3.
WHEN NEWS ISN’T frightening us, it is often busy enraging us. The ability to post comments at the end of online news stories has revealed a hitherto unimaginable level of anger in the population at large. To judge from the comments, it would seem that most of us are completely furious most of the time:
EU struggles to reach budget agreement
COMMENTS
Concerned Citizen 2 HOURS AGO
When oh when will we step off this treadmill!!!!!!!!!!
Chaffinch 2 HOURS AGO
There is a crisis here, but the trouble is that the politicians cannot fix it. Why? Because the basic concept on which the European Union was formed is flawed – and it can never work as it is. We need a two-tier system. Why didn’t they solve this problem first – and only then get round to a realistic budget?!
Muishkin 4 MINUTES AGO
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules about language.
BBC
Beneath the rage, one senses a touching belief that the problems of the world are basically solvable, it’s just they aren’t being dealt with swiftly or decisively enough for the simple reason, to which every new day provides fresh testimony, that we are ruled by crooks and idiots. The relevant insights are there, just in the wrong hands. Herein lies a central paradox of the news: it gives us the tools to develop views on serious and consequential decisions which have a direct impact on our lives. It invites us to the conference table and into the parliament, it introduces us to the key players, then it shows us nothing but inexplicable delays, strange compromises and maddening evasions. It can feel as though we are daily being invited to watch helplessly while a close friend drowns behind a plate-glass window.
The news routinely tantalizes us with the promise of drastic change and improvement. It anoints certain politicians as visionaries and expresses confidence that they can fundamentally transform the nation within a few months of attaining office. It breathlessly awaits the arrival of the new head of the central bank, who might liberate the slumbering energies of capitalism. It takes us to conferences and encourages us to believe that the delegates might in three days of horsetrading solve some of the major issues of the globe, relating to economics, African poverty or the warming of the atmosphere.
Then everything falls apart. The politician turns out to be a fool and is dismissed as shallow and complacent, the central bank governor cites the behaviour of the bond market as the reason for renewed caution, the conferences get bogged down in petty squabbling and one or two of the delegates are even discovered to have cheated on their hotel bills.
If we’re tempted to leave comments with unpublishably foul language in them at the end of stories, it may be because the news is reluctant ever to provide us with a sufficiently rich set of descriptions of the problems that surround issues. The most logical solutions regularly look as if they were being ignored out of sheer stupidity. We ask with impatience and eventual fury, ‘Why don’t they just …?’ Without going too far in the direction of fatalism and trusting obedience, this righteous question should at once make us suspicious. It should be a cue for a range of serious answers, rather than remaining merely a rhetorical enquiry. What the news seldom bothers to mention is why things don’t change very much; why great power and resources can’t solve our difficulties at a stroke. It doesn’t induct us with any degree of subtlety into the genuine reasons for calling a decision ‘difficult’. It leaves us instead to assume with mounting fury that every ongoing problem can only be the result of intense laziness, stupidity or malevolence – and could be solved in a few relatively decisive and simple steps by someone intelligent and ingenious (perhaps the journalist herself).
Our rage would in large measure be appeased if we were made aware of the raft of complications slightly offstage which none of the parties have sought to draw attention to; if we were reminded that a so-called solution may set off a secondary wave of problems; if we were made to feel the pressures around the table and the miserably tough choices on the agenda and (in some cases at least) the essential goodwill of many of the participants; if we were richly inducted into why difficult decisions are difficult.
4.
THOUGH ANGER SEEMS a pessimistic response to a situation, it is at root a symptom of hope: the hope that the world can be better than it is. The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray. The woman who grows furious every time a politician breaks an election promise reveals a precariously utopian belief that elections do not involve deceit.
The news shouldn’t eliminate angry responses; but it should help us to be angry for the right reasons, to the right degree, for the right length of time – and as part of a constructive project.
And wherever this isn’t possible, then the news should help us with mourning the twisted nature of man and reconciling us to the difficulty of being able to imagine perfection while still not managing to secure it – for a range of stupid but nevertheless unbudgeable reasons.
The news currently resists giving us the single most calming response one can offer to certain problems: evidence that they are normal and that they belong to a species which is intrinsically (rather than exceptionally) imperfect. In hock to the excitements and commercial advantages of rage, the news cruelly ignores the project of consolation.
The most significant fact of political life, which almost no news organization will dare to acknowledge – because it would at a stroke exclude half of its speculations and disappointments – is that in some key areas of politics, nothing can be achieved very quickly by any one person or party; it would be impossible for anyone – not simply this fool or that group of cretins – to change matters at a pace that would flatter the expectations of the news cycle; and that in the case of certain problems, the only so-called ‘solutions’ will have to await a hundred years or more of incremental change, rather than a messianic leader, an international conference or a quick war.
5.
IN ITS THWARTED optimism, the news is the disillusioned progeny of the Enlightenment. Refusing to square with human nature, it allows our hopes to smash constantly against the same shoals; it greets every new day with faux cherubic innocence, only to stoke up rage and disillusionment at our condition by nightfall. It posits the potential existence of a perfect world which is forever almost within reach but then curiously slips out of grasp at every step of the political process. It doesn’t do us the favour of conceding that in many respects we are a fundamentally – rather than incidentally – incorrigible species and that we would at key moments be wise to forgo hysterical annoyance for deep and quiet melancholy.
Baddies & the Bad
The Member of Parliament Eric Illsley is facing jail after pleading guilty to dishonestly claiming more than £ 14,000 in expenses. The claims were made for council tax, telephone usage, service charges and maintenance, and insurance and repairs at his second home in Renfrew Road, Kennington, south London.
Daily Telegraph
1.
SOME OF JOURNALISM’S greatest triumphs have been connected with exposés of powerful figures, on a fair number of occasions triggering their subjects’ downfall and even their incarceration.