When news no longer imparts a moral, we can simply turn it off
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Commuting on a Metro train, while reading how a Tang Dynasty (618-907) poet was surprised by a bright moon one spring eve, I was distracted by a mobile phone of a middle-aged woman near me.
She was pressing the device’s keyboard so vigorously that it kept bobbing just a few centimeters from my eyes. Was she checking the latest news, knowing how much is liable to go wrong, and how fast?
When news is craved and digested in this frenetic fashion, then as Alain de Botton advises in his “The News: A User’s Manual,” “We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal and nothing to read.” As de Botton explains, today’s torrent of news doesn’t inform its audience, although the much touted information age releases a constant torrent of sensational headlines.
The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel observed that in modern societies, news replaces religion as a source of direction and “a touchstone of authority.”
In hindsight, we might better say that news as is purveyed today is more a source of distraction for it often has little to do with important issues in our life. It certainly fails to connect to the larger human story. It would be obviously inadequate for people to work out the logic and philosophy of existence by following today’s news. De Botton goes on to examine six categories of news — political, international, economic, celebrity-focused, tragic and consumer-oriented.
He believes that making political news boring and disjointed is worse than censorship, because it undermines a democratic society’s ability to come to grips with its problems.
“It is as if, every day before breakfast, a stern and alarmed civil servant rushed in to see us with a briefcase filled with a bewildering and ... in the end, tiring range of issues,” de Botton writes.
As de Botton observes, the news should not report only on wrongdoing, but also on how to make things better. He mentions “gaffe journalism,” a subset of political news exposing the misdeeds of the powerful, a function some Western journalists often cite as their highest calling. Often such coverage sidesteps weightier issues: institutional or societal failures such as a lack of affordable housing, a shortage of well-paying jobs or the general decline in civility.
Sex and scandals sell
Here is a situation Hegel probably did not foresee. In a society where the worth of every profession is determined by the market, the quality of journalism is suggested by the attention it gets, or the clicks and page views it generates.
According to de Botton, a glance at the most popular stories on the BBC website shows 5.82 million page views for a story about the Duchess of Cambridge expecting a baby, and fewer than 2,000 for a story on failed peace talks in Congo. Similarly, a celebrity who is seen by paparazzis dating a woman can generate more clicks than, say, a story about the melting iceberg as a result of global warming.
Sex sells, as do scandals and tragedies, though these events are rarely edifying, and seldom point to greater insights. “We rarely recognize them as belonging to a coherent narrative cycle with a distinctive moral to impart,” de Botton claims.
The message for media professionals is to go beyond the dictates of market by realizing that their mission does not just lie in collecting facts, but also in making sense of them. The overloading of so much negative information can be very damaging to our sensibility. “The ancient Greeks saw tragic plays once a year ... By contrast, we take in tragic news stories almost every day,” de Botton observes.
Tragedies purveyed at this rate may become just another way of amusement.
Following the tragic crash of a TransAsia Airways plane in Taiwan on February 4, there were reports of three women posing cheerfully for a picture at the scene of the tragedy, with one of them signaling “V” with her fingers. This insensible behavior provoked outrage.
Seen correctly, these tragedies should instill in us a sense of human frailty and mortality, and help put our daily obsessions into perspective. De Botton writes that for centuries in Europe, powerful people decorated their studies and bedchambers with a human skull to remind them of their mortality.
Ironically, at a moment when people meet with problems that require introspection, the news is often there to distract. As de Botton suggests, a simple solution would be to just turn it off, or delve into the wisdom of dusty books and the joys of nature.
“A flourishing life requires a capacity to recognize the times when the news no longer has anything original or important to teach us,” de Botton writes
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