The News: A User's Manual

A Little Hope

Manchester city centre was torn apart by looters as young as nine in the worst riots in the city for 30 years. Hundreds of youths and ‘feral’ children stormed through the streets smashing windows and stealing clothing, mobile phones and jewellery. Shops and bins were set on fire as police struggled to keep up with marauding gangs in a cat-and-mouse chase across the city. Yesterday police chiefs admitted they had been ‘overwhelmed’ by the scale of the disturbances and had to call on neighbouring forces to assist.

Daily Mail

1.

WHAT KIND OF country do we live in? What is the average person in it like? Should we feel scared or reassured, proud or ashamed?

The first thing to admit is that we can’t answer these questions on the basis of our own experience alone. It is so hard to get to know a nation. Even the smallest countries have so many people in them that no individual could hope to meet up with more than a fraction of them across a highly sociable lifetime. Furthermore, there are not many large-scale public spaces where citizens can directly get acquainted. We don’t often make new friends at the mall or get much of an insight into our fellow inhabitants at the cinema. Perhaps it used to be easier. In ancient Athens, for instance, thanks to good weather, a small and cohesive city centre and a culture of democratic conviviality (at least for some), there must have been regular opportunities to take the pulse of society as a whole at first hand. But we aren’t so blessed. Our cities are too big, our weather patterns too unpredictable, our democratic systems too indirect and our homes too widely scattered.

We are therefore left to form impressions of our communities in indirect ways, in our imaginations rather than in actuality, and we do so with the help of two tools in particular.

2.

THE FIRST OF these is architecture. Through their appearance, a country’s streets, houses, offices and parks combine to convey a psychological portrait of those who designed and inhabit them.

(picture credit 2.1)

Contrasting visions of what ‘other people’ might be like.

Amsterdam docks (top), London docks (bottom).

(picture credit 2.2)

If you were trying to understand the character of the modern Netherlands and were wandering Amsterdam’s eastern docklands, you might conclude on the basis of the architecture alone that the Dutch were a forward-looking, playful, peaceable, family-centred people whom you might want to get to know better, and whose existence seemed a source of hope and reassurance.

Contrast this with the messages emanating from another city waterside redevelopment project, this one at Pier Parade in North Woolwich, London. Here the water-stained, derelict, cracking concrete buildings suggest that despair is to be expected and that the best way to resolve an argument would be to shout or shoot. Laughter and innocence feel unwelcome.

We don’t, of course, always have to follow these architectural cues. We might be furious and downcast in Amsterdam’s docks and full of vim and defiant energy in Pier Parade. It is just a little more unlikely.

3.

THE SECOND TOOL with which we get to know the character of others is, of course, the news. It is the news that introduces us to a far wider range of human beings than we could ever meet in person, and that over time, through the stories it runs and the way it comments on them, forms an idea in our minds about the kind of country we live in.

And so it is that, every day when we follow the news, we can count on learning some extremely dark truths about the people around us:

Mother accused of starving her four-year-old son to death

Members of sex ring threatened to cut off the face of one of their victims and decapitate her baby after she tried to tell police

Man kept his wife chained up in the basement and whipped her with dog chains

Church-going woman, 51, used anti-freeze to kill husband she hated and son who was worse than a pest before poisoning daughter who would not get a job

Factory worker sexually assaulted two 13-year-old girls while picking fruit

Pilot bludgeoned wealthy wife to death because he felt humiliated

Toddler bled to death in hospital due to ‘catastrophic’ lack of communication between doctors

Man tried to chop off his ex-girlfriend’s hands with a meat cleaver

Daily Mail

4.

THESE STORIES HAVE more impact on us than we might presume. They are read every day by many millions. They are more interesting than most novels and some of our friends. Without our meaning for this to happen, they seep into our minds and colour our views of strangers. After reading such stories, many things become harder.

It becomes more difficult to be hopeful:

Britain facing triple economic calamity

It feels riskier to order a taxi:

No woman is safe in a minicab, warns rape judge

Or to take a train:

Homeless man found guilty of pushing 84-year-old woman to her death on station platform

One worries about getting ill:

‘Most lethal ever’ new flu virus kills third of victims

But one worries even more about going to hospital:

Patient, 39, died after waiting eight hours without water and an ‘extraordinary lack of care’

One longs to be young again:

Miley Cyrus wears racy tight white briefs and black thigh-high boots for raunchy morning television performance

But one loses all faith in innocence:

Teacher gives student, 16, pot and has sex with him more than eight times

One worries about the state of one’s body:

Chloe Sevigny shows off her legs in printed shorts at the Orange Is the New Black premiere

And knows how people will judge us when we are older:

What has happened to Meg Ryan’s face?

