The Psychological Cost of News: Media’s Unintended Toll
Dead cats, Ad Hominem Attacks, Flooding the Zone, Gaslighting, Whataboutism, “Straw Man”, Non apologies? What’s going on?
I completed my PhD over ten years ago examining journalism and news to uncover an emerging fresh form of video journalism.
It required learning about journalism, documentary and cinema’s origins. I’d been a radio journalist since the late 80s at Radio Leicester, and had gone onto work for Newsnight, ABC News in South Africa, and Channel 4 News.
The research was as joyous as it was arduous with reads such as Mike Conway’s PhD, “The Visualizers: A Reassessment of Television’s News” and book “The Origins of Television News in America”.
I conducted indepth interviews with nearly 200 senior execs, practitioners, and media operators at the conception of television news; figures like Direct Cinema pioneer Robert Drew, Professor Brian Winston, and Ken Mellor.
Mellor was one of the pionnering ITN soundmen, who took the above photo. In devising the news, execs said “It had to be understood in Wigan”. It was a meme Mellor mentioned to me that framed how the news pioneers crafted stories from the inception to make its meaning understandable.
We became friends via emails and lengthy phone calls. Listening to his stories I urged him to publish his memoirs. Some years later a book arrived.
He’d done it.
I read the foreward feeling sheepish: “Finally, I have to thank David Gyimah for suggesting the original idea…”
I learned so much.
This post started with how news and journalism have become unwitting conduits to psychological disinformation. To be clear it’s not all intentional.
Journalism, broadcast in particular, was constructed in an age where the seeds of disinformation existed. There was Edward Bernays and politicians learning to sway the media. But they could only bend the truth so much within a red line. A defacto gentleman and woman’s agreement existed.
Digital media and its ecosystem facilitated a raft of psychological tactics to thwart this, and that line has been crossed. Today, broadcast journalism reporting struggles with Dead cats, Ad Hominem Attacks, Flooding the Zone, Gaslighting, Whataboutism, “Straw Man”, Non apologies, etc.
Politicians words and performances are psychologically crafted and it requires psychologists and behaviour experts to unpack what’s going on.
“The Democrats don’t matter”, said St£ve Ban^n. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” This is about political strategies to manage news cycle and actively discredit media.
Are there solutions? Yes, no easy ones, but it requires reforming and reframing media approaches made from when this photo was taken. It means revising how journalism training is taught, greater transparency, learning how to reframe messages pushed by politicians, and greater immersive storytelling, I teach, breaking the 4th wall.
Journalism isn’t a monolith. Some blend PR and journalism. Others don’t. Yet today with the best of intentions thus far it’s not enough.
