Critics of this argument might point out that we don’t need to see or read stories about regular life in our own country before we can start caring about the irregular events that happen within its borders; we just care anyway, instinctively. But to advance this proposition is to forget that we automatically derive a sense of the ordinary on the basis of our day-to-day residence in our homeland. We know what it’s like to take a train, attend a meeting, go to the shops, walk the children to school, flirt, laugh and get cross there – and this is why we immediately engage when we hear that someone has been kidnapped in Newcastle upon Tyne or that a bomb has exploded in Edgbaston.
The ideal news organization of the future, recognizing that an interest in the anomalous depends on a prior knowledge of the normal, would routinely commission stories on certain identification-inducing aspects of human nature which invariably exist even in the most far-flung and ravaged corners of our globe. Having learned something about street parties in Addis Ababa, love in Peru and in-laws in Mongolia, audiences would be prepared to care just a little more about the next devastating typhoon or violent coup.
6.
THERE IS ANOTHER assumption at work with regard to the ultimate purpose of foreign news coverage. As it currently exists, foreign reporting implicitly defers to the priorities of the state and of business, occupying itself almost exclusively with events which touch on military, commercial or humanitarian concerns. Foreign news wants to tell us with whom and where we should fight, trade or sympathize.
But these three areas of interest really aren’t priorities for the majority of us. At a much deeper, more metaphysical level, foreign news should offer us a means by which to humanize the Other – that is, the outsider from over the mountains or beyond the seas who instinctively repels, bores or frightens us and with whom we can’t, without help, imagine having anything in common. Foreign news should find ways to make us all more human in one another’s eyes, so that the apparently insuperable barriers of geography, culture, race and class could be transcended and fellow feeling might develop across chasms.
Many a high-minded news organization has inveighed bitterly against those who resent the influx of immigrants from other countries. But this view proceeds from the assumption that a reflexive suspicion towards foreigners is a mark of Satan rather than a common, almost natural result of ignorance – a fault which news organizations have an explicit ability to reduce through a more imaginative kind of reporting (as opposed to ineffective, guilt-inducing denunciations of bigotry).
To achieve its stated objectives, foreign news should be willing to adopt some of the techniques of art. As George Eliot suggested, art as a medium is capable of helping us by ‘amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot’. Its greatest benefit, according to Eliot, is ‘the extension of our sympathies’. Now more than ever, we need these sympathies to be extended, in part because so much of the information we receive comes at us as data or abstract facts which our deeper selves cannot digest (‘East DR Congo Faces Catastrophic Humanitarian Crisis’). Eliot went on to note, ‘Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made …; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.’
This, in a nutshell, should be the task of foreign news: to foster our ‘attention to what is apart from’ us and thereby facilitate imaginative contact, practical assistance and mutual understanding between us and other populations.
A further, related psychological rationale of the news is to help us to recover perspective. Living in one society only, it is easy to forget to notice, let alone appreciate, the advantages of our particular civilization – the relative sophistication of our laws, social habits, educational traditions and transport networks. We can’t see what has been so difficult to achieve. Foreign countries furnish a scale against which our own nation and ways of living can be assessed; they may help us to see our national oddities, blind spots and strengths. Stories from them may lead us to a fresh appreciation of the imperfect freedoms and comparative abundance of our homelands which otherwise would be treated only as matters for grumbling or blame. Alternatively, problems with which we are all too familiar may be revealed as having found better solutions elsewhere. Things that had seemed to be inevitable can emerge as cultural options, open to change.
It should be a task of the news to highlight the virtues and flaws of all that has become too present and too ubiquitous for us to see.
7.
SCEPTICS WILL ARGUE that we’re being naive here, insisting that, except under particular circumstances, we can’t really be expected to care about what is happening abroad. Foreign reportage will always bore us, this thesis holds, because we are at heart only ever interested in ‘ourselves’, a category whose limits are delineated by the strict confines of our families, our friends, our safety, our jobs and the weather over our heads. So if, for instance, we were to switch on the television and chance upon a news report about the latest goings-on within the Italian government (in the Senato della Repubblica in the Palazzo Madama in Rome, the budget process is again causing mayhem, old allegiances are fraying and new, more expedient alliances are being formed), we would inevitably yawn and change the channel.
But that cannot be the whole story, for our native curiosity is in actuality far more tenacious than this view would suggest. We are quite capable of being gripped by and even sobbing over the fates of individuals who lived, governed and died in foreign countries not just within our own lifetimes but hundreds or perhaps thousands of years ago, people who had odd names and odder occupations and whose actions had no direct consequences whatsoever upon our lives. We can sit in a darkened theatre for two and a quarter hours and give little thought to the interval as we closely follow the story of a praetor in ancient Rome named Marcus Brutus, who once heard some worrying news from his friend Gaius Cassius about plans that were being hatched in the Senate.
How is it that we can care about what happens in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? Why are we willing to expend our precious mental resources on something so remote from our own concerns? The answer is that even though this play is ostensibly about some peculiar political machinations on the Italian peninsula a couple of millennia ago, it is in truth, all along and simultaneously, actually about us.
Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with particulars involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group – and it is these specifics that tend to bore us whenever they lie outside of our own experience. But then, a layer beneath the particulars, the universals are hidden: the psychological, social and political themes that transcend the stories’ temporal and geographical settings and are founded on unvarying fundamentals of human nature.
Political news
Important, and embarrassingly boring, developments in the Italian Republic.
(picture credit 6.1)
Julius Caesar
Important, and oddly fascinating, developments in the Roman Republic.
(picture credit 6.3)
In the language of particulars, Shakespeare’s history play is ‘about’ ancient Rome, dramatizing the rather arcane events surrounding Caesar’s triumphant return from waging war against Pompey, as Gaius Cassius plotted to murder him with the support of Marcus Brutus. But in the language of universals, Julius Caesar confronts timeless themes such as how we decide what we owe to our friends and what we should give to our country, how we should respond to rumours and plots and how we might distinguish between apprehension and panic. It looks at the way good intentions can usher in disastrous results and considers the roles played by error and blindness in the affairs even of decent men.