Picture a church basement. Crumbed with supermarket own-brand biscuits, sympathetic fellow sinners perch on folding chairs. Teabags bob in their Styrofoam cups of Tetley whitened with semi-skim.

My name is Lionel Shriver, and I am a news-aholic.

I begin my day in London loading The Daily Telegraph on a tablet. Eschewing the features, I knock back most of the hard news (which chimes chillingly with hard booze) and always treat myself to the letters (the best part). But that’s just the start. I move on to the New York Times app. Since America’s “paper of record” could occupy my entire day, chugging maybe fifteen articles, putting away a few shots of the Opinion pages, and gulping a goodly proportion of “Most Popular” passes for restraint. Frightening myself, before finally getting to work, I sneak a furtive sip of the Guardian webpage.

I’d like to claim that the above takes “only” a couple of hours. But we’re often talking three.

In the effectual oyster of my afternoon, I will often take nips of the New York Times webpage, just to make sure nothing big has happened.

I begin the evening by switching on the TV – incriminatingly, already tuned to Sky News, of which I take a bracing slug. After hitting Channel 4 News (55 minutes), I’ll down Newsnight  (45 minutes) with my co-dependent husband (both shows on series record). Before bed, we’ll indulge in an informational nightcap: the CBS News from the US (30 minutes). Should Sky once more not have broadcast the programme in defiance of its schedule, rage ensues: the telltale tantrum of the addict denied her substance.

To come completely clean, I also keep on hand a six-pack of news-related documentaries. I subscribe to The Spectator, Standpoint, and The New Yorker; finally letting subscriptions to The Week and The Economist lapse last year constituted my quail-sized version of cold turkey. But even excluding these top-up sources of binge consumption, two hours of newspapers + 2.5 hours of broadcast news = 4.5 hours minimum of drinking in news, news, news every bloody weekday, and often a great deal more.

In my pale defence, I multitask. To get the blood running, I read the papers standing up. During Channel 4 News, I exercise. In front of Newsnight, we snack on popcorn and conduct a running discourse, citing contradictions, exasperations, and piquancies – since I cannot listen to this stuff with my mouth shut, which drove my husband crazy until he learned to hit the pause button. (Alas, these excitable interludes mean that Newsnight lasts even longer, and we won’t eat dinner until well after midnight.) During the CBS News, we floss.

Nevertheless, how much of a 16-hour waking day is discretionary, even for the self-employed? Subtract out cleaning, shopping, cooking, washing up, laundry, showering and evacuating, dressing and disrobing, email, chatting with friends and family, preparing cups of coffee, maintaining a Georgian house that’s eternally falling apart, and attending the odd dental appointment, and maybe ten hours remain – nearly half of which I lavish on the news. It’s astounding that I ever read a book, much less write one.

I haven’t always been like this – but in recent years the problem has only got worse. This allocation of my life is unconsidered. I didn’t decide to devote half my discretionary time to news, any more than alcoholics declare in childhood, “When I grow up, I’m going to drink two litres of vodka every day!” But if the unthinking nature of this slide into addiction is disturbing, maybe that means it’s time to think about it.

What drives news addiction?

I appear to believe that time spent on news is ipso facto productive. Cheesy, frivolous reality shows like Come Dine With Me can provoke the existential willies: Oh, no, I’m frittering my life away on rubbish! But news is serious. Breakfasting on a rich diet of broadsheet journalism makes me feel like a smart person. Although a novelist is free to renounce the factual universe for fanciful worlds of her own devising, news OD has grown disconcertingly central to my idea of myself.

First and foremost, then, news addiction springs from vanity.

I grew up in a liberal American household much invested in being “interested in the rest of the world,” if this lofty internationalism was sometimes priced at my parents’ diminished interest in the world closer to hand: their own kids. In my family, we’ve long used politics as filler and distraction. Affairs of state provide a range of happily inexhaustible default topics. Trading predictable, broadly unanimous opinions mercifully substitutes for raw interaction with one another. We thereby steer clear of real emotions, not all of which would be pretty. These days when I visit my elderly parents and discussion runs dry, we can always resort to Trump. Our convergence on the same dismay reinforces our joint sense of virtuous perspicacity, fortifying a clubby, self-congratulatory us-versus-them dynamic painfully standard in the United States. Mutual huffiness helps us to believe in the moment that we have more in common than we do.

This deployment of “the rest of the world” to avoid the folks actually sitting around the dinner table used to distress me, but I’ve gradually morphed into the same type – who can yak away for hours about the dysfunctional American health-care system and never betray what she’s feeling. My bristling arsenal of current events can keep other people at bay. Abstract interest in theoretical others substitutes for authentic interest in all-too-palpable others – who might be boring, or might demand something more from me other than a thin, elective form of attention. I can always put down the paper, switch off my iPad, or change the channel. Friends, relatives, and neighbours are harder to walk away from. News provides the illusion of truth, the illusion of insight; by contrast, people in the flesh are damnably difficult to know.

