US election is not the only important news story this year

If you are worried that your social media news feeds seem overloaded of late with snippets, comments and late-night comedy clips about the US election campaign, you are not alone. For months now, presumably large parts of the world have had to put up with a surfeit of posts lauding or lambasting every speech made, or not made, by the rival presidential candidates and their running mates. This is to say nothing of every tactless remark uttered not just in the current week or in the previous month, but from a time when said candidates had possibly not even imagined a future career in politics.
Some of the new media fixation with US politics perhaps stems from the fact that the coding for the world’s most popular social media platforms is done by young people most comfortable with the politics of “red” and “blue” states. There is also no question that the US-based social media behemoths have considerable data-driven control over the mix of news that even the inhabitants of Ruritania get to see. Still, one cannot only blame the algorithms.
Time was when the world’s biggest newspapers, magazines and wire services had bureaus headed by thoroughly professional journalists in important cities and regions. They managed to file compelling stories on tight deadlines night after night, long before the advent of the internet and email.

It was not that mainstream Western publications were devoid of US political trivia back then, but by and large the content that appeared in each morning’s newspaper, on the television news or in the weekend news magazine was an eclectic mix. Even the most jaded foreign correspondent knew that people who paid for a copy of a newspaper deserved to read stories whose urgency and prominence would be decided neither by revenue-focused algorithms nor by the proprietor’s political leanings, but by the sound news judgment of experienced editors.
The glamor associated with international reporting was reflected in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film “Foreign Correspondent” and Graham Greene’s 1955 novel “The Quiet American,” which was based on his own experience as a war correspondent in Indochina (now Vietnam). By figuring out the linkages between seemingly disconnected events on the strength of seeing things firsthand, good foreign correspondents presented the world as a whole in the dispatches they sent to their head offices.
But like all good things, the heyday of international reporting had to come to an end. “For more than two decades, the profession of foreign correspondence has been on life support, victim of both budget cutbacks and digital technologies,” Northwestern University historian Deborah Cohen wrote in a 2022 article for the Northwestern Magazine that was titled “The case for foreign correspondents.” “Only a few news organizations still maintain foreign bureaus abroad; most rely on freelancers.”

To many people who have lived through the transition from print to digital, international news these days feels dominated by the minutiae of everyday American life, and that being too frequently contaminated by political bias. They are also aware that the US (and European) news media industry’s unfortunate lapse into navel-gazing and virtue signaling has coincided with diminished coverage of developments and events whose impact is far more palpable to humanity at large than every real or alleged flaw of a US presidential candidate.

Consider a few recent developments that many people did not get to see much of in their social media news feeds because the topics in question likely could not compete with the “allure” of a US election campaign.
The AFP news agency this weekend quoted Sudan’s de facto ruler, army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, as saying that his government would not join peace talks with rival paramilitaries in Switzerland, vowing instead to “fight for 100 years.”

International news reporting may not be in good financial health, but it has not quite become extinct.

Arnab Neil Sengupta

The Associated Press reported on Friday: “Last month, global experts said that starvation at a massive camp for displaced people in the Sudanese region of Darfur had grown into famine. And about 25.6 million people — more than half of Sudan’s population — will face acute hunger, experts from the Famine Review Committee warned.”
According to a CNN report of Aug. 22: “Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers are cracking down on the sound of women’s voices in public, under a strict new set of vice and virtue laws. The laws … cover aspects of everyday life like public transportation, music, shaving and celebrations. Among the new rules, Article 13 relates to women: It says it is mandatory for a woman to veil her body at all times in public and that a face covering is essential to avoid temptation and tempting others. Clothing should not be thin, tight or short.”
A UK Guardian report of the same date stated: “Thousands of Rohingya are being forced to flee from their homes in Myanmar and escape on dangerous boat journeys after being targeted by armed rebels, activists and officials say. Having seized control of much of Myanmar’s Rakhine state from the military, the rebel Arakan Army has turned on the Rohingya minority in areas it controls, shelling villages, forcing them to leave their homes and reportedly rounding up groups of men.”
A story dated Aug. 24 in the UK’s Daily Telegraph reported: “Since January, not only have (Houthi) attacks steadily increased in number, they have diversified too. Drones and cruise missiles were accompanied by hijackings and ballistic missiles. Recently, the Houthis have started following up their attacks with small arms fire from fast boats. The Greek-flagged tanker Sounion is the latest victim, attacked four times on Wednesday, resulting in a fire on board.”
An interesting explanation as to why social media news feeds are filled with US election trivia despite an abundance of hard news concerning politics and world events has come from The Financial Times. An article published in March, “Way too much news,” on America’s fragmented conservative media map, argued that the 2024 election “may be defined by the lack of any one star, network or set of information. Audiences are dispersed across a wide range of smaller and medium-sized platforms. News business models are in flux, with all corners of the industry, from television to digital to print media, under financial strain.”
The situation today is clearly a far cry from what existed in 1936, when American novelist Ernest Hemingway’s journey to Spain to cover the developing civil war there led to his famous friendship with Martha Gellhorn, one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. In her book “Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War,” Cohen, the Northwestern University historian, identified the period from the 1920s through the 1940s as the “golden age of American international reporting.” “After the First World War, US newspaper proprietors began building up their own bureaus overseas, vowing they wouldn’t again be taken in by European propaganda,” she wrote in her 2022 article.
Nearly 80 years on from that “golden age,” international news reporting may not be in good financial health, but it has not quite become extinct. The war in Gaza and the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah have been in the headlines since the deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7 last year and throughout the devastating Israeli military counterattack. It would also be unfair to complain too much about the decline in media interest in the humanitarian disaster in Sudan, sparked by the violent power struggle underway since April last year, considering the familiar challenge of keeping a depressing story attention-grabbing for so long.
In spite of that, bombarding international audiences with US campaign-related digital content may lead to more cynicism and fatigue. Tuning out of the news entirely, for all its disadvantages, may prove to be the best revenge.

• Arnab Neil Sengupta is a senior editor at Arab News. X: @arnabnsg