A certain coy secrecy is maintained about how news is even made. We hear little, for example, about the three hours that the political correspondent had to spend standing in the rain, posted behind a barrier at the entrance to the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels, just to record the prime minister’s intemperate one-line statement that he had nothing further to add to his original press release of the day before; or about the hair-raising twenty-two hours it took for the North African correspondent to catch up with a group of rebels in Mali so that we might have a story to skim over distractedly while eating a lunchtime sandwich; or about the travails of the photographer who lost too many hours of his life waiting for an actress to emerge from a coffee shop in Beverly Hills, to give us the pleasure of admiring a surprising new trench coat.
We are not supposed to think about, or even to be aware of, the serried ranks of giant black computer servers lined up for half a kilometre in data centres in Colorado or northern Finland, fuelled by dirty coal and natural gas: theirs is a dark physical reality unalluded to by our lightweight and luminous screens.
Though they radiate a cocksure impersonal importance beneath their headlines, the stories we take in were decided not by supernatural decree after a conclave of angels but by a group of usually rather weary and pressured editors struggling to assemble a plausible list of items in harried meetings in corner offices over muffins and coffee. Their headlines don’t constitute an ultimate account of reality so much as some first hunches as to what might matter by mortals prey to the same prejudices, errors and frailties as the rest of us, hunches plucked out of a pool of several billion potential events that daily befall our species.
Whether a war in Africa should take priority over the launch of a shoe collection, a runaway tiger over a set of inflation figures, the rape of a pretty, white, middle-class schoolgirl over the decapitation of a homeless black man, the collapse of shares in mining companies over the first words spoken by a child depends on methods of classification that hint at society’s most peculiar and clandestine prejudices.
We should at least be somewhat suspicious of the way that news sources, which otherwise expend considerable energy advertising their originality and independence of mind, seem so often to be in complete agreement on the momentous question of what happened today.
7.
INDIVIDUAL NEWS STORIES achieve power, too, by being delivered under the aegis of brands. Opinions that we might have probed more robustly had they been put to us by a person across a table can acquire an almost mythological power once they appear beneath certain mastheads.
We are marginally – but crucially – less likely to question the soundness of an article about a rationale for going to war when it comes presented beneath the neo-Gothic Cheltenham typeface of the New York Times, or to probe the coherence of a thesis defending a presidential budget when it is laid out in the sober yet sensuous columns of Le Monde’s Fenway font.
Brands alone dissuade us from picking sceptically at their underlying content.
8.
FOR ALL THE supposed plurality of the news, across outlets, the questions that end up being asked in a number of areas fail to range beyond some punishingly narrow boundaries.
In the field of education, it seems ‘normal’ to run stories about class sizes, teachers’ pay, the country’s performance in international league tables and the right balance between the roles of the private and state sectors. But we would risk seeming distinctly odd, even demented, if we asked whether the curriculum actually made sense; whether it really equipped students with the emotional and psychological resources that are central to the pursuit of good lives.
When it comes to housing, the news urges us to worry about how to get construction companies working, how to make purchasing a home easier for first-time buyers and how to balance the claims of nature against those of jobs and businesses. But it doesn’t tend to find time to ask primordial, eccentric-sounding questions like: ‘Why are our cities so ugly?’
In discussions of economics, our energy is channelled towards pondering what the right level of taxation should be and how best to combat inflation. But we are discouraged by mainstream news from posing the more peculiar, outlying questions about the ends of labour, the nature of justice and the proper role of markets.
News stories tend to frame issues in such a way as to reduce our will or even capacity to imagine them in profoundly other ways. Through its intimidating power, news numbs. Without anyone particularly rooting for this outcome, more tentative but potentially important private thoughts get crushed.
9.
MONEY IS PARTLY to blame. The financial needs of news companies mean that they cannot afford to advance ideas which wouldn’t very quickly be able to find favour with enormous numbers of people. An artist can make a decent living selling work to fifty clients; an author can get by with 50,000 readers, but a news organization cannot pay its bills without a following larger than the population of a good-sized metropolis. What levels of agreement, what suppression of idiosyncrasy and useful weirdness, will be required to render material sufficiently palatable to so many … Wisdom, intelligence and subtlety of opinion tend not to be sprinkled through the population in handy blocks of 20 million people.
10.
ON ACCOUNT OF its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it. News organizations will only ever be able to offer up sketchy and sometimes deeply mistaken maps of what will continue to be an infinitely elusive and varied reality.
Alarm bells should hence ring in our minds, as they rang in Flaubert’s, upon any encounter with a point of view which seems to have attained a slightly too consistent level of consensus. We should remain at all times sceptically alert to the potentially gross idiocy that may lie concealed beneath the most beautiful fonts and the most authoritative and credible headlines. We should be as alert to media clichés as Flaubert was to literary ones. The latter ruin novels; the former can ruin nations.
III.
World News
Information/Imagination
The east of the Democratic Republic of Congo faces a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, an aid agency has warned ahead of a regional summit in Uganda. The Oxfam charity said millions of people were now at the mercy of militias, with a sharp increase in killings, rapes and looting. It said the focus on dealing with rebels had diverted the security forces from other vulnerable areas. The UN says the conflict has forced about 250,000 people from their homes.
BBC
1.
NEWS ORGANIZATIONS CAN be unexpectedly idealistic places. At the entrance to the headquarters of the BBC in London, there’s a quotation in Latin on the wall which declares:
This Temple of the Arts and Muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first Governors of Broadcasting in the year 1931 … It is their prayer that … all things hostile to peace or purity may be banished from this house, and that the people, inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful and honest and of good report, may tread the path of wisdom and uprightness.
Upstairs the visitor can see how some of that idealism is translated into practical action. There are desks tasked with covering events in all the most troubled and unfortunate parts of the world. The staff concerned with Africa occupies an entire floor; Somalia alone has eight people reporting on it; the Democratic Republic of Congo has a cohort of three, who enjoy a sofa area and inspiring views on to Portland Place.