<a href="https://www.rawpixel.com/image/4051296/president-trump-speaks-with-the-press" rel="nofollow">President Trump Speaks with the Press</a> by <a href="" rel="nofollow">National Archives and Records Administration</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/" rel="nofollow">CC-CC0 1.0</a>
“A good day to bury bad news.” That is what British special advisor Jo Moore wrote to colleagues on September 11, 2001. The appalling phrase flagged that nobody was paying attention to anything else on such a monumental day.
Trump’s tariffs are, obviously, not of the same magnitude as the world-altering events of 9/11. However, this is still a day where there is but one story in town.
“The most significant thing about a national newsroom when it’s only chasing one story is the impressive amount of energy it can bring to bear,” a former senior journalist at BBC News told me. They added:
I think we are so used to feeling under-resourced and over-stressed trying to cover too much that when all that journalistic effort is brought to a focus on one topic, it feels like you’re at the heart of a powerful machine. Suddenly you find yourself able to cover every angle and dig deep into a story rather than just skimming the surface. Some of the quite detailed analysis I’ve seen of the Trump tariffs bears this out.
The same was true in the run-up to the US election. An international TV correspondent based in London noted:
The main point is that Donald Trump is not one major story. Everything that comes out of his mouth matters and impacts almost every other story that’s going on in the world, from the cost of living in the UK, for example, to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, to the cost of malaria meds in Africa, to climate change and everything else in between.
Consequently, this correspondent believes that “it’s kind of understandable that newsrooms are making this, quote, unquote, one major story, the one that they are following, because it’s not one story.”
Trump Tariffs Mean Other Things Are Missed
It’s a perfectly fair argument. I would never chide the media for diving into something important with full force. The problem, the ex-BBC staffer pointed out, is that “it is frighteningly easy to dismiss other important breaking/emerging stories, or important developments in ongoing stories as a result.”
There is a “huge danger that other news gets buried,” they added. That’s my concern too. Furthermore, the ex-Beeb hack said they’d “guess a fair proportion of the audience doesn’t want wall-to-wall coverage of one story either. But sometimes – and this case I’d say is one of them – it’s really important to be able to cover the story in great depth.”
The international TV correspondent made a similar observation:
Obviously, there will be other stories that you know, let’s say are not directly Trump-related, which may get pushed lower down.
It is not an easy line to tread.
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