One worries about birds:

Customers’ horror as they find dead bird in bag of salad during their meal

And one worries about insects:

Woman finds live giant Egyptian grasshopper in her bag of greens

One hates politicians:

EU leaders quaffed £120 bottles of wine over lunch while insisting there was no room to make savings in the Brussels budget

But one doesn’t hold out much hope for ordinary people either:

Wheelchair-bound equalities adviser, 59, jailed for arranging to have sex with girl, five, and her mother at a Travelodge

One is fearful of men:

Father murdered his 11-month-old son by shaking him violently and throwing him on the floor minutes after argument with his girlfriend

But one is equally afraid of women:

Mother, 43, arrested for having an affair with her teenage daughter’s 14-year-old friend

One realizes how provincial one’s life is:

Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell party with Grace Jones until 5am following star-studded gallery bash

And how devoid of passion one’s relationship has become:

Like the honeymoon never ended: Keira Knightley can’t stop cuddling husband

There seem very few reasons not to despair of the human race:

Suri Cruise, 7, to launch her own fashion range

Daily Mail

5

IF ASKED WHY it has decided to tell us all this, and is driving us more than a little mad as a result, the news will soberly reply that it has no choice. It simply has a duty to tell us ‘the truth’. What happens in a country is not something that it decides. The stories aren’t made up: a father really did murder his eleven-month-old son. A wheelchair-bound equalities adviser truly did arrange to have sex with a five-year-old girl and her mother at a Travelodge. It would be a betrayal of journalistic duty to keep the public away from these sobering but fundamental phenomena; journalists have to share the truth about the nation with the same frankness and lack of squeamishness as a doctor delivering a challenging diagnosis.

6.

YET THIS ISN’T entirely true. In any nation at any given point there is a welter of conflicting evidence about what is going on in the land. There will be several paedophiliac murderers at work, but there will also be tens of millions who don’t favour abusing and bludgeoning children to death. Some people will be drawn to murdering partners who have been unfaithful with a meat cleaver, but the majority will tearfully and angrily muddle along. There will be some depressed residents who have been worn down by economic hardships, but they will have their opposites in many others who remain resilient in the face of daunting odds. Some people will riot and vomit in the streets, break shop windows and run off with looted spirits, but most will be keener to trim back the flowers in the garden and keep things tidy in the kitchen. A few people will go to glamorous parties all the time, but many more will accept with grace the pleasures, dignity and freedom of an ordinary life. It is easy to get upset about the deteriorating state of one’s body, but there are other ways to excel and impress than via one’s legs.

Strangely though, the more cheerful side of the coin never makes it into the news. There is a plethora of headlines that would be both true and yet impossible to run:

Grandmother, 87, helped three flights up the stairs at railway station by 15-year-old bystander she didn’t know

Teacher surmounts his feelings for a young student

Man abandons rash plan to kill his wife after brief pause

65 million people go to bed every night without murdering or hitting anyone

There are so many different versions of ‘reality’, it is impossible to speak of the nation as if it were a single thing that could daily be captured by the most determined news organizations. The news may present itself as the authoritative portraitist of reality. It may claim to have an answer to the impossible question of what has really been going on, but it has no overarching ability to transcribe reality. It merely selectively fashions reality through the choices it makes about which stories to cast its spotlight on and which ones to leave out.

Herein rests an enormous and largely uncomprehended power: the power to assemble the picture that citizens end up having of one another; the power to dictate what our idea of ‘other people’ will be like; the power to invent a nation in our imaginations.

This power is so significant because the stories the news deploys end up having such a self-determining effect. If we are regularly told that many of our countrymen are crazed and violent, we will be filled with fear and distrust every time we go outside. If we receive subtle messages that money and status matter above all, we will feel humiliated by an ordinary life. If it’s implied that all politicians lie, we’ll quietly put our idealism and innocence aside and mock every one of their plans and pronouncements. And if we’re told that the economy is the most important indicator of fulfilment and that it will be a disaster for a decade at least, we will be unable to face reality with much confidence ever again.

