PREMIUM: What is public interest?
What public interest is, why it's important, the real definition. But first, take a guess. You may be surprised.
Part of being an adult is being surrounded by the term ‘public interest’. Part of being a normal adult is not knowing quite what that means.
The public interest is one of those jargon terms that’s spread through everything that runs society: the media, the government, your council, your ads. It’s crucial to be around things that are in the public interest, and if you’re not, first a lot of people get hurt and then civilization falls apart. This fact makes it seem hard to think about public interest because it’s so basic to our survival, like electrolytes or gravity. But it’s actually easy to understand when you introduce some examples of what it is and isn’t.
Anyway, let’s start with public interest in principle
The definition of public interest is the welfare and well-being of the public. Many people hear the term and get the impression that it’s about what interests people, what makes good gossip and sells newspapers. But a lot of gossip and clickbait is bad for the public interest, not just because it spreads misinformation so often, but because it can convince people that the media is not telling them the truth.
So what is public interest in the media?
The weather, and extreme weather events about to hit the public, are in the public interest. The amount of rain over a politician’s house right now is not. The parts of a serial killer’s life that encouraged them to kill are in the public interest. Intimate details about their ordinary victims are not.
The public interest is what helps the community stay healthy.
As you know if you’ve been getting these emails for a while, just about all jargon encounters a problem when it hits the general public. There’s a schism in its definition, where the term comes to mean two things: A) The actual definition for which the technical term was invented, and B) What the average person thinks this technical phrase means when they hear it. I have a test for determining whether a word is jargon. If you have to hear the definition of a phrase even though it’s made up of ordinary words, there’s a good chance it’s jargon. If you find yourself answering that definition with “Oh, I thought it meant something else”, there is an extreme chance it’s jargon.
If you follow my scale, ‘public interest’ is a jargon term, which is why it has an ironically rough time in public life and is destined to be misused.