News addiction is further driven by that contemporary cliché, fear of missing out. While seismic stories will sooner or later arrive on one’s doorstep unsolicited, I prefer sooner. Even in the miniature context of my marriage, I’m keen to hear about big turns of the wheel first. As I’d dislike learning about a terrorist knife attack on London Bridge second-hand, this spring it pleased me instead to rattle off the details when my husband got home, because I’d been glued to Sky for the last hour. Yet comically, my having derived the story from the news implied that a vast team of journalists had learned about the assault before I did. All news is hearsay.

I bequeathed this determination to head the queue at the information booth to the 13-year-old protagonist in my last novel, The Mandibles. Willing Darkly insists on watching an historic presidential address in real time, not later on the internet – because “the copy would not be happening. He couldn’t explain it, but that made it completely different.” Besides which, “big news got old fast. If you waited, somebody was bound to tell you about it before you learned it for yourself. They’d change the words around, too, and get everything in the wrong order. Willing hated being told what had happened. The telling people always seemed so smug and powerful, and they maintained their power by keeping their special knowledge to themselves for as long as possible. So they would feed you bits of information in sadistic dribs, like dog treats for Milo. You couldn’t trust the telling person either. Even if they claimed to hand over all that they knew, they only conveyed the part that they liked or especially hated. Being told – it was not the way to find anything out.”

My horror of being told about major events played out in The Post-Birthday World, when my main character and her snooker-player boyfriend have such a heated, protracted, all-consuming row that they don’t leave the house, answer the phone, turn on a television, radio, or computer, or buy a newspaper. Having been mired in petty jealousies and grudges, they only learn about 9/11 two solid days after the attacks. “I have never,” the protagonist says, finally bringing home a stack of newspapers, “been so ashamed.”

Keeping up to date does save you from the embarrassment of disproportionate absorption in the personal while greater events than your dumb little life are afoot. And most of us have our where-we-were-when tales in relation to JFK’s or Martin Luther King’s assassination and the OJ Simpson verdict, as well as the likes of 7/7 in Britain, or 9/11. Nevertheless, this obsession with being one of the first to find out what we’ll all know in short order is irrational, and “I-I’ve got a se-ecret!” is utterly childish. If you’re not yourself a local medic or policeman, it really doesn’t matter whether you learn about the attacks in Nice, or Beslan in North Ossetia, or the Bataclan in Paris, a little sooner or later than everyone else. The power of being “the telling person” is false and silly.

It is important to me to be informed – or appear to be informed – in social settings, and that goes doubly for professional ones. In an event in Paris in May, an audience member asked what I thought about Trump’s announcement of a sizeable arms sale to the Saudis. Busy, for once I’d not been frantically checking nytimes.com all day, and I’d no idea what he was talking about. My answer was garbled. At a festival event in Manchester, another audience member asked me to comment on Bob Dylan’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. The winner had been announced that day, but on the train up I had actually been reading a book. That will teach me. On the spot, I blandly commended the choice as creative. Yet on reflection, I regard a folksinger’s being awarded the most prestigious prize in literature as ludicrous (“The times they are a-changin’!” would never sound like great poetry without a guitar). Experiences of being caught out unawares bolster my habit. See what happens when you avert your eyes from the BBC for an instant? So much for reading fiction on the train.

A completely fake justification for all this indiscriminate gobbling of incident – abundantly, the tragedies of strangers – is this notion that we’re all obliged to keep abreast of current events out of civic duty. For me in the UK, that rationale is farcical; I don’t hold a British passport, and can’t vote. In the US, a bare-bones lowdown suffices to make most electoral decisions. Republicans oppose abortion rights and resist the separation of church and state. Enough. I won’t vote for them. Arriving from Mars, I’d need only listen to Donald Trump for two minutes to ascertain that I didn’t want to vote for him, either. The same goes for Jeremy Corbyn (maybe a minute and a half). So I’m not spending hours per day on becoming a better-educated voter. Any fellow sufferer of the same enslavement – I am not alone here – who defends information overload as civic responsibility is a liar.

What’s wrong with news addiction?

Be they binges on news or food, most inputs enter an organism only to transit out. My recall of the news I guzzle is appallingly poor. Oh, I occasionally snatch a statistic and hold onto it, the way a single kernel of corn can catch in your intestines for months – especially if I repeat this souvenir factoid to others. By 2015, according to the IMF, non-financial public and private debt stood at $152 trillion, or 225% of worldwide GDP. I did not need to look that up, because I have trotted it out a dozen times. Or, a recent favourite: in the UK, the top 10% pay 90% of the taxes. So I’m relieved to have learned something from the newspaper semi-permanently. But otherwise, I sometimes discover that I’m watching a CBS News we’ve forgotten to delete, and I can get through ten minutes’ worth before realising I’ve already seen it. Show me a Daily Telegraph whose entirety I read five years ago, and I doubt I’d recognise a single article. I’d struggle to recapitulate the bullet points, much less the details, in most of the articles I read last week.

