The News: A User's Manual

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.

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.

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.

We can’t expect the average news story to be written up with Shakespearean skill, but we might insist that it pay a degree of Shakespearean attention to universals, especially where the particulars are likely to seem off-puttingly foreign. There are ways of presenting a story that assist us in transferring knowledge across cultural and circumstantial gaps and in viewing the myriad experiences of our fellow human beings as resources on which we can continuously draw for inspiration, caution, guidance and insight.

8.

WE HAVEN’T LOST all our appetite for elsewhere. We are creatures who, in previous ages, stood in queues to hear tales about so-called exotic lands. The problem is that the reporting methodologies developed by the modern news media – which privilege factually accurate, technologically speedy, impersonal, crisis-focused coverage to the near exclusion of any other kind – have by error led to a sort of globalized provincialism, whereby we at once know a good deal and don’t care about very much; whereby a little knowledge of the wrong kind has managed to narrow rather than expand the compass of our curiosity.

Yet our fascination and our empathy are merely slumbering. To become powerful once more, foreign news needs only to submit itself to some of the processes of art.