Christian Schicha is Professor of Media Ethics at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. There he researches, among other things, media scandals, political and visual communication. A conversation about terrifying images, forgotten wars and the “Tagesschau”.
Where has the corona crisis actually gone? A topic that has dominated the media for two years.
Professor Christian Schicha: Reporting always follows a certain pattern. You can see that especially when it comes to scandalization: there are different waves. First we had the so-called wave of refugees, then the Corona wave and now the force of the war is coming. One topic often dominates the reporting so much that ultimately everything else falls behind.
Does that mean we can only focus on one crisis at a time?
Attention is limited. We are permanently surrounded by countless media content from which we can obtain information, background reports, classification, possible consequences. But it takes time, leisure and perhaps the appropriate education to unravel and classify all of this. Some people only watch the news for fifteen minutes in the evening and only want to know the most important facts. That is why it would be disastrous if such an important and dramatic event as the war in Ukraine was not documented in great detail in the mass media.
And how is the attention distributed with only 15 minutes of “Tagesschau”?
Journalists naturally select topics based on whether they are relevant. And the fact that Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine is relevant – we don’t have to discuss that. The format of the daily News however, is controversial. It often only offers snippets, no real information that sticks. The always the same process, the rituals and the language mean that people feel well informed on the surface, but in the end they don’t know that much.
What other crises are going down?
A classic are forgotten wars in Africa, because Africa is not economically and politically “relevant”. Such topics are absent. Or about complex things – such as economic relationships or technology and sometimes medical topics if they cannot be explained well.
Above all, reporting on the climate crisis is repeatedly criticized: too little, too undifferentiated. Why is climate reporting so difficult?
A climate crisis is initially abstract and far away for many: difficult to visualize, difficult to forecast. It is incredibly difficult to address such abstract, long-term changes appropriately and at the same time in an understandable way. In a war – as macabre as it may sound – it’s something different: you have the images, the immediate empathy. That is almost impossible with the climate issue. And ultimately with Corona too.
What happens to media consumers when the next, “even worse” crisis keeps popping up in the reports without the previous one having been resolved?
You have to make sure that you hide the whole horror a bit, because you can’t grasp everything. And of course, media coverage has to be extremely careful not to propagate any vague fears.
Do you have an example?
Images of injured, mutilated people where individuals are clearly identifiable. Even if you just walk past the kiosk, you can sometimes see these images of fear and horror. Of course you should show the horror of war, also with drastic pictures to document the drama. But that also works if faces cannot be identified. My nightmare is always: people who see pictures of relatives in the media for the first time and don’t even know what happened to them beforehand.
Will the intensity of reporting on Ukraine remain, or is this an initial high that quickly ebbs away again at this intensity?
We have to wait and see: will negotiations bring anything? Does it get even more brutal? That’s too early to assess. But at some point it will die down. Both scandals and topics always have an expiration time. You can see that very nicely, for example, in the focal points or special programs after the news: First it’s half an hour, then a quarter of an hour, and at some point the topic falls down to the very bottom. You will also get used to this crisis to a certain extent.