IS NEWS bad for us? Apparently someone has been telling The
Guardian's journalists this. Madeleine Bunting wrote: "Imagine
a news-free life - no radio, no television news. What would you
miss? According to the Swiss novelist Rolf Dobelli, the answer is
not much.
"In fact, your creativity, insight and concentration could all
flourish without the addictive habits of the news junkies whose
activities are constantly punctuated by the drip-drip stimulation
of novelty.
"As Dobelli described his four-year news purdah to a group of
Guardian journalists last week, there was a sharp intake
of collective breath, nervous laughter and complete astonishment.
How could someone suggest such a thing to a journalist? He ploughed
on: news is bad for your health, very bad for your mental
faculties, and bad for your emotional state."
This seems to me completely self-evident. I never listen to the
Today programme, or watch any television current-affairs
programmes; and I never read a newspaper when I am not paid to do
so. I may still be mad, fat, and dangerous to know, but think how
much worse I would be if I were on top of all the latest news as
well. Ms Bunting, however, will have none of this.
"It's not news per se that is the problem, but the formats in
which we now consume news and the habits of constant interruption
and brief attention they generate. [But] the whole point of news
sites and newspapers has always been to introduce you to events and
ideas you might not otherwise encounter.
"Cut yourself off from all of that and you limit your
understanding and engagement in life. You isolate yourself from the
collective conversation that news sustains and inspires. In the end
it closes down your world to a very small space of who you know and
what they know. It denies curiosity, one of the great human
appetites that news both satisfies and feeds. It restricts your
understanding of the huge diversity of human experience."
I think here she is rather missing the thrust and power of
Dobelli's argument. It's not as if there were some river of pure
news from which we could drink if we only avoided "the formats in
which we now consume news". It always comes in a format. If all
available formats are designed to make thought and concentration
more difficult - and, increasingly, they are - then the news we get
is bad for us. And it is.
Mass-market news is about as intellectually stimulating as a
shopping mall. After all, that is what it is, in economic function:
a place to wander, in a state of blurry distraction, until you
settle on something to buy. Novelty is something that the
techniques of producing news are designed to exclude. There is
endless variation, true, but only within rigid limits. The names
change, but the parts do not.
This is as true of sport, and of politics, as it is of the
Mail's sidebar of shame, where every day a different
line-up of pretty women "show off their" concavities and
convexities - but it's always the same bumps and hollows.
Anyone who has tried to get a genuinely new idea into a
newspaper - and Madeleine Bunting has certainly done so - knows how
fiendishly difficult it is. And it certainly cannot be done in a
news story.
The same is true of criticism in ad-funded media. That does not
involve discovering and praising the particular excellences of an
article. It is almost entirely a matter of saying what other things
it resembles. This is not populism: the ultimate form of these
reviews is not the customer comments on Amazon, but the strip above
them, which suggests other things you might like to buy if you have
just bought any particular widget.
Anything really new is disturbing. News merely titillates.
There is worse. The most ghastly promise of the whole modern
news machine is, of course, what Ms Bunting politely calls "the
collective conversation that news sustains and inspires". I spent
part of one morning this week engaged in what is known as "Twitter
spat" with followers and friends of Richard Dawkins. He wrote
something silly on his Twitter feed. I wrote something silly poking
fun at it.
Tens of thousands of people read the result, and were briefly
stirred by it. At one stage, three people a second were looking.
There were 2400 comments by the end of the first day. A biology
professor in Chicago wrote a piece on his blog calling me "an
accomodationist moron".
Nowhere, in any of this, was there any shred of novelty. Even
the biologist, Professor Coyne, had only varied his earlier
judgement of me as "The Guardian's resident moron". I
really cannot believe that anyone's life or understanding was
enriched by this exchange.