The Independent & online newspapers / Television news: why watch it?

First edition of The Independent: October, 1986

I was lucky one day this week, in that my local corner shop had sold out of The Independent, and so I bought The Guardian and came across Professor Brian Cathcart’s article (about The Independent and online newspapers generally). It seems that the printed press does not register with the under 35s, and that – much sooner than we might think – all other newspapers will go the way of The Independent. I was saddened – but not at all surprised – at this: it rang true to me. But what is the problem if (eventually) all is available online? From my point of view, some important things:

I find reading online a highly unsatisfactory experience: the surrounding ads, and other breaks in the articles, are very distracting. If I find something that is two A4 sheets in length, then I copy and paste it into word, remove all the extraneous material, and then print it out – so that I can concentrate on it properly. It is probably true that my mind is ‘print–formed’. But even so, it is well recognised that typos and errors in syntax are much more easily spotted on the printed page; by which I do not infer that many such will be found in edited articles, but my guess is that by the same token subtleties of meaning will also be lost when reading online.

I do not buy the same newspaper every day, but check to see what topics are being covered by the top columnists in the four quality papers. This is a quick eyeballing process which I will not be able to do online, and unless the online papers are content–indexed I very much doubt that I will spend time searching. So it is that I will miss the serendipity of discovering interesting articles other than the one I’d intentionally bought the newspaper for. Further, I have no intention of spending more time online than I already do.

So, If the young are ‘getting their news’ online, I might wonder exactly what they are getting, and how qualitative it is. Quite possible is as ‘joined up’ as the contemporary student practice of relying on a multitude of internet sources rather on the best available textbooks. A net loss, as may be said.

Anyway, I read newspapers for the columnists, not for the news; and I doubt very much that I will be seeking these out on the internet. Another net loss...   

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Apologies to those of you who followed my previous blog, Notes from the boundary, for the re appearance of this topic. I had my doubts about it, but – having given up watching TV news, and limited my newspaper reading – I felt emboldened to republish it. If you ask where I get my news from, it is from the radio. And if you live in the uk, then it is principally pm and The World Tonight: excellent programmes both.

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Television news:                      why watch it?

Lay at least the skin of three hundred years between you and today!

Nietzsche The Gay Science

I worry that my own business [television] . . . helps to make this an anxious age of agitated amnesiacs . . . We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty–four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.

Bill Moyers, quoted in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)   

It may be wondered if any single invention has so impoverished world culture and the lives of people as television. For decades that ‘magic box’, that insidious screen, has been the focal point in the sittings rooms of millions upon millions of homes. In this environment we passively sit and watch – or as often as not half watch: our attention being “distracted from distraction” by a multitude of inessential concerns. Not for nothing is Trivial Pursuit so popular. And, if it is ’the news’ we are watching, what are we learning? To all intents and purposes – in the broader sweep of history – not a great deal. For television is a distorting medium par excellence: what your see is not the world. (I realised this as never before, when I was on holiday in Sarajevo last October: twenty years after the siege the majority of the buildings are still riddled with holes from the fighting, and this is the closest I've ever been to a war zone.) We do not stand in the reporter’s shoes – we sit in the comfort of our sofas. We are shown footage of horrific things, and distress ourselves about that over which we have no control. We attend to the minutiae of private tragedies (for a dose of the ‘Princess Di effect’). Occasionally, a ‘feel–good’ factor is introduced: some miraculous feat or outstanding achievement (else we might switch off). And then, night after night, we switch on ‘the news’ for more of the same; and if nothing dramatic has happened we feel disappointed, because the content is not as high octane as we have become habituated to, and does not fulfil the promising urgency of the introductory music, which aims deliberately to hype us up. But, finally, I have to ask myself just how much are we really learning. Yes, we are thoroughly up to date with current affairs, but to what extent does that constitute an education? ‘The news’ is only too easy to watch: it only requires to be turned on. During the war in former Yugoslavia, I read Andro Ivac’s The Bridge over the Drina. This historical novel, covering some four hundred years of Balkan history up to the outbreak of WW2 (and the ending of the ‘rotten ripe’ Ottoman / Turkish Empire), gave me a deeper understanding of the underlying causes of the conflict than all of the television, radio, and newspaper coverage I saw or read.

‘breaking news, breaking news’, runs along the bottom of your television screen. It can wait. If you were on holiday you would not necessarily hear about it. Do you fear that those who need to know will not know, and will not have taken appropriate action?

“But I want the hottest news.” Then get yourself a Smartphone, and stay tuned 24/7!”

    At the Chicago riots of 1968, the demonstrators shouted, “The whole world is watching!” And the whole world was. What they were watching was first rate TV drama & they hadn’t the slightest interest in translating this into response. Public reaction came only in print.

    We wear our media. They are our real clothes.

Edmund Carpenter, Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! Bantam, 1974 

I am not suggesting that we should cut ourselves off from current affairs completely – far from it. But how much do you need to know? Suppose a drug cartel has been busted in Mexico City. Well, this has happened before and it will happen again: it is not an unusual occurrence in large Latin American cities surrounded by sprawling, lawless slums. Long ago you learnt of the danger of straying outside of the centre of such cities, as also of the ruthlessness of drug barons. So, unless you are an academic studying these matters, why clutter your mind with such ‘sensational’ and – to you – useless ‘information’? It is nothing more than ‘snack–reading’: tit–bits for the mind.

~ __________________ ~

“Have you heard of the latest shoot–out between the police and the Mexican drug barons?”

“Can’t say I have. Did you find yourself in the firing line?”

~ __________________ ~

 “There’s been a dreadful earthquake in Turkey.”

“Hm . . . tectonic plates on the move, I suppose. I seem to remember that there was an earthquake a few years back. Doubtless there will be another in a few years time. These things happen . . .”

~ __________________ ~

“Princess Diana has been killed in a car crash in Paris.”

“That is a tragedy I would wish on no one. I never knew her personally, but the media will no doubt have a field day . . .”

~ __________________ ~

The last word may go to Henry David Thoreau:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate . . . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. Walden

Postscript

The Very Rev. Abbé Ernest Dimnet, Canon of Cambray Cathedral (1948) wrote of the following conversation he had when travelling on a train from Paris to Orléans. In the corner, on his side of the compartment, there was;

. . . a child of twelve dressed in black . . . reading a square little book also habited in black canvas by some amateur bookbinder. I never saw anybody read like that. It seemed as if the old–fashioned but pretty and dainty figure were trying to lose itself into that book. In time my curiosity about a book that could be read with such intensity became irresistible. I made a brief feint of talking with the father and then suddenly turned to the little girl and asked: “What are you reading?” The eager little face looked up, summoned, as it were, from far away regions. “Monsieur c’est l’Histoire Romaine” (brief pause), “et je vais arriver à Jules Cᴂsar!” – “How do you know you are coming to Jules Cᴂsar?” – “Oh! I have read this book many times. I have never forgotten the emphasis on: “et je vais arriver à Jules Cᴂsar!” No prospect of Christmas, or a degree or a first visit to Paris ever produced emphasis of that quality.

From The Art of Thinking, Jonathan Cape, 1929

It is impossible to imagine such a scenario today. The smart phone has destroyed any possibility of a return to such concentration.

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