Journalism must give people back an accurate picture of each other

Khalil A. Cassimally for Fathm (June 2026)

One in five young adults worldwide has nobody to count on. That’s up practically 40% in the past two decades. Yet, much of that isolation rests on a misperception: we assume people care less than they actually do.

The evidence shows the opposite. When researchers plant lost wallets and track whether they are returned to their owners, far more come back than people predict. Across the 40 countries in the study, lost wallets were returned nearly twice as often as people expected.

It’s not only wallets. People also misjudge how it feels to reach out. When researchers at the University of Chicago asked commuters to strike up a conversation with a stranger rather than ride in silence, the talkers reported a more enjoyable journey, while a separate group had confidently predicted the reverse. The findings were replicated in London.

The same gap shows up with smaller gestures: we expect that paying a compliment, expressing gratitude or asking for help will land more awkwardly than it actually does.

That’s the misperception: we are too pessimistic about each other. And the pessimism feeds itself. Believe nobody cares, and we stop reaching out, so we never collect the evidence that would prove us wrong.

The media does not connect people

We don’t build our picture of other people from nowhere. Family, neighbours and the people we actually meet all shape it. It’s not a massive stretch to say that a significant part also comes through the media – it’s where most of us encounter the wider world. Whatever else it does, the media is constantly telling us what other people are like.

It is one source among several but for those of us who work in it, it is the source we can do something about.

So it is worth asking how good we are at making people feel connected. The answer, on the evidence, is poorly.

As per the Digital News Report 2024, when people across 47 markets were asked how well the news media meets each of their needs, the needs they rated us worst at were “inspire me” followed by “connect me”.

The same shows up on the supply side. In my work with newsrooms, I consistently see that “update me” dominates the output, while "inspire me" and "connect me" are vastly underserved.

Too much of the industry makes it worse

Large parts of the industry have gone even further and built businesses on the dark user needs: outrage me, panic me, confirm my bias, overwhelm me, numb me, demoralise me, exploit my agency, and tribalise me. Not everyone, and not all the time but enough of the industry, often enough.

Each of those dark needs is, in effect, an instruction to make other people look worse than they are. Serve enough of them and the effect compounds. We are handing people a portrait of humanity more divided and more selfish than reality. And the consequences are dire.

Disconnection does real damage to people

The World Happiness Report 2025 describes social connection as a buffer against stress. Take it away and pressure can turn toxic, raising the risk that everyday difficulty tips into a genuine mood disorder. The finding rests on decades of work.

At the far end sit what Princeton University professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton named deaths of despair: the deaths from suicide and substance abuse. Their inverse link to social connection is well-established. Deaths of despair go down when more people give, volunteer and help strangers. An analysis puts it at roughly one fewer such death a year per 100,000 people for every ten-point rise in the share of people behaving prosocially.

And it doesn't stop at the individual

Trust is what makes people willing to pay their taxes and back the sharing of wealth, on the reasonable belief that others are contributing too. As it drains away, the basic deal that holds a society together starts to fray.

Ciudad Juárez shows how far that can run. By 2008 the Mexican border city had become, on one measure, the most violent in the world. Among the causes was a torn social fabric. A population had moved in for factory work, cut off from the family and community ties they had left behind, and their children had to grow up without adequate guardianship, which gangs took advantage of.

The city did, eventually, turn things around a bit: by rebuilding community life through schools, public spaces, sport and health services. There, connection was the difference between a city that functioned and one that fell apart.

Put it all together and loneliness looks less like a private mood and more like a question about whether a society can hold together at all.

And if part of what is corrupting people is a misperception of other people, then everyone who helps paint that picture, the media included, has an obligation to act.

The gap can be closed

The misperception can be changed. When researchers at Stanford University showed students plain evidence of how much their peers actually cared, through posters and a short workshop, the gap between perceived and real kindness shrank sharply, by as much as 75% in one experiment. What’s more, as students came to see the people around them as more caring, they took more social risks and built wider networks.

The media is well-placed to bridge that misperception gap at scale. Few institutions can reach as many people as we can.

Here’s a good story, largely untold, to start with: people grew more generous during the pandemic and have mostly stayed that way, with benevolent acts still running about 10% above where they started. Most people have no idea, because we are not telling them.

Journalism built the other way round

Parts of the industry are already pushing the other way. Many have (re-)discovered that what works for people, our audiences, also tends to work for the business.

Publishers that organise their journalism around real needs of people see the numbers move in the right direction. Le Nouvel Obs in France rebuilt its strategy around fewer, higher-value pieces, and reports cutting its article output by roughly a third while lifting median pageviews per article by half and digital subscriptions by a third. Nederlands Dagblad in the Netherlands cut back its “update me” output and put more into “give me perspective”, “inspire me” and “connect me”, and grew.

If there’s one thing that is foundational to bridging that misperception gap and helping people reconnect, it is being clear what we, as individuals and organisations, in the media, are actually for – why we even exist.

One tool I use with clients to make that concrete is the Rose Model, built by Maike Olij and Jekke Mink at the Dutch public broadcaster NPO. It links a newsroom’s purpose to four things society needs from journalism – discover what is hidden, set the agenda, represent those who usually go unheard, and hold power to account – to the specific reader needs that serve them. It lets a newsroom reason from the good it wants to do back to the journalism on the screen (and page).

User needs and the Rose Model are not the only tools at our disposal. Solutions journalism, impact-first journalism, change-centric journalism, to name but a few, are other routes to the same place: journalism built backwards from its usefulness to people.

So this is the work in front of us. Serving the “connect me” need does real work. Done well, it hands people back an accurate picture of each other, and an accurate picture of each other is one of the things a functioning society is built on. We should be doing far more of it.