The News: A User's Manual

Boredom & Confusion

TENANTS’ RENT ARREARS SOAR IN PILOT BENEFIT SCHEME

ASSEMBLY ABORTION LAW CHANGE FAILS

MIXED EFFORTS TO REBALANCE THE ECONOMY

EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS TO REACH IMMIGRATION JUDGEMENT

COUNCIL SPENDING ‘LACKING CLARITY’

COMMITTEES MAKE GUN-RIGHTS PROVISIONS PERMANENT

ANTI-TAX GROUP LEADS CONSERVATIVE CHARGE

RECESS APPOINTMENTS RULING TO BE APPEALED

SYDNEY MAN CHARGED WITH CANNIBALISM AND INCEST

BBC

1.

IT IS EARLY morning and, still in bed, one reaches for a screen and navigates to the news. Soon it will be time for the shower and the usual rush to make it out of the house on schedule, but there are still a few moments left to browse.

Sadly, today nothing seems particularly tempting. The first, rather puzzling entry – ‘Tenants’ Rent Arrears Soar in Pilot Benefit Scheme’ – gets a click anyway in the hope that something more intriguing may lie beyond it:

Rent arrears among tenants on a government pilot project that pays housing benefit directly to recipients have seen a big increase, figures show. One area is predicting a £14m loss if the new system is implemented for all its tenants. Paying housing benefit directly to recipients, rather than their landlords, will form a key part of the planned new Universal Credit. The Department for Work and Pensions said the experiment has helped it to ensure that its scheme will be effectively implemented across the country.

This is scarcely any better. A decision to change the way that the government subsidizes housing for the lowest-paid is clearly significant; a high-minded news organization has spent time and money bringing the particulars of the scheme to public attention. And yet it isn’t easy to care.

This isn’t unusual. We regularly come across headlines of apparent importance that, in private, leave us disengaged. Boredom and confusion may be two of the most common, but also two of the most shameful and therefore concealed, emotions provoked by so-called ‘serious’ political stories presented by the news organizations of modern democracies.

Further down the list of headlines, however, there is one story, about an incestuous cannibal in Australia, that requires no effort whatsoever.

Perhaps one is, at heart, a truly shallow and irresponsible citizen.

2.

BUT BEFORE CASTIGATING ourselves too strongly, imagine if, in similar circumstances, we had been shown a headline that read simply ‘Man in Russia Consults Lawyer’, beneath which lay the following story:

Three women: an old lady, a young lady, and a tradesman’s wife; and three gentlemen: one a German banker with a ring on his finger, another a bearded merchant, and the third an irate official in uniform with an order hanging from his neck, had evidently long been waiting. Two clerks sat at their tables writing, and the sound of their pens was audible. The writing-table accessories (of which Karenin was a connoisseur) were unusually good, as he could not help noticing. One of the clerks, without rising from his chair, screwed up his eyes and addressed Karenin ill-humouredly.

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to see a lawyer on business.’

Imagine if at this point the story came to a sudden halt, and we were expected to express deep fascination and a desire to know more, even though it wasn’t clear when ‘more’ would appear and it might be many weeks before a dozen further lines of this wearisome tale were made available.

It would be implausible to suppose that we could nurture a sincere interest in Anna Karenina in this way, but the habit of randomly dipping readers into a brief moment in a lengthy narrative, then rapidly pulling them out again, while failing to provide any explanation of the wider context in which events have been unfolding, is precisely what occurs in the telling of many of the most important stories that run through our societies, whether an election, a budget negotiation, a foreign policy initiative or a change to the state benefit system. No wonder we get bored.

3.

WE’RE STANDING FAR too close. To draw another analogy from the arts, it is as if we were being asked to open our eyes a millimetre or two above an inchoate bluish-purple surface marked with random black dashes tinged white along their edges. For all we could tell from such a vantage point, we might well be looking at the landscape of Jupiter, the surface of a bruise or the fossilized footprints of a prehistoric creature – none of them especially engaging options. Yet we might in fact be gazing at a detail of one of the most psychologically compelling portraits in Western art, Titian’s Portrait of Gerolamo Barbarigo, only at the wrong distance – for this is a masterwork that requires a viewer to be standing at least a metre away from it before it begins to yield any of its interest.

4.

BOREDOM IS A new challenge and responsibility. For most of human history, there simply wasn’t any news to be bored by. What information there was lay in the hands of a small and secretive aristocratic governing class. It went only to the few: the king, the chancellor, the commander of the army and the senior members of trading companies.

