed their sympathy for the man and their gratitude that tragedy had been averted, but they weren’t that convincing. 

The desire to be present at disaster and the desire to tell the story later are twinned human traits and always have been. The man who didn’t jump was not news, any more than the thousands of aeroplanes that land safely every day are not news. It’s only the plane that flies into the side of a mountain that’s news.

That doesn’t prevent people from wanting to direct our gaze to what they believe should be the news, as opposed to what content consumers and editors have decided is the news. 

Those people are virtuous, let’s be in no doubt about that. They’re not at all like the political information officer who advised her colleagues to get all the bad stuff out under the cover of 9/11, because nobody would notice it. Mostly, those seeking to redirect public gaze worry about the untutored who love bread, circuses, and celebs. They want to teach them to be better.

So, when contact was lost with the submersible, they went into overdrive about the attention being paid to the missing millionaire tourists as opposed to the attention they believed should have been paid to the refugee ship sinking. One furious critic on social media pointed out that two of the presumed dead on the Titan were Pakistani, while hundreds of dead in the Mediterranean were also Pakistani and just as worthy of our attention.

Vincent Browne tweeted: “The media obsession with the Titanic submersible is in contrast with the relative meager [sic] coverage of the drownings in the Mediterranean Sea.”

That was true. A contrast was evident. And predictable. A bizarre, super-rare submarine was lost near the wreck of the most famous ship on the planet, about which one of the most successful movies in human history was made. Versus an issue which has been a constant for five years. 

Why would it be a surprise that it was getting more attention? While some newspapers used graphics to demonstrate how the ship capsized, the Titan gave much more visual scope. Its cylindrical shape is now imprinted on the minds of millions throughout the world.

It would also be difficult to support the proposition that the world paid attention to Titan because of the millionaire status of its passengers. Indeed, it would be arguable that the wealth-tourism angle to the story might have turned off some content consumers.

Except this is not how content consumption works. People read and view just as often because they hate someone as because they love them. 

Hate pulls eyes more than love does. Coverage that mocks can market. Mainstream media gets a great kick out of ridiculing Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and the individual products they peddle.

 However, every time a newspaper does a spread mocking the latest ridiculous object sold by Goop, it alerts its readers to Paltrow’s continued existence and merchandise, thereby increasing her sales.

Free speech is a wonderful thing. The fact that some of the speakers speak twaddle comes with the territory, as does the fact that some readers/viewers pay attention to stuff the worthy and important don’t believe are worth paying attention to. That’s life in media.

The worthy and important, when it comes to stories such as Ryan Tubridy and RTÉ, often deploy an oblique criticism to avoid it looking as if they’re a superior breed which views ordinary people as morons. They say they know from anecdotal evidence that those ordinary people don’t really want any more about this story at all, that it’s only media that likes it, because (cue knowing eyebrow raise) media love talking about media.

Of course media love talking about media. Why wouldn’t they? Media includes famous people. Famous people making mistakes.

Famous people getting caught out. Famous people being fired or getting a better job. Big money.

Let’s get real here. The proposition that the media is ramming a story down the throats of listeners, viewers, and readers and that those listeners, viewers and readers are bored with is insupportable and outdated.

A journalist from Independent.ie stated on radio this weekend that their hits on this particular story were reaching “stratospheric levels”. 

Measurement of audience interest is now instantaneous. Editors can look at the reaction to individual stories within minutes of publication or posting. They don’t have to do guesswork or interrogate people in the street who claim that they’re bored by the topic and would much prefer something of more significance.

Inevitably, that quick certainty can skew editorial decision-making, so some mainstream outlets end up chasing social media outlets down a rabbit hole of trigger words.

However, others still manage to offer a wide range of topics from which people can choose. Note that ‘can’ choose, as opposed to ‘should’ choose: Just as there’s no crying in baseball, there are no ‘shoulds’ in reading, listening, or viewing.