Page 125 of the latest issue of The Economist contains a remarkable visualization of some four million online journalism articles published during 2019 across approximately 5,000 websites. At its centre lies what might be described as a vast black hole of public attention: articles mentioning Donald Trump absorbed an extraordinary 112 million hours of reading time. By comparison, coverage of the devastating fires in the Amazon, California and Australia attracted, collectively, less than a tenth of that attention. Human suffering in poorer parts of the world fared worse still, revealing a disturbing geography of public concern in which some tragedies appear infinitely more capable than others of commanding the world's gaze.
The same image offers an even more unsettling comparison. The international event that attracted the greatest amount of reading time was neither the collapse of the Brumadinho tailings dam in Brazil nor Cyclone Idai in Mozambique and neighbouring countries, despite the enormous human toll of those disasters. It was the burning of a cathedral in Paris. The contrast says something uncomfortable about the moral economy of global attention: the value implicitly assigned to suffering appears to depend profoundly on where it occurs, to whom it happens, and how culturally close its victims seem to those who command the world's media and political institutions.
Perhaps this also helps explain the chronic inadequacy of the international response to climate change. The Conferences of the Parties (COP) are asked to confront a crisis whose gravest consequences are disproportionately borne by people who contribute least to it and possess the least political, economic and media power. Climate diplomacy therefore collides with the same brutal hierarchy of attention and empathy visible in The Economist's graphic. The poorest populations of the developing world can sometimes appear to occupy the position of the “Untermensch of the twenty-first century”: people whose lives matter rhetorically in international declarations, yet whose suffering struggles even to secure a meaningful fraction of the world's collective attention. Before inequality becomes visible in income, security or climate vulnerability, it may already be visible in something as elementary and as revealing as who receives our attention, and who does not.