Now the news is for everyone, and yet the wheels of our curiosity are too often at risk of spinning idly in a soft slush of data. It is as if, every day before breakfast, a stern and alarmed civil servant rushed in to see us with a briefcase filled with a bewildering and then in the end tiring range of issues: ‘Five hospitals are predicted to breach their credit limits by the end of the month’, ‘The central bank is worried about its ability to raise money on the bond markets’, ‘A Chinese warship has just left the mainland en route for Vietnam’, ‘The Canadian prime minister will be here for dinner tomorrow’.

What are we meant to think? Where should all this go in our minds?

Who cares?

Titian, Portrait of Gerolamo Barbarigo, c. 1510.

(picture credit 1.1)

5.

NEWS ORGANIZATIONS ARE coy about admitting that what they present us with each day are minuscule extracts of narratives whose true shape and logic can generally only emerge from a perspective of months or even years – and that it would hence often be wiser to hear the story in chapters rather than snatched sentences. They are institutionally committed to implying that it is inevitably better to have a shaky and partial grasp of a subject this minute than to wait for a more secure and comprehensive understanding somewhere down the line.

Given the dangers of confusion that result, what we need above all are good signposts. Under a headline such as ‘Man in Russia Consults Lawyer’, an extract from a novel – even one of Anna Karenina’s power – will seem irksome. However, if we were told that we were reading a small, slightly monotonous passage that belonged to an extraordinary thousand-page book exploring the tragic dimensions of marriage, in particular the tension between the desire for adventure and the demands of domesticity and social conformity, we might anticipate a next instalment with a little more excitement.

We need news organizations to help our curiosity by signalling how their stories fit into the larger themes on which a sincere capacity for interest depends. To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to ‘put’ it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already know how to care about. A section of the human brain might be pictured as a library in which information is shelved under certain fundamental categories. Most of what we hear about day to day easily signals where in the stacks it should go and gets immediately and unconsciously filed: news of an affair is put on the heavily burdened shelf dedicated to How Relationships Work, a story of the sudden sacking of a CEO slots into our evolving understanding of Work & Status.

But the stranger or the smaller stories become, the harder the shelving process grows. What we colloquially call ‘feeling bored’ is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place. We might, for example, struggle to know what to do with information that a group of Chinese officials was paying a visit to Afghanistan to discuss border security in the province of Badakhshan or that a left-wing think tank was agitating to reduce levels of tax in the pharmaceutical industry. We might need help in transporting such orphaned pieces of information to the stacks that would most appropriately reveal their logic.

It is for news organizations to take on some of this librarian’s work. It is for them to give us a sense of the larger headings under which minor incidents belong. An item on a case of petty vandalism one Saturday night in a provincial town (‘Bus Shelter Graffitied by Young Vandals in Bedford’) might come to life if it was viewed as a minuscule moment within a lengthier drama titled ‘The Difficulties Faced by Liberal Secular Societies Trying to Instil Moral Behaviour without the Help of Religion’. Likewise, an indigestible item about yet another case of government corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo (‘Kickback Accusations in DRC’) could be enhanced by a heading that hinted at its grander underlying subject: ‘The Clash Between the Western Understanding of the State and the African Notion of the Clan’.

Properly signposted, even the unfortunate account of the change to the government housing benefit system would stand a chance. In reality, this article is no more about what its headline announces – ‘Tenants’ Rent Arrears Soar in Pilot Benefit Scheme’ – than Anna Karenina is about a man in Russia who consults a lawyer. It is about the ongoing enquiry by the modern state into how best to assist its poorest members; it is part of a hundred-year debate about whether welfare lends its recipients dignity and support or subtly humiliates them by fostering dependence. It is a single episode in a multi-chaptered narrative that might be called ‘How Subsidy Affects Character’, ‘The Psychology of Aid’ or, more sonorously and abstractly, ‘The Responsibility for Poverty’.

6.

UNFORTUNATELY FOR OUR levels of engagement, there is a prejudice at large within many news organizations that the most prestigious aspect of journalism is the dispassionate and neutral presentation of ‘facts’. CNN’s slogan, for instance, is ‘Bringing you the facts’; NRC Handelsblad of the Netherlands touts its ability to ‘deliver fact, not opinion’; the BBC vaunts itself as ‘the world’s most reliable source of facts’.

The problem with facts is that there is nowadays no shortage of sound examples. The issue is not that we need more of them, but that we don’t know what to do with the ones we have. Every news day unleashes another flood: we learn that Standard & Poor’s is reviewing the nation’s credit rating, that there has been an extension to the government spending bill, that voting boundaries have been submitted to a committee and that plans for a natural-gas pipeline have begun to be drawn up. But what do these things actually mean? How are they related to the central questions of political life? What can they help us to understand?

The opposite of facts is bias. In serious journalistic quarters, bias has a very bad name. It is synonymous with malevolent agendas, lies and authoritarian attempts to deny audiences the freedom to make up their own minds.

