Race for page views and rise of silliness

One of the challenges facing online news providers in their competition with each other in this bright new digital age is to upload stories as quickly as they can, and some practitioners of old school journalism have lamented that this has led to a deterioration in quality.

The concern for speed usually comes hand in hand with the obsession to upload something new at shorter and shorter intervals. This has perhaps resulted in the lowering of the guard against, among other things, sensationalism.

As media platforms chase ever more sensational headlines, public figures have, in turn, found the need to attract attention in any way possible. They compete for column inches and video minutes in order to get as much public attention as possible, even if it means public rage.

This phenomenon has spawned a debate in the United States in the wake of the presumptive presidential candidacy of Republican Donald Trump. The billionaire bigot is especially adept at playing the media game. When his career as a reality TV host was reaching its end last year, he rebranded himself as a Tea Party conservative and became one of the loudest voices in the so-called Birther Movement, a frivolous league against Barack Obama. As ever more inflammatory comments issued from his mouth, he found the media more than willing to devote time and space for him.

As The Late Show host Stephen Colbert has put it, when Trump announced his candidacy, Colbert and his team were so anxious to put together a segment mocking him that they never imagined that months later, America would be staring down the barrel of a gun called a Donald Trump Presidency. The media, with a sort of perverse amusement, treated him like a child waving a loaded gun. One can imagine the amusement turning into horror, now that he has parlayed his media presence and the willingness to report on his atrocious remarks into a serious challenge against common sense and all that is good and right.

A question then arises: what should the media report? Here’s a dirty secret: controversy breeds page views and media companies live and die by page views. Without controversial figures like Ibrahim Ali, Hew Kuan Yau, Jamal Yunos, Ali Tinju and the like, several outlets would have likely folded a long time ago. However, giving time and space to such people achieves nothing but the continued polarisation of society because there are opposing reactions to everything that appears as a news item these days.

This brings us to the current feud between Jamal Yunos and Ali Tinju. Ali has accused Jamal, the Sungar Besar Umno division head, of threatening to beat and shoot him for having the gall to say Umno would lose should he stand as its candidate in the upcoming Sungai Besar by-election. This, of course, provoked a retort from Jamal. He said Ali had evil intentions and was trying to humiliate him and his family.

It is admittedly hard to imagine such silliness having the societal effect mentioned above, but it is nonetheless indicative of the media problem we have discussed. Why are two figures in the public eye behaving like wrestlers on Monday Night Raw? And why should we bother?

Many of us do sometimes enjoy the wrestling-style speeches here and there, but when something as ludicrous as this is treated as breaking, national news, the cycle of chasing controversy and page views continues and encourages more of such behaviour. Media practitioners certainly have to do better than this if they see themselves as having a role to play in shaping a decent society.

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