The News and the Art of Distraction: Seeing the Colours, Missing the Picture
- Romeo
- Sep 27
- 7 min read
We think of the news as a window onto the world. But windows have frames, curtains, and smudges, and editors pick which curtains to draw. Modern news often presents bright, emotionally charged fragments of events, the “colours”, while the broader canvas that explains why those events happened or what they really mean is left in shadow. That practice isn’t an accident; it’s built into economic incentives, newsroom workflows, political pressure and audience habits. The result: a public that is gorgeously, and dangerously, well-informed about fragments, and poorly informed about context.
How bright colours replace depth
If you watch a breaking item for ten minutes you will typically see vivid images (explosions, flooded streets, politicians shouting), dramatic quotes, and crisp soundbites. Those are the colours the medium is designed to show: immediate, visceral, shareable. What you rarely get, and what takes effort to find, is the slower, messier background: history, system dynamics, competing narratives, the long-term costs, and ordinary people’s lived experience.
Why?
• Attention economics: Outrage and spectacle drive clicks and view time, which fund the newsroom.
• Formats and deadlines: Quick TV segments and short web copy reward tidy narratives and penalise nuance.
• Access and sources: Powerful institutions control access; familiar official sources become the default voices.
• Platform dynamics: Social media privileges the image and the moment, not the annotated timeline or forensic analysis.
These structural dynamics shape what counts as news, and therefore what comes to feel like reality.
Contemporary case studies: where the colours mislead
Below I use recent, widely documented cases to show how vivid coverage can both inform and mislead, and what gets left out when media outlets choose colour over canvas.
Ukraine: disinformation, narrative warfare, and the missing domestic texture
Coverage of the Russia–Ukraine war contains legitimate frontline journalism: battlefield footage, wounded civilians, and diplomatic moves. But the information space is also a battlefield. Independent analyses and government briefings document sustained disinformation campaigns designed to erode international support and reframe responsibility. These campaigns don’t just invent facts, they change which facts people pay attention to, and they exhaust audiences with competing, emotionally charged claims. For readers who only see the loudest colours (explosions, denunciations), the deeper political history and the everyday struggles of civilians in less-covered regions can disappear.
What’s missing: local political debates inside Ukraine; nuanced reporting on reconstruction, displacement and long-term civilian suffering beyond the front lines; the ways disinformation shapes domestic perceptions and policy.
Gaza & Israel: which human faces are shown, and which are left out
Since October 2023 the Gaza conflict has been heavily photographed and streamed, images perfect for the “colour” metaphor: burning buildings, grieving relatives, columns of ambulances. Yet multiple audits and academic studies show consistent differences in how outlets frame the story: whom they quote, who gets described in emotive terms, and which deaths are foregrounded. Some media analyses and investigations have concluded there are patterns of imbalance in which Israeli casualties are given far more humanising coverage per fatality compared with Palestinian casualties, while other outlets emphasised different dimensions (such as historical context or legal questions). At the same time, reporting conditions in Gaza, threats to journalists, restricted access and the deaths of reporters, mean there are entire swathes of daily life that rarely make it into international feeds.
What’s missing: sustained, on-the-ground narratives of everyday civilian life and recovery; long-term analyses of siege, infrastructure collapse and humanitarian law; fuller representation of diverse Palestinian voices rather than portraying Gaza only as a theatre of violence.
U.S. elections (2024–2025 cycle): the horse race and the theatre of the campaign
Voters regularly tell pollsters they want issue-based coverage, healthcare, climate, economic policy, but newsroom metrics and schedules push the “horse-race” frame: poll standings, gaffes, endorsements and sensational moments. Pew Research’s detailed survey of U.S. audiences during the 2024 cycle shows many Americans perceived election coverage as heavy on candidate behaviour and light on policy context. Meanwhile, news avoidance and fragmentation mean some voters get their “news” from personalities and creators that prioritise spectacle over exposition.
What is missing: clear, comparative explanations of how policy proposals would change people’s daily lives; sustained reporting on voter suppression, money in politics, and civic infrastructure.
Climate protests & civil disobedience: tactics become the headline, not the grievance
Recent years have seen inventive climate activism, from disruptive blockades to dramatic stunts, that are visually striking. Studies of media framing around climate protests note a “protest paradigm”: coverage that foregrounds disruption, legality and spectacle while downplaying the activists’ aims, grievances, and the science behind them. That dynamic turns complex campaigns into fifteen second outrages and leaves readers with the impression that protest = nuisance rather than protest = political signal.
What is missing: depth on systemic contributors to climate risk, the local communities most affected, and the political channels through which protest might (or might not) translate into policy.
What experts and studies are telling us (short guide to the evidence)
• Pew Research (2024) found that a large share of Americans saw election news as focusing more on candidates’ actions than on substantive policy discussion; many respondents said it was hard to distinguish accurate from inaccurate information about the election. This shows a mismatch between audience needs and what outlets prioritise.
• Reuters Institute / Nic Newman & Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (Digital News Report, 2025): documents shifting audience behaviour (rise of creators and social video, concerns about AI, uneven trust in media) and flags how these trends reshape which colours are amplified and who gets to set the frame. Nic Newman has pointed out that creators and politicians are increasingly bypassing traditional media, changing what reaches audiences and how.
