The Media Research Center’s NewsBusters website has carved out a beat identifying odd discrepancies in how much the press covers one topic relative to another. During primary election season, for instance, it reported routinely on Donald Trump’s saturation of the nightly news, rendering his now-vanquished Republican primary competitors afterthoughts. The comparisons can be arbitrary and the conclusions subjective, but the information often illuminates where our media wants to focus its cameras.
NewsBusters wrote Wednesday that the morning and evening programs on ABC, CBS and NBC dedicated 54 times as much coverage last weekend to the shooting of Harambe the gorilla than they did to the shooting of 69 people in Chicago during the same period. It also stated last year that the networks covered Cecil the lion more in one day than they covered the covert Planned Parenthood abortion videos in two weeks. Neither outcome was due to primate and feline executive producers running the shows.
How much press the Chicago gun crimes and Planned Parenthood deserved is less of the issue here than just how much attention the slain animals actually received. There are only so many hours in the day, after all. Only a fraction of them are used on Today and the NBC Nightly News.
During this same time period—and many years before it—the broadcast media’s hyperactive kid sibling, the Internet, infamously turned cat content into revenue streams. The website I Can Has Cheezburger?, home to the LOLcats meme, reportedly sold for $2 million in 2008. It grew so exponentially that it eventually attracted as many as 467 million page views in just one month of 2012, and $30 million of investment to go along with it, the Seattle Times reported.
That’s a unique success story, and Cheezburger’s website traffic has fallen by more than 80 percent in the last four years as mobile activity has eaten into the overall share of online consumption. But this evolution in Internet habits bodes well for video. The communication technology firm Ericcson estimates that it will grow to account for more than two-thirds of all mobile data traffic by 2021. Advertisers will migrate accordingly.
News outlets doubtlessly will, too. There is no reason to restate or disparage BuzzFeed, today a prominent journalism publication, for packaging and helping popularize social-friendly, shareable animal content. The website’s Jack Shepherd told Sarah Stodola, writing for The Awl, that cats generate “3.5 times more viral traffic (shared via Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.) than the average BuzzFeed post. And they generate a whopping 14 times as many ‘reactions’ (likes/dislikes).”
Media competitors almost have to take notice.
“Now everybody has to compete with the BuzzFeeds of the world. Even CNN does stories on Internet cats,” Ben Lashes, the agent (yes, really) for web sensation Grumpy Cat, told Bloomberg.
Knowing that there will be dollars and a home for their productions, the owners of Stalking Cat, Dramatic Cat, and the myriad Proper Noun Cats have incentives to continue uploading footage of their pets committing acts of cuteness. (“Incentives matter,” any economist would say.)
It’s simply the nature of modern media that the animal kingdom rules the fascinations of us mere mammals. Give a quadruped a name, wrong it, and we cry outrage; make it a meme, share it, and we click; film it, upload it, and we laugh. Does all of this displace serious news? Not exactly. The Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, CNN, The Atlantic and others all reported about the Memorial Day weekend violence in the Windy City.
But these creatures can certainly obscure and subordinate other reporting. Just as there is limited airtime for broadcast news, humans can only click or hit play on so many links and videos. They’re clearly attracted to the ones involving a critter, a creature of the wilderness, a resident of the zoo.
And so it is that among CNN.com’s top stories Thursday afternoon is “Aussie politician kills, eats elephant.” The article even embeds a Twitter scuffle about it.
