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.