Endless direct, looped comments, other eclipsed news… The titanic media coverage of the death of the Queen of England can have a repulsive effect at a time when more and more people are already turning away from the information, warn specialists interviewed by the AFP.
“We are already seeing criticism of this coverage,” notes Nic Newman, of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, attached to the English University of Oxford.
And this observation is even more true elsewhere than in the United Kingdom, since the disappearance of Elizabeth II has a global echo.
“Did the Australian media really need such demented coverage? “, wondered Monday mediawatch, Australian public broadcaster ABC’s media analysis broadcast, four days after the Queen’s death.
“It’s crazy, we hear the same things on all the channels at the same time”, gets angry Marie-Dominique, octogenarian French diligent news channels. Like her, many American viewers are indignant on Twitter that this news leaves little room for others.
“information fatigue”
In the UK, “we were surprised at the level to which the international media took an interest in this story”, acknowledges Nic Newman.
“It’s the type of event that illustrates the vicious circle of information: we can’t not treat it, but all the media treat it the same way. And what are we left with in the end? asks French journalist David Medioni, director of the Media Observatory of the Jean-Jaurès Foundation.
He co-directed a survey published in early September which highlights “information fatigue”, a feeling of stress and exhaustion from which 53% of French respondents say they suffer, bombarded with information on multiple channels.
Published in mid-June, after polls in some forty countries, the annual report of the Reuters Institute comes to a similar conclusion: faced with news deemed depressing, nearly four out of ten respondents (38%) assure that they deliberately avoid the news, up from just 29% in 2017.
Almost half (43%) say they are put off by their repetitive nature.
“We expect this phenomenon of avoidance to rise” in the coming days regarding the death of the queen, said Nic Newman, lead author of the report.
“This media frenzy, the fact that everyone is gearing up – social networks, TV, press, radio – amplifies the feeling of overflow” already latent, adds David Medioni.
However, public interest in such news is real.
Around the world, TV audiences were strong at the announcement of the death. And on Twitter, an unprecedented total of 46.1 million messages on this subject were published between Thursday and Tuesday (with a peak of 1,800 tweets per second Thursday evening), according to the specialized platform Visibrain.
But once the initial emotion has passed, “the challenge for the media is to find the right balance,” according to Mr. Newman.
“Infobesity”
“The subject is the question of quantity,” agrees Mr. Medioni. When the media “exhausts every angle to the hilt, you can end up at the end of the day feeling like you haven’t heard anything useful or interesting”.
If he deplores “a lack of collective reflection of the media”, the French expert also points to “an addictive relationship” of the public to the info, which he calls “infobesity”.
“We have Big Mac XXL information menus. We know it’s bad, because we feel a form of exhaustion, but we continue to feed on it, without knowing how to stop, ”he says.
“Getting out of it is not just an issue for the media and democracy, it’s a public health issue,” assures Mr. Medioni.
And the first interested parties, the journalists, are not spared.
In a column published in July by the washington postAmerican journalist Amanda Ripley confessed to avoiding the news in recent years (a “vaguely shameful secret”).
For her, the profession must change the way it works, giving more space to hope and solutions, for example in the coverage of climate change.