Comment

Santilla Chingaipe
The end of seriousness

Back in February, a meeting that resembled a Real Housewives reunion was being dissected, analysed and broadcast around the world. “This is going to be great television, I will say that,” United States President Donald Trump announced to the gathered press pool at the end of the showdown.

Trump, a former reality television star, was hosting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and entertainer who once played a fictional Ukrainian president in a political satire comedy series.

Familiar with ratings and images, Trump used the White House meeting to verbally assault Zelensky. The episode shocked those in the room and beyond. Trump and his vice-president, J. D. Vance, were playing into the theatrics that captivate TV audiences worldwide, and the media obeyed with enthusiasm.

The meeting consumed the news cycle for hours, days and weeks. Memes, TikToks and gifs emerged as media organisations scrambled to work out exactly how to report the spectacle that took place in Washington.

Diplomacy is about tact and respect and Trump’s actions were about neither. Reading the commentary in the aftermath of the chaotic meeting, I was baffled by the surprise many pundits expressed at the US president’s behaviour.

It was not Trump’s behaviour that was surprising but rather how the media had failed to reckon with why we find ourselves with leaders who understand how to keep the public’s attention but who have almost no interest in the real issues they are there to resolve.

We take nothing seriously anymore. Serious news events are reduced to spectacles. Erin Patterson’s triple-murder trial was turned into can’t-look-away television by networks here and overseas. There are reportedly seven documentary teams preparing to make shows based on the mushroom killings, as well as books to be published, all to feed the public’s obsession with true crime.

In the days the jury was deliberating, the desperation to reel in viewers saw Channel 7 assign a breathless reporter to stream late into the night, to its live audience, the glass doors through which the jury entered to fulfil their obligations. Riveting stuff.

The ABC also succumbed to the lure of an addicted audience and, wanting a share of the ratings, allocated extraordinary resources to its coverage. A dedicated daily podcast dissecting every detail – and non-detail – was created and a drama series about Patterson has just been commissioned.

This is aimed at the appetites of the audience. Never mind the victims and families impacted by this tragedy or the small community grappling with having the world’s attention for the wrong reasons.

In the previous century, much of this coverage would have been relegated to what was then considered “soft news”: entertainment news programs, or tabloid and talk shows that would weave major news events with popular culture. The stories often incorporated humour with sensationalism, gossip, scandals and true crime. The more outlandish, the better.

Critics have argued a large section of the public remains ignorant of political and social issues and that engaging them through entertainment is one way of challenging this ignorance. The outcome of this, however, has been the end of seriousness. Mainstream news organisations have chased these distracted audiences into culs-de-sac of irrelevance. We live now in an age of fragmentation and frivolity. Truth is a casualty, as are its siblings, depth and nuance.

Earlier this year, meditating on the fires ravaging the west coast of the US in The New Yorker, Teju Cole wrote that the oversaturation of information about the fires would not sustain an audience’s attention because of the moment in history in which we find ourselves. “They won’t last for the same reason that there are no lasting images of recent hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes: even with high demand for such images, there is consistent oversupply,” Cole wrote. “But these images are fugitive for another reason – their function has changed. They bring us news of devastation, quick news that will soon be supplanted by other news. They are victims of an unremitting public need for novelty. The meanings of these images – which speak variously of environmental collapse, policy failure, ineluctable helplessness – do not invite their use as objects of contemplation … Our ways of seeing are not yet adequate to our predicament.”

In the past few weeks, several news events that really matter have barely made headlines. Few outlets gave serious space or resources to the coronial inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker, or to Australia’s first truth-telling inquiry handing its report to Victoria’s parliament, or to the fact more than a third of Tuvalu’s citizens have entered the ballot for a world-first climate visa that would allow them to permanently migrate to Australia.

These events deserve our attention – not just for the impact they have had on human lives but for the implications that will arise from them and will affect all Australians.

When did the lines between information and entertainment begin to blur? It’s hard to say, although scholars in the US point to the 1994 double-murder case against football star and actor O. J. Simpson. The combination of celebrity, true crime and a hungry audience, as well as the advent of 24-hour cable television live-streaming the trial, turned it into a media circus. Most traditional media were reluctant to cover the case but succumbed to viewer interest. In the internet age, these boundaries have all but dissolved.

What happens when audiences, or leaders such as Trump, set the terms of engagement? What happens when media no longer mediates, no longer plays a role in deciding what is important?

Audiences have become desensitised to tragedy and devastation. They are numbed by their own desires, by constant images and videos of human suffering. To counter that, many outlets opt for humour and light-heartedness. Others chase the dark impulses of “engagement”.

If audiences and the powerful continue to dictate what should be watched, however, discerning fact from fiction becomes increasingly difficult. Trump understands showbusiness and what it takes to be a ratings success. He uses shock and spectacle because it works. Compounding all of this is the fact political leaders are newsmakers, so news outlets are required to report on what they say or do.

Rarely do measured, thoughtful or informative stories draw significant audiences. Violence, scandal and entertainment are more likely to retain attention. This shifts the focus from those in power, who are culpable and responsible for systemic failures and injustices, to unnecessary topics and stories of inconsequential events. Wasted hours are spent being distracted, and by the time citizens wake up to this fact it’s almost always too late. Rights end up curtailed, power is centralised, democracy is all but eroded.

Telling stories requires selection and is a constant negotiation between what to keep and what to omit. Each choice bears significance. When the editorial choice is for programming that is less rigorous and less comprehensive, audiences become ill-equipped to engage with serious issues.

Spectacle clouds judgement because it often targets the least rational of human characteristics: emotions. Rather than ask questions about what the distraction means for our health, safety and economic wellbeing, audiences are instead manipulated to feel. Anger and fear are popular, as many politicians know, and are politically expedient emotions.

Knowledge and expertise have been replaced with popularity and pseudo-scholarship. Those tasked with sorting through the noise and informing the public often acquiesce to audiences and to the tools of the platforms to which those audiences have been lost. The media’s “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” response dilutes the seriousness of major issues and turns them to farce. It also diminishes the role of the media as a bastion of truth. In a race for the most clicks and shares, only the powerful win.

In a world filled with never-ending distractions, what does it mean to pay attention?

Most news audiences are time-poor. Weighing up what to focus on is challenging despite more information being available today than ever before.

I get it: there’s a lot going on in the world. It’s easier to laugh than it is to sit with stories of human suffering that might leave you feeling powerless and overwhelmed.

Yet being informed is a civic responsibility in a democratic society, and audiences need to be held accountable with what they choose to read and watch and give their attention to. Being passive and apathetic makes us more disconnected and pushes us closer to versions of authoritarianism. Audiences have to be aware of the consequences of absolving those responsibilities.

These are very serious times – and yet the world does not seem to have the seriousness required to comprehend them, let alone confront them.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 19, 2025 as "The end of seriousness".

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