In the immediate vicinity, there might well be stability and peace. In the garden, a breeze may be swaying the branches of the plum tree and dust may slowly be gathering on the bookshelves in the living room. But we are aware that such serenity does not do justice to the chaotic and violent fundamentals of existence and hence, after a time, it has a habit of growing worrisome in its own way. Our background awareness of the possibility of catastrophe explains the small pulse of fear we may register when we angle our phones in the direction of the nearest mast and wait for the headlines to appear. It is a version of the apprehension that our distant ancestors must have felt in the chill moments before dawn, as they wondered whether the sun would ever find its way back into the firmament.
Yet there is a particular kind of pleasure at stake here, too. The news, however dire it may be and perhaps especially when it is at its worst, can come as a relief from the claustrophobic burden of living with ourselves, of forever trying to do justice to our own potential and of struggling to persuade a few people in our limited orbit to take our ideas and needs seriously. To consult the news is to raise a seashell to our ears and to be overpowered by the roar of humanity. It can be an escape from our preoccupations to locate issues that are so much graver and more compelling than those we have been uniquely allotted, and to allow these larger concerns to drown out our own self-focused apprehensions and doubts. A famine, a flooded town, a serial killer on the loose, the resignation of a government, an economist’s prediction of breadlines by next year; such outer turmoil is precisely what we might need in order to usher in a sense of inner calm.
Today the news informs us of a man who fell asleep at the wheel of his car after staying up late into the night committing adultery on the Internet – and drove off an overpass, killing a family of five in a caravan below. Another item speaks of a university student, beautiful and promising, who went missing after a party and was found in pieces in the trunk of a minicab five days later. A third rehearses the particulars of an affair between a tennis coach and her thirteen-year-old pupil. These occurrences, so obviously demented, invite us to feel sane and blessed by comparison. We can turn away from them and experience a new sense of relief at our predictable routines, at how tightly bound we have kept our more unusual desires and at our restraint in never yet having poisoned a colleague or entombed a relation under the patio.
5.
WHAT DOES ALL this news do to us over time? What remains of the months, even years we spend with it in aggregate? Whither those many excitements and fears: about the missing child, the budget shortfall and the unfaithful general? To what increase in wisdom did all these news stories contribute, beyond leaving behind a vague and unsurprising sediment of conclusions, for example, that China is rising, that central Africa is corrupt and that education must be reformed?
It is a sign of our mental generosity that we don’t generally insist on such questions. We imagine that there would be something wrong in simply switching off. It is hard to give up on the habit first established in our earliest years, as we sat cross-legged during school assembly, of listening politely to figures of authority while they tell us about things they proclaim to be essential.
To ask why the news matters is not to presume that it doesn’t, but to suggest the rewards of approaching our intake more self-consciously. This book is a record, a phenomenology, of a set of encounters with the news. It is framed around fragments of news culled from a variety of sources that have been subjected to analysis deliberately more elaborate than its creators intended, based on an assumption that these fragments might be no less worthy of study than lines of poetry or philosophy.
The definition of news has deliberately been left vague. Though there are obvious differences between news organizations, there are also enough similarities for it to seem possible to speak of a generic category that blurs into one the traditional fiefdoms of news – radio, TV, online and print – and the contrasting ideologies of right and left, high- and lowbrow.
This project has a utopian dimension to it. It not only asks what news currently is; it also tries to imagine what it could one day be. To dream of an ideal news organization shouldn’t suggest an indifference to the current economic and social realities of the media; rather it stems from a desire to break out of a range of pessimistic assumptions to which we may have become too easily resigned.
6.
MODERN SOCIETIES ARE still at the dawn of understanding what kind of news they need in order to flourish. For most of history, news was so hard to gather and expensive to deliver, its hold on our inner lives was inevitably kept in check. Now there is almost nowhere on the planet we are able to go to escape from it. It is there waiting for us in the early hours when we wake up from a disturbed sleep; it follows us on board planes making their way between continents; it is waiting to hijack our attention during the children’s bedtime.
The hum and rush of the news have seeped into our deepest selves. What an achievement a moment of calm now is, what a minor miracle the ability to fall asleep or to talk undistracted with a friend – and what monastic discipline would be required to make us turn away from the maelstrom of news and listen for a day to nothing but the rain and our own thoughts.
We may need some help with what the news is doing to us: with the envy and the terror, with the excitement and the frustration; with all that we’ve been told and yet occasionally suspect we may be better off never having learned.
Hence a little manual that briefly tries to complicate a habit that, at present, has come to seem a bit too normal and harmless for our own good.
II.
Politics
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.