Agenda-Setting, Justice, and Collective Attention

Front-page news headlines capture the attention of readers and put particular issues forward as worthy of attention. This is an important role – arguable the chief role – of journalism in a democratic society: to bring important information to the public in an accessible way and to make issues that are relevant salient [14]. Indeed, journalism is often referred to as “the fourth power” to describe the important role it plays in shaping political issues [15].

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 Photo by Mr Cup / Fabien Barral on Unsplash

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But how effective is journalism at meeting this aim? Does it always highlight the most news-worthy items?
 

One thing to notice is that media outlets are also embedded within the attention economy. Many outlets depend on advertisement for their revenue [16]. This, we have seen requires an audience. And even where media is publicly funded and not so heavily reliant on advertisement, smaller audiences may translate to less funding and require more justification for their continued existence. Media outlets thus have an incentive to attract viewer attention.

 

But there will often be a tension between what we might take to be genuinely news-worthy and what might be on the news because it is the kind of thing that will attract attention. These two things often come apart. For example, in June 2023, many media outlets provided constant coverage of the Titan submersile that went missing on its way to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.  On board were 5 wealthy passengers, who paid $250,000 for their tickets [17]. Before its fate was known, the world was captivated by the story the missing seacraft, and approximately 1.2 million dollars was spent on search and rescue efforts [18]. A week earlier, a migrant ship ("the Adriana") carrying an estimated 750 passengers quietly capsized off the coast of Greece, killing all but about 100 of those aboard [19]. No rescue efforts were launched [20], and the level of news coverage was pale in comparison to the Titan.
 

There is no doubt that the story of the Titan had attention-grabbing elements. Who could resist watching a story unfold about billionaires on board a missing submarine on a mission to explore the world’s most famous shipwreck? But we might ask whether the Titan is what we should have been all paying attention to.

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Attention is a scarce resource that needs to be distributed

We have talked about attention being a scarce resource for the user. One simply cannot attend to everything at once. When one attends to one thing, one takes away attention from something else. We have seen that when you attend to the fire alarm that is set off in the café where you are working, for example, your attention is taken away from reading your book. And when we attend to the passengers on the Titan submersile, we take attention away from those on the Adriana.

 

This invites the question: what should we pay attention to? It is wrong to pay attention to the victims of the Titan and not those of the Adriana?

 

One possible answer is to say that in order to act (and in this case, to put together rescue efforts), one first needs to pay attention. So, by not paying attention to the plight of those on board the Adriana, any chance of rescue was forgone. (As it turns out, unlike in the case of the Titan, the passengers on the Adriana could have been helped [20].) We might then take up a consequentialist stance and say that we should pay attention to whatever will produce the best outcomes. If paying attention to the Adriana makes it possible to save more lives, then we should have paid attention to the Adriana and not to the Titan.

 

But what if no rescue efforts were possible in either case? One might say that one still has a duty to bear witness [21] to the plight of individuals – that is, to recognize a tragedy and the lives lost as a way of showing respect. In failing to pay attention, we fail to fulfill that duty. The problem here is that if it is not possible to pay attention to everything, there will be occasions where we fail to bear proper witness to some events.

 

Another option is to say that attention, as a scarce resource should be distributed in a way that is fair. And we could say that distributing attention based on what is most “attention-grabbing” is not fair.

 

John Rawls introduced a way to establish fairness in society. He suggested we take up an imaginary standpoint -- what he called the veil of ignorance -- from which we did not know who we were and what social positions we occupied [22].  This imaginary standpoint was to prevent individuals from choosing principles that would privilege themselves [22, 23]. Behind the veil of ignorance, one did not know, for example, one’s gender, one’s race, one’s country of origin, or one’s economic background.  One is then tasked to set up a society anew and choose what basic rules would be in place for how to distribute wealth, power, opportunities, and so on. Rawls thought that the resulting principles chosen from behind the veil of ignorance would be fair.

 

Rawls thought that individuals from behind the veil of ignorance would choose a society that distributed its resources roughly equally, and any inequality in society should be distributed in a way that make the situations of those who are worse off better [24, pp.42-43]. In this regard, Rawls was primarily concerned with inequalities in income wealth [22, p.61], but we might take inspiration from this and say that we too should distribute our attention in ways that are more likely benefit those persons who are worse off. And that should have been to the 750 migrants aboard the Adriana and not the 5 billionaires aboard the Titan.

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