Clickbait Will Kill Us All

This week: a brief rant about news values; some stuff that probably shouldn’t be taught in schools; and a journey planner for your trip to early modern Europe.

On Sunday night, my phone buzzed to let me know I had a news alert.¹ It was BBC News, promising me that if I clicked I could see actual video footage of the “moment migrant sex offender arrested in London park”.

I am not, on this occasion, going to bang on yet again about how concerns over the efficacy of Britain’s asylum and immigration policy are being used as a beachhead to build support for something far nastier than a more competently run border policy: it feels pretty uncontroversial to say that both Hadush Kebatu’s crimes, and his accidental release, are bad. This should not have happened.

Nonetheless, I find myself wondering: what on earth is the BBC doing sending out that news alert? The fact Hedash Kebatu’s arrest was captured on film by a passer by is of marginal interest, I suppose. But why do literally millions of people need a push notification telling them they should drop everything and watch it right now?

There is nothing in the four lines of text, after all, to contextualise either Kebatu’s crimes, or his escape. All this story as presented tells us is that:

a) asylum seekers can also be sex offenders, and

b) the prison system sometimes releases people by mistake.

In other words, for reasons that have nothing to do with informing, educating and entertaining, but are likely instead about some team’s target stats, someone at Britain’s national broadcaster has decided to actively tell literally millions of people that they should be frightened by asylum seekers. Brilliant work.

That is very far from the only example of the media’s internal incentives causing journalists to act in a way that seems almost designed to screw everything up. Consider another example that did the rounds on Monday: a Times’ story about Torsten Bell MP, with the headline “Treasury minister leading budget plans spent £900 on desk”.

There’s obviously a political motivation behind such stories, which you hardly need be Machiavelli to uncover. But there’s a media business one as well – to inspire the outrage that persuades people to click before they have time to realise the story is bollocks. It’s since been taken down, as have all the copycat versions: Bell claims it was simply untrue, and his office actually underspent its furniture allowance. Even were it true, though, the main takeaway I can see is, “Office furniture is surprisingly expensive, and we probably don’t want the people writing a Budget to also be high on codeine thanks to debilitating back pain”. I am unconvinced the paper of record is acting in the public interest here.

This sort of bullshit inevitably shapes how people see the world: if large swathes of the public imagine asylum seekers to be dangerous, or politicians to be cynics on the take, it’s at least partly because newsrooms have told them they should. Sometimes this is because of their own political agendas; just as often, though, it’s because that’s how you generate web traffic.

Even worse, arguably, is the impact on the way governments actually govern. One of the many horrible revelations in the Home Affairs Committee’s report on how Britain accommodates the asylum system was the fact that everything got worse because civil servants were taken off boring but important things like contract management and redirected to headline-begging gimmicks about Rwanda. This is clearly awful – but what it isn’t, given the incentives facing our politicians, is either irrational or surprising.

In the same way, the Palace of Westminster is a quite literal deathtrap, at genuine risk of simply burning down; yet no government has been bold enough to address the problem, for the entirely rational reason that it will inevitably result in headlines about Westminster spending billions on itself. In the same way, it’s hard to build housing or power infrastructure because there will always be clicks in tracking down the people mad about it and quoting them in a headline; it’s hard to fix social care, because the people who’ll benefit in future will be silent, while those who’ll pay for it now will be furious, and there’ll be clicks in reporting the fact. As with Bell’s actually quite inexpensive furniture: there’s very little reward for doing the right thing.

And you can’t have a grown up conversation about trade offs when everyone is screaming.

It may be possible to flip this, however. If media incentives mean our leaders are going to get screamed at regardless, they really might as well make the hard choices that could actually make things better. Swap hysteria about new office furniture for hysteria about a parliamentary rebuild; instead of being shredded by the Telegraph for even considering more stealth taxes, just (this point shamelessly nicked from Duncan Weldon) stick 3p on income tax, calm the bond markets and create the room to actually fix stuff.

The coverage, after all, will be hysterically furious regardless. Really, what have they got to lose?

No, We Can’t Just Keep Adding Stuff To What’s Taught In Schools

Kaleb Cooper, off Clarkson’s Farm, has had an idea. “I am going to try to get farming taught in schools,” he recently told the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where he was promoting his inevitable children’s book. “I was never very good at school, but farming can teach us a lot of things about maths, English or science.” Whether never having been very good in school makes you more or less qualified to aid in curriculum reforms is left to the reader to decide. I’m genuinely not sure.

Cooper wasn’t the first to propose this particular idea. In July, Maya Ellis – the first ever Labour MP for Lancashire’s largely rural Ribble Valley – told Farmers Guardian that she would “absolutely love it if our curriculum review ended up with some form of compulsory teaching in schools about where our food comes from or giving children the opportunity to visit a farm”. Which is, to be fair, exactly the sort of thing you should probably say to Farmers Guardian if you’re the first Labour MP for a traditionally Tory rural seat.

The problem is – that isn’t the only thing people have demanded be added to the national curriculum. This happens all the time. What follows is the result of the most cursory Google News search.