The speaker is reacting to a shift in how the news talks about "us," a group that is never clearly named. The poem opens with "a new tune," as if the media has suddenly changed its song. The "commissioners of news" are described as "nobody known to us," which makes them sound distant, official and faceless, deciding how people are shown without ever meeting them.
What stings is the timing. These same outsiders now look at the group and see "broken lives," yet earlier they "took no notice" and "called us common." The speaker seems to feel that this new attention is late and maybe not sincere. Pity has replaced neglect, but neither one treats people as individuals.
The mood is quiet, wary and a little bitter. The short lines and plain wording make the complaint sound controlled rather than angry, as though the speaker has seen this pattern before and isn't fooled by the change in tone.