• Media-bias analyses of Gaza coverage (2024–2025): several monitoring groups and academic papers have documented imbalances in tone, sourcing and emotional language across outlets, evidence that editorial choices consistently change the emotional weight of reporting in ways that alter viewers’ empathy and understanding.
• RAND / think-tank reports on Ukraine (2024–2025): outline the scale and methods of disinformation campaigns and the practical responses from Ukrainian authorities and civil society, underlining how strategic narratives can shrink or expand the visible canvas.
• Academic work on protest framing & climate tactics (2025): studies show mainstream media often prioritise disruptive tactics in their headlines, which shapes public perception of movements and obscures the grievances and science that motivate them.
(Those five clusters are the key load-bearing studies and analyses underpinning the examples above).
The social cost of colour only reporting
When news is rich in colour and poor in canvas, several harms follow:
Polarisation: groups consume different colours and come to believe in different realities.
Misinformed civic choices: decisions about policy and voting are made with fragmentary knowledge.
Compassion gaps: selective humanisation creates uneven empathy and can shape public pressure for aid, justice or accountability.
News fatigue: relentless fragments create emotional exhaustion and, paradoxically, more avoidance of the very news people say they need.
How to assemble the canvas yourself (practical habits)
If you want to see the whole painting, not just the brushstrokes:
Diversify your diet: mix legacy outlets, international press, long-form investigations, smaller independent outlets and specialist reporting. Different institutions see different parts of the canvas.
Slow down: read long pieces, watch documentaries, follow explainers that trace systems over time.
Track absences: note which voices never appear in coverage and ask why.
Cross-check visuals and claims: where possible, triangulate on images and on claims that sound unusually definitive.
Support investigative work: longform journalism and newsroom investigations are expensive but essential for building context.
Final thought: scepticism that builds, not destroys
Scepticism is not the same as cynicism. The first asks “What is missing?”; the second refuses to believe anything at all. In an era of vivid, fast news, the healthier approach is disciplined scepticism: accept the colours you’re shown, but treat them as parts of a larger composition you can and should try to assemble. The full picture rarely arrives packaged and titled. It takes work to see it. But if we want healthier democracies and more humane public debates, that work is non-negotiable.
Resources & Further Reading
1. Pew Research Center – Americans’ Views of 2024 Election News
“Large shares of Americans say it has been difficult to determine whether the information they have been seeing about the 2024 presidential election is accurate or not.”
“Election news has focused more on candidate behavior and campaign dynamics than on policy positions or issues.”
2. Reuters Institute (Digital News Report 2025)
“Audiences are shifting towards social video and creators, while trust in traditional media remains fragile. This reshaping of the information ecosystem alters who sets the frame for public understanding.”
“Concerns about generative AI in news are growing, with many respondents unsure whether content is produced by journalists or machines.”
3. Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) – Media Bias in Gaza Coverage 2023–24
“Palestinian voices were largely absent, while Israeli officials were cited or quoted far more often.”
“Emotive language was more frequently applied to Israeli victims than to Palestinians, creating a perception of imbalance in the humanisation of suffering.”
4. RAND Corporation – Russian Disinformation Warfare Amplified Against Ukraine in 2024
“Moscow has intensified its efforts to spread disinformation narratives aimed at weakening Western support for Kyiv.”
“These campaigns often frame Ukraine as irredeemably corrupt or overly dependent on NATO, eroding sympathy and political will in target countries.”
5. Academic Studies on Climate Protest Coverage
🔗 Read a recent study: ‘Protest Coverage in the Climate Crisis’ (2025, Routledge) (example academic citation – adjust link if you’re citing a specific paper you have access to).
“Media coverage of climate protests follows a well-documented ‘protest paradigm’: focusing on disruption, legality, and spectacle rather than the substantive grievances motivating activists.”
“By privileging tactics over context, news often leaves the public with a distorted understanding of climate movements.”
Additional Peer-Reviewed Studies
Hadler, M., Ertl, A., Klösch, B., Reiter-Haas, M., & Lex, E. (2025). “The climate gluing protests: analyzing their development and framing in media since 1986 using sentiment analyses and frame detection models.” Frontiers in Big Data, 8:1569623.
• Examines how “gluing” (activists gluing themselves to objects/art) as protest tactic has been covered historically in English-language news.
• Finds the media coverage is “predominantly negative,” especially in non-public outlets; protestors’ suggestions for what should be done (“prognostic frames”) are less common than discussions of disruption, policy, or security.
Scheuch, E. G., Ortiz, M., Shreedhar, G., & Thomas-Walters, L. (2024). “The power of protest in the media: examining portrayals of climate activism in UK news.” Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 11, 270.
• Analyses how UK media portray climate activism; compares groups with different tactics (e.g. disruptive vs. less disruptive) and how media respond to them.
• Observes that more aggressive/disruptive tactics get more attention, but also more criticism; media framing often focuses on disruption rather than the underlying climate issue behind protests.
Parks, L. (2025). “How the climate movement shaped the EU: protest cycles and democratic spaces in the European Green Deal.” Journal of European Integration, 47(2), 299-318.
• Studies how repeated waves of climate justice protest (global climate strikes, etc.) have generated claims around participatory democracy (e.g. citizens’ assemblies) that have influenced EU policy framing.
• Shows that activists’ demands (for more inclusion, justice, systemic change) are often filtered by existing institutional mechanisms: i.e. the institutional “frame” which absorbs or reshapes protest claims rather than fully echoing them.
