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.