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The News: a piffle-peddler’s handbook

“From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting.” – Gustave Flaubert

Critics of the author Jane Austen insist she spent too much of her novels explaining what is of little importance, while glancing over matters of most importance.

The same might said of Alain de Botton in his new book The News: A User’s Manual.

The pop-philosopher (whose previous works include Religion for Atheists, and How Proust Can Change Your Life) has turned his ever-ticking brain from architecture, faith, and travel to the machinations of the news, and how the public interacts with the daily barrage of bulletins.

As always, the diagnosis is optimistic with de Botton. The author visits the BBC (perhaps the news agency least representative of reasonable reportage) and ventures to a foreign land (Uganda) for the book, snatching headlines and paragraphs from the Daily Mail and their ilk, but finds little corroborative evidence elsewhere – a troublesome omission when writing an apparently overarching bible on the media’s inner workings.

He lays the blame for public apathy towards critically important matters at the feet of the media. We’re barren and bland, yet festering and badgering at the same time. The hoarse holler of the press is too deafening and too confusing for the humble proles and plebs to imbibe with any virility.

His deft and enlightened analysis proposes a revolution. For example, why not use W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Musee des Beauax Arts’ as a training manual for more observant foreign reporting? Or perhaps parliamentary budget negotiations could be written a la Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar?

Admirable aims, to be sure. But the slowly-crumbling interiors that once housed newsrooms, editors, and newspaper publishers – the present machinations of a creaking engine – are omitted and glazed over. So too are the financial incentives that only serve to foster droopiness and distraction.

Forget all of that, de Botton seems to say. We can get by with a little...reframing. Drop your notebooks! We’re only going to report birthdays and weddings, trips to the hairdresser, or down to the shops when the milk runs out...

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In launching his new competitor to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, Ezra Klein provides a nourishing anecdote using the barrel-aged term ‘vegetables’ for ‘serious’ news stories: few people want to read challenging pieces, but they are good for us.

“Vegetables can be cooked poorly,” Klein writes, “but they can also be roasted to perfection with a drizzle of olive oil and hint of sea salt.”

But as degustation-esque newspapers begin to fail en masse, discharging their grizzled reporters and photojournalists into the chilly air, wire agencies step in to the blank spaces that many online aggregators insist be filled at once.

Their ‘vegetables’ tend to taste like old socks.

In veteran journalist Nick Davies’ seminal book Flat Earth News, the vast majority of reportage being fed from wire agencies such as the Press Association to major outlets involves “producing maximum output with minimum staff.”

Within this zero-sum equation, the inevitable occurs: the primary function of a journalist (to investigate, check facts, and tell the truth) is thrown out the window in favour of hammering out story after story with PR spin, government or intelligence agency positions, and corporate interests masquerading as truth.

“It is not attempting,” Davies writes of the PA, “nor does it claim to be attempting, to tell people the truth about the world...If the Prime Minister says there are chemical weapons in Iraq, that is what the good news agency will report.”

Davies’ analysis can be applied as a mock-up to many other agencies like Reuters and the Associated Press which feed an enormous portion of the global media. Over the last thirty years, the average wire reporter has had less and less time to file more and more stories – 30% more, in fact.

This terrifying model no doubt contributes to de Botton’s concern that the public no longer gives a damn about most important things that happen in the world. For example, a 2006 Hansard Society report said “the public are usually in the dark as to how [the UK] Parliament works and what legislation actually means to their lives. Westminster, the world of politics and Parliament, remains a closed book to many.”

This problem is critical, if not terminal. And yet de Botton would rather turn away from this unpleasant development (which, admittedly, is still better than no news at all) and focus on something almost irrelevant.

He falls foul of the trap that claims many commentators: why doesn’t the news report all the good things that happen in the world?

De Botton argues that an understanding of the day-to-day mediocrity, or the extraordinary reality of “other” communities, is essential to empathising with those people involved in tragedies on an enormous scale.

He correctly presents the reasons why we generally feel rather indifferent to most foreign news: we lack context. Our understanding of local stories is precisely because we live and breathe that reality. The fire that destroyed a house might have occurred two blocks away from our own home, or the enforcement of national education standards might affect how our children are taught.

He proposes that news must focus on the mundane and the ordinary, that reports be commissioned to explore such things.

“We don’t know whether anyone has had a normal day in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” he writes, “for no such thing has ever been recorded by a Western news organization. We have no idea what it’s like to go to school or visit the hairdresser in Bolivia...and what people do on the weekend in Algeria.”

But what if the banal and the everyday no longer exists in a stricken nation? Take the entirety of the Central African Republic or Syria. In nations torn apart by mass slaughter and brutal tit-for-tat sectarian sadism, the school run, the cafe outing, the yoga class, or even the routine attendance of church is made impossible by those seeking constant violence. What if the steady state no longer exists?

He later goes on to attack the supposed manner in which these conflicts are reported, railing against the “factually accurate, technologically speedy, impersonal, crisis-focused coverage” which manages to “narrow rather than expand the compass of our curiosity.”

This indifferent and swift form of reporting is endemic in what we read every morning, but there are still mastheads, networks, and programmes which fundamentally disagree with de Botton’s characterisation.

Take Newsnight’s recent report on the aforementioned conflict in the Central African Republic: it focuses on a Christian priest sheltering persecuted Muslims in the walls of his church while the machete-wielding ‘anti-balaka’ patrol the area baying for their blood. It is six minutes and thirty seconds of pure interpersonality which emphasizes human interest far above vague dictums and context-free facts.

Or take the Toronto Star’s exploration of the refugee crisis the Rakhine state in Burma, which delves straight into the slum streets and tinderbox shacks, presenting the faces of the desperate thousands to the reader with remarkable clarity.

