Monday, 27 February 2023
Here is the news
As many folk have known for years, the mainstream news outfits are not worth much attention except to maintain a sense of direction. Why is this being pushed? What is being hidden? Where are we being taken? Answers are not likely to be mainstream though – that’s the nature of the beast.
Mainstream news outfits do not offer unadorned news, but selected stories, perspectives, fictions and opinions moulded into a curious form of entertainment – and it is a form of entertainment. Stories of conflict, romance, heroism, hedonism, celebrity, achievement, danger, magic, mystery, crime, comradeship, stupidity, sacrifice, outrage, deviancy, horror, humour, faith and fantasy. Plus the weather forecast.
It all ends up as a kind of soap opera interwoven with gossip and homilies with a range of storylines which may change rapidly with events. Yet sometimes stories continue for days, weeks, months or even years. Sporting soap operas tend to have long storylines, particularly football.
The resulting news service is not quite fiction and not quite fact but relentlessly superficial, emotional and sentimental, relentlessly shallow, salacious, orthodox, familiar, stereotyped, suggestive, misleading, embroidered, insinuating and undemanding.
Like a soap opera – the aim is to entertain a mass audience without upsetting advertisers, powerful people or powerful bureaucracies. The bias is built in, it has to be. The audience must enjoy knowing far less than it thinks it knows.
And yet something may have changed and may still be changing. In a digital world, many people are effectively writing their own stories from their own materials. Interesting times lie ahead. Unless…
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6 comments:
I find that substack carries what are effectively blogposts or essays by intelligent, numerate people - my interest having been initially to find out what the hell was going on with Covid, vaxxes, and so on. In total these writers have been infinitely superior to the alternatives. Frexample consider this:
As a former UK government PSO/G7 scientist and section leader for a policy area my work sometimes pushed me in the direction of the ONS, and so I would attend high level meetings at their offices, chewing over the numerical fat with PSO/PEO/G7 types from their end. Planning the 2001 census was one such area of work, along with development of work streams and outputs across a variety of topics. So when I say the quality of the datafile released to the public five days ago matches that expected from a rookie SO/EO then, as a former gov-bod, I know what I’m talking about. There’s no way a datafile on such a hot topic would be released to the public without the scrutiny of the G7 in charge, who would be clearing release with appropriate Assistant Secretaries. Absolutely nothing would be left to chance, and especially so with a datafile this explosive. I can only conclude that we are witnessing deliberate acts of obfuscation that will invariably be covered by the Official Secrets Act (even though I left government service years ago the OSA still binds me). The clever part of this is that public-facing officers at ONS would not necessarily be aware of all that is going on, this typically being on a strict need-to-know basis.
The introduction of the emotional "soap opera" component to news is undeniable - just look at the BBC and how they sweat blood to get an emotional reaction to the narratives they spin, and then compare it with how they operated fifty years ago. There are two interesting components here. The first is that this was forced upon the BBC and major newspapers by factors completely outside their control. Technology made new upstarts (private news channels, blogs, cheap publications) possible, and the dinosaurs had to copy them or die.
But in copying them, they will die. Because it becomes obvious that they are not supplying the news, objective truth about the world. Everyone is now catching on to the fact that this is just another entertainment channel,albeit one that is run by flat-footed stuffy middle class dullards. Auntie is now using coarse language and she delights in raising the topics of global warming and people with blue hair and piercings who have odd sexual preferences, and as such she stops being "Auntie" and becomes another silly opinionated woman.
For some reason (and you can debate all the causes at length) Newspapers are now mostly opinionpapers and the TV News is now the TV Opinions.
Now it is admittedly much easier to take the merest nubbin of events (and write endlessly about how you should feel about them) than actually do proper journalism.
There are few journalists left, they are mostly diarists who earn a crust writing about how they feel. Which is why they are more and more shouty against the competition of others.
I don't see any quick solution. My suggestion is not to buy or subscribe to the news in the hope that economic collapse will clear away the dross.
dearieme - I've poked around a few substack links but no regular visits as yet. That one sounds interesting though - thanks. I've found the site via a text search and bookmarked it.
Sam - we don't hear much about it, but the BBC must be acutely anxious about where its viewers will come from in the future. I'm sure you are right, it will be seen as an entertainment channel run by flat-footed stuffy middle class dullards. Our grandkids barely know what it is apart from a channel which shows Dr Who, but they soon seem to grow out of Dr Who.
Games seem to be the big competitor for mass attention, but the BBC isn't even in that market.
DJ - maybe the dross will be cleared away as old habits fade away naturally, because when it comes to news many people seem to stick with what they have known for decades. The state of play was easier to grasp when could simply compare newspaper circulation numbers, however imperfect they were. Now it all seems more opaque.
We still take the Telegraph. If pressed on why I could be frank and say "Because my wife insists" or I could admit that at least I enjoy the obituaries. I sometimes find the personal finance supplement on a Saturday useful.
Over the years we've taken The Scotsman (which was pretty good back then), the Guardian (couldn't stick that for long - the letter writers were clearly certifiable and the journalists were trending in that direction), the Independent (remember that?), The Times (Bernard Levin was still writing - he was their tower of strength) and the Telegraph - which was a much better paper when we started taking it than it is now.
I also have some fond boyhood memories of the Telegraph - a decent science correspondent and the wonderful Peter Simple columns.
I'd never seen the New York Times until I was a fresher. A pal asked what I made of it. "Duller even than Le Monde" - a bloody good assessment if I may say so.
dearieme - I remember Bernard Levin writing about killjoys and their war on smoking, calling them "wowsers" which was a word I'd never come across till then. He predicted that alcohol would be next on their list if they ever managed to eradicate smoking.
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