6. Omitting to publish can violate your readers’ right to be informed

Every editor has to make decisions on what to cover. Newspapers are constrained by space. While space is not a practical problem for news websites, our article count is constrained by the number of reporters, sub-editors and fact-checkers available to us. It’s also constrained by how much content people will read on any given day. On a website, the order of articles, which articles appear on the front page, and which articles are pushed on social media, also affect what is read.

These are all hard editorial decisions and no two editors or publications are likely to agree. These daily decisions are influenced by both ideological preconceptions and commercial concerns. Editors must be free to make these choices but they should also be criticised for them.

Importantly, what is omitted also affects how informed a publication’s readers are. Systematically omitting news of a certain kind, or ensuring it is placed obscurely in a newspaper or on a website, can sometimes infringe your readers’ right to be informed.

Consider GroundUp News (which we edit) and the Limpopo Mirror (published by a close colleague). The latter is a small community publication in the north of South Africa. It has no duty to publish stories outside the geographical area it covers, and that its readers understand it to cover. For GroundUp on the other hand, any human rights related story in the country fits within our scope. But publishing every such story is both impractical and would make for a very boring unwieldy publication. Only a selection of stories can be published, restricted mainly by the number of editors and journalists the publication can hire and manage.

But we should scrutinise ourselves and be scrutinised by our readers for omissions. For example, are we only reporting the foibles of a particular political party? Or are we completely ignoring a big story that appears to be in our remit? But even this is complicated. With limited resources, it may appear to us that even though the story is important we either lack the skill to cover it, or believe another publication, to whom our readers generally have access, is doing a sufficiently good job of covering it and there is no need to duplicate coverage.

A clear violation of our readers’ right to be informed would be if we begin covering a story and then fail to complete covering it. For example, if we start covering a court case, but then fail to report its outcome. Unfortunately this does happen, though not intentionally. Stories fall through the cracks; reporters who were covering a story for us move on to other publications or jobs or sometimes we simply fail to realise there has been a new development.

While lack of ill intention and lack of resources might be reasonable excuses for failing to realise the right to inform, there is a more troubling failure: ignoring important news stories because of bias.

Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman is a seminal and controversial analysis of the US mainstream media. It deals extensively with the US media’s coverage of the American role in the war on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. It primarily examines bias, but also looks at the omission of reportage of human rights violations, such as the US bombing of Laos. For example:

“In July 1968, the Southeast Asia correspondent of Le Monde, Jacques Decornoy, published lengthy eyewitness reports of the bombing of northern Laos which had become '… a world without noise for the surrounding villages have disappeared, the inhabitants themselves living hidden in the mountains …' … After Decornoy’s reports, there could be no doubt the US Air Force was directing murderous attacks against the civilian society … Not only did the [US] media fail to publish the information about the attack against a defenseless civilian society or seek to investigate further for themselves, they proceeded to provide exculpatory accounts that they knew to be inaccurate, on the rare occasions when the bombing was mentioned at all.” (pp. 255-256)

An equally comprehensive analysis of media coverage of the ongoing war in Gaza is yet to be done. As we write this there is debate about the BBC’s coverage of the war (see here too). By contrast, the breadth of coverage on Gaza on Al Jazeera far exceeds the other major television news outlets. Is this difference in coverage because Al Jazeera has more journalists on the ground in Gaza, or because of a pro-Israeli bias at broadcasters like the BBC and CNN?

It should be considered a violation of the right to be informed to systematically ignore or demote news stories of vital public interest that fall within the ambit of a publication. It does not follow from this that there should be legal repercussions for this. That would almost certainly come into conflict with freedom of expression and we have no desire to undermine that vital right. But the right to be informed can be used by readers to advocate for their favoured publications to do better.