“The method is objective, not the journalist. The key [is] in the discipline of the craft, not the aim,” the American Press Institute tells us. Sadly, reports like these are but diamonds in a very murky patch of rough. This form was once admirable and inquisitive, but has been tarred.

“Money is partly to blame,” de Botton says in passing.

Well, no. It’s almost entirely to blame.

As we well know, media outlets (from newspapers to aggregators) are slowly bleeding subscriptions and are unable to stem that flow with online advertising because similar content is being delivered for free elsewhere.

“The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us,” James Surowiecki wrote in the New Yorker back in 2008. “We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free.”

This prompts another zero-sum equation: it is far cheaper for a website to generate dozens of pages of babble and lace it with cheap marketing and ugly advertising than to pour money into serious investigative journalism that may only take up a few pages servicing fewer ads.

The value of piffle soars, while sincerity becomes an expensive luxury. We are indeed exchanging print pounds for digital pence.

Our daily search for truth and enlightenment often leads us to visit titles that have neither the budget nor the responsibility to satisfy us. Many outlets masquerading as journalistic havens have been corrupted: if the gap where decent reportage used to exist hasn’t already been filled by the aforementioned impreciseness of wire agencies, then the politics desks and grizzled hacks have been forced to turn coat and churn out faceless paragraphs on petty squabbles, vague speculation, and tiresome galleries questioning the perkiness of a celebrity boob job.

This dilemma between quantity and quality has the ability to turn once probing and questioning newspapers or bulletins into a strangely congealed monolith. De Botton mentions this (again only in passing): “The financial needs of news companies mean that they cannot afford to advance ideas which wouldn’t very quickly be able to find favour with enormous numbers of people.”

Nick Davies puts it far more concisely as ‘ninja turtle syndrome’: parents in the 1990s worried about their children being exposed to casual violence and the tarring of four Renaissance artists’ names simply switched the TV off. But when that child returned home, having been isolated by their peers who had seen the show, the parents gave in.

Imagine a story floats down the wires about North Korean dictator Kim Jung-un forcing each male university student to get a haircut exactly like ‘the Dear Leader’ (which is also apparently called the ‘Chinese smuggler haircut’).

There was no truth in the story whatsoever. Despite many recent visitors to the debased country reporting no major revolution in hairstyling, and the original story citing a dubious source, some major media players including the BBC and TIME magazine carried the hoax in its entirety.

Why? Because they fear missing out on a story that could haul in an extra few thousands clicks, and therefore a little extra cash for an ailing business model. Instead of pondering aloud whether the story might be even vaguely rational, the only question they pose is this: If everyone else is running it, why shouldn’t we?

“What levels of agreement,” de Botton asks, “what suppression of idiosyncrasy and useful weirdness, will be required to render the material sufficiently palatable to so many...”

De Botton imagines that the current model can be improved, or even revolutionised, but provides no radical ideas for altering the status quo - a troublesome omission in what is supposed to be a handbook on the current system. Suggesting that each section of the modern newsroom – from national, foreign, and political desks to business and ‘lifestyle’ pages - can be moulded and sculpted with the coffers only half-full is, frankly, missing the point.

All of this, all of it, is purely in pursuit of cold, hard cash.

Despite this, he is exact when skewering an impending format for information that may toplle the whole system: personalised news.

Ejecting the age-old reliability of editorial control and trained professionals deciding what is important, this rotten concept entrusts the user to manipulate a stream of news based on what they would rather see. To most, this would mean throwing out the reports on education reform, or armed conflict, or revolutions in favour of endless paparazzi shots, and trivial stories about monster rats, or royal weddings.

He calls on the idea of Marie Antoinette having access to such a nit-picking form of learning, ignoring the 5,000 starving citizens of Rennes in favour of “an exhaustive report on the dresses sported by guests at a party given by the Duchesse de Polignac – an ordering of priorities that would have revealed itself as a problem only by October 1793, as the queen awaited her fate on the guillotine steps.”

To let the public eat cake, as it were, is an inherently flawed idea. In order for the system to work, de Botton believes the user must have a “highly mature and complex sense of what sort of news they needed to hear. But this would require them...to know their own souls extremely well.”

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Perhaps there is a more precise position that can be taken here: matters of critical importance are no longer front-and-centre in the public conscious. The avenues and rabbit holes down which our distraction can tumble are overwhelming.

Trawling through one of Buzzfeed’s mind-numbingly boring displays of cutesy animals, or staring at the perverse lack of wrinkles on many a celebrity’s face, or simply using our ability with technology to rub out completely what we don’t care much for has become an addiction. It’s an alternative to chewing-over and digesting the hellish reality of war and mass exodus, financial collapses, flagrant corruption, or the necessary tedium of parliamentary politics.

Presented with an insanely vast and occasionally delicious menu for the first time in history, many people point at the greasy French fries and open their salivating gobs, waiting to be fed.

The creation of meaningless space-filler comes at the detriment of genuine and practical journalism, hoovering up cash but also providing an instantly gratifying morsel – a toothsome but sugary treat rather than a plate of delicious ‘vegetables’.

Despite the immense volume of information available, the news is failing to stimulate because it can no longer afford to, and it then falls to the aggregators and the piffle-peddlers to fill in the blanks.

“What an achievement a moment of calm now is,” de Botton writes, “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 rain and our own thoughts.”

While finding peace might be an aspiration, even from bustling existence let alone the universe of 24-hour satellite news stations, simmering Twitter feeds, and endless breaking news alerts, our willingness to turn away from critically important matters is a symptom of a near-broken system.

Alain de Botton’s fantasies for the future of the news industry don’t seem to resonate with the present reality. His proposed manner of reporting is not (and shouldn’t be) the future, but is a vague utopia which Thomas More told us long ago to consider with a very wary eye.