Yet we should perhaps be more generous towards bias. In its pure form, a bias simply indicates a method of evaluating events that is guided by a coherent underlying thesis about human functioning and flourishing. It is a pair of lenses that slide over reality and aim to bring it more clearly into focus. Bias strives to explain what events mean and introduces a scale of values by which to judge ideas and events. It seems excessive to try to escape from bias per se; the task is rather to find ways to alight on its more reliable and fruitful examples.

Although certain grating right- and left-wing varieties dominate our understanding of the term bias, there are ultimately as many biases as there are visions of life. There are countless worthy lenses to slide between ourselves and the world. We might, for example, interpret the news according to the distinctive biased perspectives of Walt Whitman or Jane Austen, Charles Dickens or the Buddha. One could imagine a news outlet with a psychoanalytic bias, focusing on issues of guilt and envy on both sides of the Arab–Israeli conflict, alive to the idea of projection in political debates and highly sceptical that ‘depression’ had set in across the country because the economy had contracted by 0.1 per cent or indeed that happiness was inevitable because it was set to expand by 1.3 per cent.

What should be laudable in a news organization is not a simple capacity to collect facts, but a skill – honed by intelligent bias – at teasing out their relevance.

7.

CENTRAL TO MODERN politics is the majestic and beautiful idea that every citizen is – in a small but highly significant way – the ruler of his or her own nation. The news has a central role to play in the fulfilment of this promise, for it is the conduit through which we meet our leaders, judge their fitness to direct the state and evolve our positions on the most urgent economic and social challenges of the day. Far from being incidental features of democracies, news organizations are their guarantors.

And yet the news as it exists is woefully short on the work of coordination, distillation and curation. We are in danger of getting so distracted by the ever-changing agenda of the news that we wind up unable to develop political positions of any kind. We may lose track of which of the many outrages really matters to us and what it was that we felt we cared so passionately about only hours ago. At the very moment when our societies have reached a stage of unparalleled complexity, we have impatiently come to expect all substantial issues to be capable of drastic compression. Faced with the scale of the problems the news highlights, individual initiative can start to seem counter-intuitive and bathetic. Rather than an impression of political possibility, an encounter with the news may usher in an impression of our nothingness in an unimprovable and fundamentally chaotic universe.

8.

HEGEL’S ARGUMENT THAT the news now occupies the same prestigious position in society as religion once did misses out an important difference between the two fields of knowledge: religions have traditionally been particularly sensitive to how bad we are at focusing on anything. Exactly like the news, religions want to tell us important things every day. But unlike the news, they know that if they tell us too much, in one go, and only once, then we will remember – and do – nothing.

They therefore take care to serve up only a little of their fare each day, taking us patiently through a few issues and then returning to them again and again. Repetition and rehearsal are key to the pedagogical methods of the major faiths. They know there is no point informing us of a vital cause in a hurried and excitable way. They sit us down in a solemn place, quieten our minds and then speak to us with dignified urgency rather than panic, understanding that we will have to return to their ideas over days and weeks if we are to stand any chance of being influenced in how we think and behave.

9

IT WOULD BE easy to suppose that the real enemy of democratic politics must be the active censorship of news – and therefore that the freedom to say or publish anything would be the natural ally of civilization.

But the modern world is teaching us that there are dynamics far more insidious and cynical still than censorship in draining people of political will; these involve confusing, boring and distracting the majority away from politics by presenting events in such a disorganized, fractured and intermittent way that a majority of the audience is unable to hold on to the thread of the most important issues for any length of time.

A contemporary dictator wishing to establish power would not need to do anything so obviously sinister as banning the news: he or she would only have to see to it that news organizations broadcast a flow of random-sounding bulletins, in great numbers but with little explanation of context, within an agenda that kept changing, without giving any sense of the ongoing relevance of an issue that had seemed pressing only a short while before, the whole interspersed with constant updates about the colourful antics of murderers and film stars. This would be quite enough to undermine most people’s capacity to grasp political reality – as well as any resolve they might otherwise have summoned to alter it. The status quo could confidently remain forever undisturbed by a flood of, rather than a ban on, news.

A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.

But the answer isn’t just to intimidate people into consuming more ‘serious’ news; it is to push so-called serious outlets into learning to present important information in ways that can properly engage audiences. It is too easy to claim that serious things must be, and can almost afford to be, a bit boring. The challenge is to transcend the current dichotomy between those outlets that offer thoughtful but impotent instruction on the one hand and those that provide sensationalism stripped of responsibility on the other.

In the ideal news organization of the future, the ambitious tasks of contextualization and popularization would be taken so seriously that stories about welfare payments would be (almost) as exciting as those about incestuous Antipodean cannibals.