The News: A User's Manual

Received Ideas

The relentless march of three-dimensional printing continues … [The process] uses exotic ‘inks’ based on silver and carbon nanotubes … Carbomorph, because of its polyester component which melts when heated, is a suitable raw material for this process. It is also a useful one, for among its electrical properties is piezoresistivity.

The Economist

1.

THE NOBLEST PROMISE of the news is that it will be able to alleviate ignorance, overcome prejudice and raise the intelligence of individuals and nations.

2.

BUT FROM SOME quarters it has intermittently been accused of a contrary capacity, that of making us completely stupid. One of the most uncompromising versions of this charge was levelled in the mid-nineteenth century by Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert belonged to a generation that had experienced the rise of mass-circulation newspapers at first hand. Whereas in his childhood news had been dispersed randomly throughout the population by rumour and via badly printed single-page news-sheets, by the time he was in his thirties the invention of the steam printing press, the development of railways and the relaxation of censorship laws had together enabled the proliferation of well-capitalized, authoritative newspapers which now laid claim, across France, to a combined readership of millions.

Flaubert was appalled by what, in his estimation, these newspapers were doing to the intelligence and curiosity of his countrymen. He believed that the papers were spreading a new kind of stupidity – which he termed ‘la bêtise’ – into every corner of France, an idiocy that was far worse than the mere ignorance it replaced, for it was actively fuelled by, rather than just passively filling in for, knowledge. So contaminating was the effect of the press, in Flaubert’s eyes, that only entirely illiterate and uneducated Frenchmen now stood a chance of being able to think properly: ‘Peasants are less idiotic than three-quarters of the middle classes of France, who are always getting themselves into a frenzy over something they’ve read in the papers and spinning like weather vanes according to whatever one paper or another is saying.’

The most loathsome character in Madame Bovary, the pharmacist Homais, is introduced early on as an avid consumer of news who sets aside a special hour every day to study ‘le journal’ (Flaubert keeps the word in italics throughout, to send up the neoreligious reverence in which this object is held). In the evenings, Homais heads for an inn, Le Lion d’Or, where the local bourgeoisie gather to chew over current events: ‘Afterwards, they discussed what was in “the newspaper”. By this hour, Homais knew it all practically by heart, and he would report on it in full, including the editorials as well as the many individual catastrophes that had occurred across France and around the world.’

3.

FLAUBERT HATED NEWSPAPERS because of his conviction that they slyly encouraged readers to hand over to others a task that no honest person should ever consent to offload on to someone else: thinking. The press implicitly suggested that the formation of complex and intelligent opinions on important matters could now safely be entrusted to its employees, that the reader’s mind could leave off its own particular peregrinations, enquiries and meditations and surrender wholesale to conclusions deftly packaged up by the leader writers of Le Figaro and its ilk.

It is hardly surprising that a writer so sensitive to cliché and the mentality of the herd should feel outraged by the constriction of independent enquiry that this mass development represented, by the ironing out of local eccentricity and individual difference in favour of an all-encompassing, monocultural set of assumptions. Here was a homogenizing force in danger of stamping out all the productive oddities of interior life and of turning the rich, idiosyncratic, handcrafted kitchen gardens of the mind into rolling, mechanized, insipid wheatfields.

4.

IN THE 1870S, Flaubert began keeping a record of what he judged to be the most idiotic patterns of thought promoted by the modern world in general and by the newspapers in particular. Published posthumously as The Dictionary of Received Ideas, this collection of bromides, organized by topic, was described by its author as an ‘encyclopédie de la bêtise humaine’ (an encyclopedia of human stupidity). Here is a random sampling of its entries:

BUDGET Never balanced.

CATHOLICISM Has had a very good influence on art.

CHRISTIANITY Freed the slaves.

CRUSADES Benefited Venetian trade.

DIAMONDS To think that they’re nothing but coal; if we came across one in its natural state, we wouldn’t even bother to pick it up off the ground!

EXERCISE Prevents all illnesses. To be recommended at all times.

PHOTOGRAPHY Will make painting obsolete.

It is worth noting how many of the Dictionary’s clichés touch on sophisticated disciplines such as theology, science and politics, without, however, going anywhere very clever with them: the ‘received ideas’ consist of exotic or intricate facts married to a stubborn narrowness of mind. In the past, Flaubert implied, idiots had had no clue as to what the carbon structure of diamonds was. Their shallowness had been entirely and reliably evident. But now the press had made it very possible for a person to be at once unimaginative, uncreative, mean-minded and extremely well informed. The modern idiot could routinely know what only geniuses had known in the past, and yet he was still an idiot – a depressing combination of traits that previous ages had never had to worry about. The news had, for Flaubert, armed stupidity and given authority to fools.

5.

THE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS of our own day would be unlikely to mollify Flaubert in the least. They continue to hammer their audiences’ opinions into some highly standardized shapes:

3D PRINTING In future, everything will be 3D-printed. Express surprise and awe at the prospect.

INTERNET Has made concentration impossible. So hard now to read long novels.

WORK–LIFE BALANCE More difficult than ever before. It may soon be necessary to make an appointment to see one’s own spouse.

CARBON-FIBRE AIRCRAFT WINGS Flex amazingly; but sure to cause a crash one day.

MANDARIN The language of the future.

6.

HOW DOES THE news manage to enlist us in its sometimes hackneyed or wrong-headed conclusions?

Primarily because it succeeds, by a variety of means, in coming across to us as extremely authoritative. For a start, we don’t entirely grasp who decides on what counts as news and by what criteria – and therefore bulletins have a habit of seeming as if they had been generated by nature or some higher necessity to which we are not privy and which it would be impudent to question. We forget the highly contingent and human dynamics underlying the choice of what ends up being picked as a ‘story’.

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.