When the front page shouldn’t be the top priority

Lots of things are important, but some are more important than others – often by orders of magnitude (for example, causes of death).

One frustrating thing about the news is that the amount of column inches and airtime a topic gets seems to bear little relationship to how significant it is to the world. Obviously I’m not talking about tabloid showbiz gossip, or sports commentary: these don’t even implicitly claim to be focussed on what matters. But I have different expectations when it comes to flagship BBC current affairs shows, or newspaper editorials, and certainly what gets onto the House of Commons order paper.

Salience and importance

I think quantifying this discrepancy might be an interesting project. You could calculate a salience / importance ratio for different topics, and see which are disproportionately over- or under-represented in the media.

This is similar to, but distinct from, the first two components of the importance-neglectedness-tractability framework in Effective Altruism. The main difference is that my model focusses primarily on the political, as opposed to looking at all problems facing humanity. Rather than thinking about importance in an ultimately moral sense, as the INT framework does, I want to use it to roughly point at « if people were better informed on matters of fact, but had the same ethical views, this is what I think they’d spend their time caring about » (see more in the sidenote below).

How would one operationalise the measure?

• Salience (i.e., amount of media attention)
  • Number of news articles
  • Eyeball-minutes / amount of readers’ attention
    • The Economist complied data on this from Chartbeat in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, but not 2023 as far as I can tell They seem to have discontinued the Graphic Detail section altogether, which is disappointing :(
• Importance (i.e., how much does the issue matter I’m well aware that this isn’t a normatively neutral measure: it matters what kind of importance I am talking about, and by whose lights. Richard Y Chappell’s piece on moral misdirection, which occurs when a speaker “predictably reduces the importance-weighted accuracy of the audience’s moral beliefs”, helpfully makes explicit the value-ladenness of the designation “important”. However, I think that most would agree that ceteris paribus, something which impacts a larger number of people (or other moral patients), or accounts for a greater amount of government spending, and so on, is more important. In this way, we can come up with relatively pluralist measures of importance that are not highly sensitive to nuances of ethical frameworks, at least when it comes to politics and current affairs. )
  • The number of people affected
  • Number of DALYs or QALYs or WELLBYs
  • Proportion of GDP

Some speculation

Calculating the ratio would be easiest for economic policy questions. I’d be interested in any ideas about how to determine it more objectively/accurately. Absent that, or the time to spend figuring it out, I think some candidates for a high (i.e. over-represented) salience-importance ratio are:

• Inheritance tax
• ULEZ
• Fishing rights during Brexit This might be a contentious one, with people arguing that distributional effects mean that fisheries were extremely important to the already-struggling coastal communities which relied on them for the local economy. But fishing accounts for less than £500m of output and about 11,000 jobs (roughly 0.03% of GDP and labour force.), and about 11,000 jobs. I would say that all things considered, its importance even to those communities was less than that of, e.g., what settlement the financial services industry got.
• The Rwanda asylum seeker deportation policy