The idealistic line on news runs as follows: evil, passivity and racism are chiefly the results of ignorance. By helping people to learn what is really happening in other parts of the world, the chances of prejudice, fear, deceit and aggression decrease. News can make the world a better place.
2.
YET THERE IS a problem with this logic and it crops up on examination of the daily Web traffic figures for the BBC news website:
Duchess of Cambridge Due to Give Birth in July 5.82M
Heavier Snow Predicted across the UK 4.34M
Bowie Comeback Makes Top 10 Singles Chart 2.52M
Nigeria Church Attack in Kogi State Kills 19 9,920
East DR Congo Faces Catastrophic Humanitarian Crisis 4,450
South Africa: Five Die in KwaZulu-Natal ‘Clan Shooting’ 2,540
DR Congo Conflict: Kagame and Kabila Fail to Agree 1,890
In one sense, the great goal of the Enlightenment has been achieved: the average citizen now has near-instantaneous access to information about events in every nation on earth. But we’ve also been forced to learn something rather more surprising: no one is particularly interested.
3.
THE STANDARD RESPONSE from news organizations is to blame the public for its shallowness, for caring more (by an astonishing margin) about a pop song than about a clan shooting, about the birth of one baby to a member of the British royal family than about 100,000 desperate children suffering from rickets and malaria in central Africa.
Yet what if this astonishing level of disengagement turned out to be not entirely the fault of the audience? What if the real reason viewers and readers don’t much care about what is happening in foreign lands is not that we are especially shallow or nasty, nor even that the events described are inherently boring, but instead simply that the news isn’t being presented to us in a compelling enough way? What if we have become uninterested in the world mainly because of certain mistaken assumptions the news organizations have made about the way the world should be described to us?
4.
THE FIRST OF these assumptions is that the single most important technical skill for every journalist to possess is the capacity to collect information accurately. Because news organizations presume that they are essentially battling the ignorance of their audiences, the gathering of precise information has a pride of place in the educational priorities of journalism schools. New entrants into the field are taught to seek out and transcribe quotations from key actors in each story, to provide facts and figures to back up any claims, to abstain from distractingly ornate writing and to strive to eliminate all personal and cultural bias from their reporting.
All of these strategies seem logical enough, but the problem is that the condition actually afflicting audiences differs slightly from the one diagnosed by the news establishment: they are in truth suffering not so much from ignorance as from indifference. Accurate information about foreign countries is now not very hard to get hold of; the real issue is how we might come to feel sincere interest in any of it. It is one thing for a story to convey how many people died in an attack by guerrillas or were drowned in a flood or lost everything they owned because of a crooked president; in such coverage, the challenges are technical and administrative, the reporter needing to possess patience, bravery and an appetite for hard work. But it is another task altogether (one far less often considered) to persuade readers or viewers to care about such events. And the skills this requires lie in an area almost always overlooked by the foreign desks of news organizations.
Art may be most usefully defined as the discipline devoted to trying to get concepts powerfully into people’s heads. In literature as distinct from journalism, the ablest practitioners will never assume that the bare bones of a story can be enough to win over their audience. They will not suppose that an attack or a flood or a theft must in and of itself carry some intrinsic degree of interest which will cause the reader to be appropriately moved or outraged. These writers know that no event, however shocking, can ever guarantee involvement; for this latter prize, they must work harder, practising their distinctive craft, which means paying attention to language, alighting on animating details and keeping a tight rein on pace and structure. In certain situations, creative writers may even choose to sacrifice strict accuracy – perhaps by adapting a fact, eliminating a point, compressing a quote or changing a date – and rather than feel that they are thereby carrying out a criminal act (the routine presumption of news organizations when they catch one of their own doing such things), they will instead understand that falsifications may occasionally need to be committed in the service of a goal higher still than accuracy: the hope of getting important ideas and images across to their impatient and distracted audiences.
5.
A SECOND ASSUMPTION guiding the reporting of foreign news holds that the more gruesome, tragic or macabre an incident is, the more ‘important’ it should be considered, and therefore the further up in the story hierarchy it should go. Journalists and their editors tend to believe that the importance of any event is determined by how anomalous and unusual it is, which almost invariably means how terrible, bloody and murderous it has proved to be. Therefore, a bombing that kills thirty people is thought more newsworthy than a quiet day in a fishing village, an outbreak of a tropical disease that tears its victims’ lungs apart in three hours is considered to be of greater interest than the peaceful collection of the harvest, and revelations of torture by the security services are deemed more significant than a collective lunchtime ritual of eating tabbouleh and stuffed vine leaves in a bucolic field overlooking the River Jordan.
The problem with this philosophy is that unless we have some sense of what passes for normality in a given location, we may find it very hard to calibrate or care about abnormal conditions. We can be properly concerned about the sad and violent interruptions only if we know enough about the underlying steady state of a place, about the daily life, routines and modest hopes of its population.
Yet, when it comes to most other countries of the world, despite the news media’s amazing technological capabilities, despite the bureaux, correspondents, photographers and camera operators, we are given no information whatsoever about ordinary occurrences. We don’t know whether anyone has ever had a normal day in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for no such thing has ever been recorded by a Western news organization. We have no idea what it’s like to go to school or visit the hairdresser in Bolivia; it’s entirely mysterious whether anything like a good marriage is possible in Somalia; and we are equally in the dark about office life in Turkmenistan and what people do on the weekend in Algeria. The news parachutes us in only for the so-called ‘important’ events – the earthquakes, the gang rapes, the indiscriminate destruction of whole villages by drug-addled killers – and assumes that we will feel suitably shocked and drawn in by them.
But in truth, we can’t much care about dreadful incidents unless we’ve first been introduced to behaviours and attitudes with which we can identify; until we have been acquainted with the sorts of mundane moments and details that belong to all of humanity. A focus on these does not in any way distract from ‘serious’ news; it instead provides the bedrock upon which all sincere interest in appalling and disruptive events must rest.