7.

BEFORE WE DESPAIR at the calamities that apparently surround us on all sides, we should remember that the news is ultimately only one set of stories about what is happening out there, no more and no less.

Our nation isn’t just a severed hand, a mutilated grandmother, three dead girls in a basement, embarrassment for a minister, trillions of debt, a double suicide at the railway station and a fatal five-car crash by the coast.

It is also the cloud floating right now unattended over the church spire, the gentle thought in the doctor’s mind as he approaches the patient’s bare arm with a needle, the field mice by the hedgerow, the small child tapping the surface of a newly hard-boiled egg while her mother looks on lovingly, the nuclear submarine patrolling the maritime borders with efficiency and courage, the factory producing the first prototypes of a new kind of engine and the spouse who, despite extraordinary provocations and unkind words, discovers fresh reserves of patience and forgiveness.

This, too, is reality. The news we are given about the nation is not the nation.

8.

WHY DO NEWS organizations focus so much on the darkness? Why so much grimness and so little hope? Perhaps they think that their audiences are by nature a little too innocent, sheltered and pleased with themselves and therefore very much in need of being taught some of the negative aspects of reality – in order to recalibrate their expectations of others and take safety measures where possible. The presumption is that without the dark realism of the news, the nation might lapse back into its dangerous tendency to gloss over its problems and feel foolishly content with itself.

Putting aside the logic of this thesis for a moment, it at least offers up a suggestion of how news organizations should go about curating their content. Faced with an infinity of potential stories, they should pick ones that answer to what they think of as the prevailing national need. That which the nation most needs to hear at any given point – in order to compensate for its weaknesses – should determine the selection process behind the line-up of news items.

This logic isn’t alien to news organizations of today. What is problematic is their judgement about what the national need actually is. Most countries, far from taking too rosy a view of their condition, far from trusting too much and feeling stupidly hopeful, do precisely the opposite. They are at risk for reasons other than the ones currently implicitly diagnosed by the media. They scupper their chances through excessive fear, anxiety and gloom. They are all too familiar with their litanies of problems, and yet they seem to feel debilitatingly small, unambitious and weak in the face of them. They can’t see a way past decline, broken relationships, out-of-control teenagers, status anxiety, physical vulnerability and economic ruin.

There is a task for the news here: not only to remind us daily of society’s worst failings, but also – sometimes – to train and direct its capacities for pride, resilience and hope. National decline can be precipitated not only or principally by sentimental optimism, but also by a version of media-induced clinical depression.

9.

ARCHITECTURE CAN OFFER a useful example of how the occasional showcasing of what is positive has legitimate uses. The members of the team charged with designing the velodrome for the 2012 London Olympics (less than a mile from North Woolwich) were well aware of Britain’s many challenges – its class divisions and economic inequalities, its educational failures and its housing shortages, its high rates of family breakdown and its degraded manners and morals – but they decided, on this occasion, not to dwell on them.

Instead they chose to create a structure that would stand as an eloquent expression of politeness, modernity, class harmony and reconciliation with nature, in the hope that these qualities might become more present in the country at large through their articulation in a cycling venue clad in glass, steel and western red cedar. The building was an essay in flattery. It hinted that desirable qualities were already widely possessed by a country in which they were in fact only nascent or intermittent.

We are used to thinking of flattery as sentimental and dangerous, an abandonment of reality, but this is to underestimate how reality can be moulded. The child who is praised for her first modest attempts at kindness (when sharing a toy with a neighbour’s offspring), and called lovely as a result, is being guided to develop beyond what she actually happens to be right now. The thought is that she will grow into the person she has flatteringly been described as already being.

As with architecture, so with news. Alongside its usual focus on catastrophe and evil, the news should perform the critical function of sometimes distilling and concentrating a little of the hope a nation requires to chart a course through its difficulties. While helping society by uncovering its misdeeds and being honest about its pains, the news should not neglect the equally important task of constructing an imaginary community that seems sufficiently good, forgiving and sane that one might want to contribute to it.

This is perhaps (also) what ‘other people’ might one day be like in Britain: a suggestion from the Olympic Velodrome, London, 2012.

(picture credit 2.3)