It was an interesting question. A listener to The Rest Is Politics podcast asked about Syria: why wasn’t it in the news any more? Alastair Campbell replied that, on the contrary, it was being widely reported, but he would say that, wouldn’t he? He clearly reads and watches an extraordinarily extensive range of international news sources, often telling listeners about the foreign papers he sees and the French-language speeches he listens to. Most of us aren’t like that. We might be journalists, but unless something is directly relevant to our particular interests, or a story we are working on, we mostly scan headlines and home in on what we find most appealing. Or is that just me?

The listener, though, raised a fair question about how we consume news – and how and when that news is presented to us. In particular, what makes a foreign story interesting, and what makes an important story fade from view. There has always been an assumption that readers have short attention spans, so a lead story will suddenly vanish from view after a few days. Iran? No, that was last week. But there is another important factor.

I have worked as a therapist as well as a journalist, and a key takeaway from my training was that, sophisticated as our modern lives might be, our basic instincts haven’t moved on much from our caveman era. Every moment, for example, our minds process millions of pieces of information from what we see around us, but we can only really notice about seven of those millions of things. This is for our own protection: when we leave our cave in the morning, we don’t need to notice the tree and the rock that are always there, but we do need to spot the sabre-toothed tiger. Similarly, we are all instinctively suspicious of people who “aren’t like us”. Most of us can consciously override that instinct, which stops us all being racists.

It seems we have pretty basic instincts about foreign news too, especially when, as it so often is, it’s about conflict. We want to see things in black and white… who’s the goody and who’s the baddy? That’s why the Second World War is so much easier to understand than the First World War, because the answer to that question was simple: Hitler was the baddy, and anyone fighting against him were the goodies (at least, until the war was won). And, of course, that simple view of the world suits our modern news media – it’s so much easier to portray an unnuanced story. So, reporting the Ukraine war is straightforward: Zelensky is the goody, Putin is the baddy.

After October 7, 2023, most of our media took a strong stance: Israel, as the wronged party, was the goody, Hamas the baddy. Some people who had been paying a bit more attention to the Middle East over the previous 75 years might have held a slightly more nuanced view, but this was a position that the western news media were able to stick to for quite some time, partly because most people knew very little about Hamas (nearly two years later, they still don’t), so Hamas made an easy bogeyman.

But goodies aren’t always goodies for ever… perhaps something that Benjamin Netanyahu should have taken into account. Goodies can become baddies over time – look at how Afghan Islamists who fought the Soviet Union and were therefore on “our” side later became the enemy – and Netanyahu’s government squandered that early capital. As the news-consuming public watched the horrors unfold in Gaza, their black and white view gradually faded through grey to white and black. And so it is with Syria. It was never clear to most in the west who the good guys were in the civil war. WERE there any good guys? We journalists are not terribly keen on shades of grey, so it was hard to present this story simply. Even Microsoft Copilot, AI, which is supposed to make my life easy, tells me the civil war was “complex”. We know that Bashar al-Assad was an evil dictator, even though he looked like the NHS ophthalmologist he was before he became an evil dictator, but what about the other lot? Which ones were we supposed to cheer for? Reading British newspapers or websites during the civil war probably didn’t make that much clearer.

Then, suddenly, we were cheering the winner, Ahmed al-Sharaa – a good guy! Except, hang on, wasn’t he in al-Qaida in Iraq and a former American prisoner? Oh, it’s all too complicated. No wonder we stopped being all that interested in Syria.

No wonder too, perhaps, that so many people now rely on well-read podcasters to sum up tricky political situations in far-off places and save us having to read complicated newspaper analyses. It’s a colourful world out there, but sometimes we just prefer someone to sketch out those far-off events in more monochrome terms.