The Largest Voiceless Population We Ignore — Even in High-Impact Writing

Effective Altruism is partly about identifying where attention is most misallocated. Nowhere is that gap wider than in journalism about animals.

A recent peer-reviewed study in Journalism Studies (Michelle Rossi, Reframing the Public) interviewed 56 journalists from outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Vox. The finding: most newsrooms treat farmed animals as if they don’t exist.

Why?

• “News is for humans only.”
• “Farmed animals don’t read newspapers.”
• “They can’t be interviewed.”

A smaller group called it what it is: structural bias—speciesism—that shields audiences from discomfort and protects industry.

The cost of this omission:

• Over 150 billion farmed animals are killed each year.
• Their suffering is hidden by ag-gag laws.
• Their production drives major environmental damage: manure and fertilizer runoff create ocean dead zones, and factory farming is a leading cause of climate collapse.

If we believe that moral circle expansion is a high-impact cause area, then the absence of farmed animal stories from mainstream news isn’t just a journalistic failure—it’s a bottleneck for change. Public will follows public awareness, and awareness is shaped by what’s written.

Objection: media change is too indirect

A common critique is that media reform is less tractable or measurable than direct interventions—like policy campaigns, corporate reforms, or alternative protein development. But those downstream wins depend on public and political will, which is shaped by what people see and hear.

Measuring media impact is difficult, but not impossible. Research in other areas—like climate communication—has linked changes in coverage and framing to tangible policy outcomes. If farmed animal coverage increased proportionally to its scale of impact, it could multiply the effectiveness of interventions EA already supports.

One possible approach: pilot a small “Farmed Animal Media Accelerator” to test whether targeted journalism can measurably shift awareness and policy.

Questions for EA:

• Should EA invest more in media reform or alternative journalism as a way to accelerate moral circle expansion?
• Could we quantify the impact of shifting editorial norms on policy wins for animals?
• What would a cost-effective intervention here look like—training journalists, funding investigative pieces, creating AI tools to surface animal-relevant angles?
   

If these lives remain invisible, can any downstream interventions reach full effectiveness?