Media fragmentation and the rise of the gated news community

Inevitably over Christmas and New Year, we meet up with friends and family we have not seen for a while and with the suspension of normal activities there is plenty of time to chat. In the past most people getting together in this way would agree on what the issues of the day were but there would usually be differing opinions as to the causes and the solutions.  

What struck me this year is the number of conversations I had or witnessed when those involved simply had no idea as to what the other was talking about.  

It felt as if the echo chambers and the internet filter bubbles we were warned about seem to have come to pass and for those of us working in communications – if not for wider society – this creates profound problems.  

Whatever our views on the mainstream media their objective function in society has been well-documented. As Brian McNair says in his book An Introduction to Political Communication: “As citizens, we are unable to grasp or assimilate anything like the totality of events in the real world, and thus we rely on the media to search and sift reality for the most important happenings. During election campaigns, for example, David Weaver points to ‘considerable support for the conclusion that the news media are crucial in determining the public importance of issues … at least those issues generally outside the experience of most of the public.’”

This is known as the agenda-setting function of the media. When we all gather around the water cooler or the Christmas dinner table, there were in the past a number of issues we would all feel were worthy of discussion. And not just political issues – subjects of discussion would include celebrities, TV and film, music and so on. Having some sort of common agenda would facilitate conversation and debate.

Political theorists have said that this facilitated debate is essential to the functioning of democracy. Unless we are all agreed on what are the issues facing society, how could we make a decision on who is best to help solve them when we were in the privacy of the voting booth? Given that the subjects up for discussion on this agenda stretched beyond politics you could argue this agenda-setting function of the media was essential to a functioning society in its entirety.

We now increasingly begin our news journey online and despite the attempts by traditional media to digitise their content, we are beginning that journey with social media platforms, and this is writ large for the so-called social as opposed to the digital natives.

We all know what has changed. Newspaper readership and the consumption of mainstream broadcast media has plummeted in recent years. There was a brief rally during Covid when our hunger for news about such an unknown entity saw us run back to familiar sources such as the BBC, but the long-term trend is downwards. We now increasingly begin our news journey online and despite the attempts by traditional media to digitise their content, we are beginning that journey with social media platforms, and this is writ large for the so-called social as opposed to the digital natives.

We all know how social media works in terms of looping us back to the content it knows we prefer and have lent our attention to before. As Eric Schmidt, former Executive Chairman of Google, once said: “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.” And what is tailored for me, probably almost certainly, will not be tailored to you. This is how we all begin living in our own worlds and lose the ability to engage meaningfully with others. 

There is another worrying phenomenon that is on the increase. News avoidance. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has tracked this for some years and recently reported that for 2022, the proportion of people who say they actively avoid news sometimes or often has increased sharply in many countries. This type of selective news avoidance has doubled in the UK (46%) over the last five years, with many respondents saying news has a negative effect on their mood. For younger respondents, news may be avoided because they say they simply do not understand it. As the Reuters Institute observes, news avoidance amongst the young: “… could relate to the complexity of the language or assumed knowledge but also to the way young people follow the news on social media, where they might miss key context that was packaged into linear narratives.”

Perhaps this trend to news avoidance is also fuelling the rise of partisan or opinion-led news coverage as news outlets fight for our attention. We are familiar with the ‘shock jock’ but this approach to news is now moving much more mainstream with the likes of Talk TV and GB News. But to be fair, as journalists engage with their audiences more on social media, we also see this trend in the more mainstream media outlets. Gary Lineker is a BBC sports journalist, but we are all aware of his political opinions too. 

Now it is of course naïve to assume the old school mainstream media were in all circumstances entirely impartial, but the rules of the game were perhaps better understood and tolerated by the majority of people. The rise of more obviously partisan news along with the social media fragmentation and news avoidance are coming together to create from an information point of view gated news communities.

As PR professionals and crisis communicators this new world makes our role that much more challenging. We rarely need to communicate our messages to everyone – with the possible exception of a major crisis – and will usually in any case identify and segment the stakeholders we need to reach. But there is no doubt the fragmentation of the media ecosystem makes reaching those stakeholders much more difficult.

Even if we do work out some kind of media outlet matrix, how are we to develop the common messages that tell a consistent, coherent narrative to such a fragmented community with little if no common understanding of many issues? Fortunately, it does look as if the media are also wrestling with these challenges. It also looks from research as if the public value both opinion and factual reporting – they just want both to be labelled clearly.  

My fear for 2023 is that nature abhors a vacuum. If the traditional agenda-setting mechanism is broken, what will it be replaced with? 

Chris Tucker is Chair of the CIPR Crisis Communications Network.

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