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.
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 hopefuclass="underline"
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 ilclass="underline"
‘Most lethal ever’ new flu virus kills third of victims
But one worries even more about going to hospitaclass="underline"
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: