“In its stoking of our fears, the news cruelly exploits our weak hold on a sense of perspective.” Alain de Botton, The News: a User’s Manual
“The availability heuristic, like other heuristics of judgement, substitutes one question for another: you wish to estimate the size of a category or the frequency of an event, but you report an impression of the ease with which instances come to mind.” Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
In February 2017, arguments have rapidly escalated between major news outlets and the new American administration. The BBC, along with American news outlets such as CNN, ABC, NBC, and the New York Times, have been accused by the President or his team of purveying “fake news”. The President’s team has suggested that the established media have become irretrievably dishonest, that they are letting down the American people, and that we need new reliable sources of news to take their place. The news outlets have responded with bewilderment and anger that, unlike Trump and his team, they are simply reporting verifiable facts.
Objectively, it is child’s play to prove some of the Trump assertions to be incorrect. Claims about the size of the crowd that witnessed his inauguration in Washington DC, or the number of people who voted for him, for instance, are disproved by photographic evidence and polling data; and others such as the description of his administration running like a “well-oiled machine”, when the first few weeks have witnessed inter alia the departure of his national security advisor and the courts’ rejection of his travel ban, are clearly demented. It is as easy for most people to discern who is being more reasonable – Trump or the media he lambasts – as it is when they witness a parent trying to calm a two-year-old having a tantrum.
Many journalists are comparing Trump’s rhetoric about “enemies of the people” to past dictators such as Stalin and Chairman Mao, who had reporters killed when they had the audacity to disagree with or criticise them. And it is certainly very worrying, for all of us, that Donald Trump is inciting hatred of the press; and that, more broadly, America has voted in a man so unsuitable to lead.
A distorted outlook
And yet – in responding to the imperative to defend freedom of speech and the primacy of truth, we and the media perhaps also need to ask why it is that so many people support Trump in the first place? A good journalist may be careful to corroborate her facts, but her editor will be highly selective about which facts (in the very wide universe of facts) he chooses to publish. And that choice, which is in no sense objectively right, will influence the outlook of us consumers of news. The danger, all too often realised, is that we end up with a distorted perspective of the world, and misdirect our emotional and physical energy in response. And that the biggest problems we face – such as resource and land depletion, climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the spread of disease – are neglected, with devastating consequences.
Judging by the news, our biggest problem is international terrorism. So affected are we by reports of terrorist incidents that we have become absurdly nervous. Trump speaks for many here and throughout Europe, not just in America, when he proclaims the need to control borders in order to keep us safe. Every day in Britain, train conductors on even minor routes advise their passengers to report “suspicious persons or anyone acting suspiciously” to members of staff. It is extremely unlikely that anyone acting even very suspiciously has the slightest connection with a terror group; and yet we all imagine with ease that the bearded man over there with the large rucksack is just debating exactly when to blow us all up.
Since December 2015, France is the EU country that has suffered most from terrorism. The Paris attacks on 9th December killed 130 people. A further 87 were murdered in Nice on 14th July, followed by a priest on 26th July. In total, 218 people have been murdered by jihadist terrorists in France in the last fifteen months.
These are simple facts, simply verified. Only a little harder to verify is the statistic that each year around 3,000 people are killed accidentally on French roads. The World Health Organisation, which reports this, also reports that in an average year around 18,000 people in France die of heart disease (intriguingly, a low rate for Europe). So we see that even in the grim 12-month period starting in December 2015, during which the French government declared it was “at war” with jihadist terrorists, for every 1 person killed by a terrorist roughly 15 persons were killed in road accidents and 83 people (roughly) died of heart disease.
Broadening our geographical scope, we could note that on 8th October 2016, more than 1,000 people on Haiti were killed by Hurricane Matthew – about 5 times as many people as our 15-month total for jihadist victims in France. Indeed natural disasters tend to kill in large numbers: an estimated 15,000,000 people were malnourished during the famine in the Sahel region of Africa in 2012. Even in a normal year, the UN estimates that over 200,000 children in the region die from malnutrition brought about by a combination of drought and conflict (that’s about 1,000 children for each terrorist victim during our French annus horribilis).
Truth and a sense of proportion
Truth is without meaning unless it is allied to a sense of proportion and perspective. It is doubtful that the western media gives us much of a sense of either. Our minds infused with graphic images of people mown down by jihadist lorry drivers in Berlin or Nice, we struggle – however much we might understand things intellectually – to accord due weight to global threats that will affect most of us much more than terrorism.
This is where climate change comes in – and why it is such an existential threat. Collectively, we are hurtling towards a cliff edge because we are obsessed with other cars on the road and failing to notice where the road is going. Here are a few instances of how our attitudes and priorities are influenced by the media:
- When we fly in a plane, are we more likely to be concerned about security at the airport or about how we might offset the carbon emissions of the flight?
- When we buy a house, are we more prone to imagine strangers breaking into it – and whether the locks are adequate – or to imagine taking in a lodger on the basis that we don’t need all the space and it’s unsustainable for everyone to live in their own individually heated homes?
- Is it more common to wonder whether the beef on our plate is British, or whether it is sustainable for everyone in the world to eat beef?
- Are we more outraged by the fact that our electricity supplier proposes to increase our annual bill from £600 to £660, or by the fact that including all the calls we will spend twice as much on our iPhone this year?
- If the lights go out for a few hours this year, will we think a) that we are not necessarily entitled to have them on all of the time anyway, or b) the energy companies (and government) have failed us, especially given how much we pay them already?
Our responses are more likely to be determined by our fears for our individual safety and our partisanship than by our awareness of global trends and limits. The irony is that our safety is most threatened by the latter in the decades ahead.