Why coverage is not distributed by need

The premise of this site is that attention is distributed by something other than need. That is a claim, so it is worth setting out why it holds rather than just asserting it.

Compare two situations. In Sudan, roughly 24.6 million people face acute hunger and a UN mission has found that events in Darfur amount to genocide. In Yemen, around 22 million need humanitarian assistance. Between them that is more than 45 million people in acute need. Neither appears in most Western news cycles from one month to the next.

This is not because editors are indifferent to human life. The causes are more mundane, and more fixable.

Access

Reporting requires reporters on the ground. Darfur is difficult and dangerous to reach, and both armed factions restrict movement. Northern Yemen has become hazardous enough that even the World Food Programme suspended operations there. Coverage follows access, and access is not distributed by need either.

Continuity

News organisations are structured around events. A crisis that changes state — an invasion, a ceasefire, a collapse — generates coverage. A crisis that continues at a terrible but stable level generates almost none, because on any given day nothing has technically happened.

Famine is the clearest example. It is a process, not an event. By the time it is formally declared it has usually been developing for a year, during which there was nothing obviously new to report.

Proximity and prior investment

Outlets cover regions where they already have bureaux, correspondents and audience interest. That produces a self-reinforcing loop: places that were covered get covered, places that were not stay uncovered, and the initial distribution reflects colonial and commercial history far more than it reflects present need.

Political usefulness

This is the least comfortable factor and the hardest to evidence rigorously, so it should be stated carefully. Conflicts in which a government’s own allies are implicated tend to receive less sustained scrutiny in that country’s media than conflicts in which its adversaries are implicated.

Sudan is a useful test case. The RSF’s principal external backer is the United Arab Emirates, a close partner of the United States and United Kingdom, and a major purchaser of Western arms. It is difficult to imagine that receiving the same volume of coverage as an equivalent role played by a state those governments are hostile to.

What follows from this

Nothing dramatic. Recognising that attention is allocated by access, novelty, proximity and political convenience does not require believing in coordinated suppression. Structural bias does not need a conspiracy; it only needs incentives, and the incentives are visible.

The practical consequence is simply that the volume of coverage a situation receives is close to useless as a measure of how bad it is. If you want to know where the worst situations are, you have to look at the humanitarian assessments rather than the front pages.

That is most of what this site is for.