Ukraine War “News Fatigue” Consolidated as Concern for Winter Grows

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Ahmed Adel, Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher

Although the West conducted a huge media campaign against the Russian military operation in Ukraine to legitimise backing Kiev’s authoritarian regime, a new study has found that people are experiencing “news fatigue” and are no longer as interested in following the war, unlike the first few months of it.

Six months is a near eternity in geopolitics – elections, financial and energy crises, natural disasters and even celebrity scandals have occurred and slowly began replacing Ukraine war headlines. An Australia-based academic has attributed this to “news fatigue”, meaning that media consumers in the West are no longer finding the situation in Ukraine as interesting.

“It happens with any news coverage of major events, particularly with explosive news and things that are traumatic,” said Steinar Ellingsen, a Norwegian who lectures in journalism at the University of Wollongong and has studied the news fatigue phenomenon. “I think there’s a pattern when the new cycle moves on after the first wave, and then particularly the further geographically away from the conflict you are, the quicker the interest pales. With distance, time and resources, and budgets drain very quickly.” 

Euronews reported that a sense of fatigue for any particular story is a two-way street, which explains why that audiences can grow tired of seeing the same topic every night on the television or plastered on the front page of newspapers on a daily basis. From the perspective of media organisations, the war in Ukraine was not anticipated. Dedicating entire news team to focus exclusively on Ukraine became a huge expense which inevitably influences other news coverage decisions as well, like potentially having to scale back on reporting important domestic events. 

According to the managing editor of Sweden’s Expressen, Magnus Alselind, “the public and the media only has room for one big story at a time. So four or five years ago people were talking about immigrants, then Greta Thunberg and the climate crisis, then Coronavirus, and after that, here in Sweden, it was crime shootings, then the invasion of Ukraine.”

For his part, the University of Wollongong lecturer said that research shows how media consumers “binge” initial coverage on major events but quickly lose interest. 

“The drop-off is notable because it’s too overwhelming, and by that time the news has already established that things are dire. Sometimes a media strategy, when something starts to fade, is to give it more coverage, more details, but that’s not always successful,” Ellingsen said.

According to the academic, media consumers are now more interested in rising food prices and increased fuel costs. The irony of this is that a lot of these issues are related to the anti-Russia sanctions imposed by the West for its military operation in Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been active in trying to manipulate Western sympathies and identifies the importance of media appearances. However, maintaining interest is now evidently a difficult task as Europeans are instead asking how they can survive the cost-of-living crisis with winter now fast approaching. Despite his many speeches to governments all around the world, as well as ongoing public requests for financial and military support, the domestic policies of countries will take precedence over Ukrainian interests for domestic political reasons, especially if a country has upcoming elections.

As data from Google shows, the war in Ukraine has already been shifted out of focus for most Google News users. After a peak in interest when the war broke out in February, search popularity for ‘Ukraine’ on Google News has almost returned to pre-war levels, with the sharp decline in interest beginning in the middle of March.

Although the Norwegian professor attributes this purely to “news fatigue” and not necessarily a lack of interest, it does not account for the anger felt in many countries, especially Germany, to the economic crisis caused by reckless anti-Russia sanctions that are now beginning to affect the EU much more so than Russia. As inflation grows, along with rising energy and food costs, all directly attributed to sanctions against Russia, this so-called news fatigue phenomenon will only increase.

Journalists and reporters initially flocked to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev or Lviv near the Polish border, but eventually they started returning home and were replaced with colleagues in the field, before even they were withdrawn. Most information is now coming from Ukrainian sources. Westerners for months have been questioning the validity of such information after multiple humiliating exposes were made against Ukraine’s organised fake news campaign – Ghost of Kyiv and Snake Island being the most prominent.

Regardless of the reliability of news sources, the initial enthusiasm that Westerners had for opposing Russia at the beginning of the war has been replaced with a deep sense of concern and realism as the summer has almost passed. The winter is fast approaching and will seemingly be accompanied by an inevitable energy, financial and cost-of-living crisis. News fatigue has certainly been consolidated.

Source: InfoBrics