Ironically, following an ongoing story blow-by-blow can impede long-term retention of the big picture. I read all about the trial, but did the Charleston church shooter Dylan Roof get the death penalty in the end, or not? Ditto Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber: what was his sentence? Although I can remember his running over his brother, his bloody scrawls on that boat. Too many trees, not enough forest – which can be a problem with journalism across the board.

If I can’t remember most of this stuff, what’s it for?

Furthermore, little of the news I swill makes any serious impact on opinions I already hold. Like most people’s, my confirmation bias is thriving. I rarely scan for information that challenges what I think, much less contravenes it; I scrounge instead for scraps that back the case for pre-existing conditions. Sure, I read many opinion pieces with which I disagree and routinely submit to broadcaster biases I don’t share – the better to become energisingly disgusted. For me, television news programmes are sporting events, opportunities for a workout.

News may distort as much as it illuminates. Journalism elevates politics – in the narrow, most party-partisan sense – above all other fields of endeavour. But for Americans, is what’s going on in DC really the most important aspect of their lives? Is the happiness of the British public primarily determined by shenanigans in Westminster? By obsessing over who’s in and out of favour in the cabinet, or over the exact state of play regarding Congressional investigations of the Trump campaign and Russian hacking, the news media sideline developments in science, medicine, engineering, the arts … Everything else is sidelined, to the point where it becomes hard to remember that there is anything else. But most spats between elected officials and their jockeying for advantage will prove historically meaningless. Do we really care anymore about the rivalry between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, covered in minute, incremental detail in the British media for years?

The media’s blinkered focus on party politics makes us dumber. All the time and energy we squander on transitory, trivial shifts in governmental power, strategy, and policy might be devoted to learning about other places and other spheres. When the US federal government puts a Gone Fishin’ sign on its door from lack of Congressional funding, for ordinary citizens nothing changes. If the federal government were as vital as its lavish coverage implies, regular life should come to a halt. Instead, hoi polloi pissiness during a government shutdown has centred solely on the closure of national parks.

Media fixation on politics also convinces the audience that they are cleaved into antagonistic, irreconcilable camps – thereby encouraging discord, enmity, and a limited, rather squalid sense of what constitutes an identity. Emphasis on party affiliation invokes a dismally reductive concept of “community” (a debased term I avoid). Lately in the West, factional animosity within countries often exceeds the animosity between countries, and the news media only makes internecine polarisation worse.

In privileging party politics, the news media may simply be lazy. Political stories are always at ready hand, since scads simply sail through the letterbox. Ever eager to promote their brand, politicians are easy to identify, to contact, to extract quotes from, and to convince to appear on late-night programmes. More difficult to locate, informed professionals in other fields are harder to persuade to leave the family dinner table and show up at 10pm for Newsnight (television news seldom even pays a contributor’s fee). Most practised politicians are comfortable on camera; experts within other purviews may know what they’re talking about, but they won’t as reliably perform well on TV.

The news industry’s cosy, mutually back-scratching relationship with government almost effortlessly fills airtime and column inches. But this symbiosis is not in the interests of the consumer. If nothing else, much political coverage is boring – which is why the news junkie is, quite sensibly, a minority crackpot.

Yet the biggest downside to news addiction is its opportunity costs. Imagine what I might accomplish with an extra 4.5 hours daily (remember, with those additional magazines and documentaries, that total can climb even higher). Fair enough, maybe that time would otherwise seep into sleeping too long, back-to-backing Judge Judy, and lying dully in wait for invading neighbourhood cats to scare them away from pooping in our garden. But were the ideas to keep flowing, I could also write twice as many novels (or, perversely, twice as much journalism). I could read many more books, including in-depth nonfiction that I might actually remember. I could tutor students in English at the school across the street. I could learn Spanish. I could go back to ceramic figure sculpture, and to drawing still lifes with coloured pencils. I could watch more great movies, listen to more music, and attend more exhibitions. I could finally get round to the second season of Follow the Money, languishing on our set-top box for months. Rather than slump before CBS News, I could idle to the patio and stargaze as I floss.

Why, by doubling my free time, I could contemplate my life, the people I love, the places to which I’ve travelled, and the mystery of existence all with a less fettered gaze, one not shuttered by obsession with the latest. Consider the very word “news” – which eliminates everything else that’s already happened.

Read part 2 of this piece here.

There has been no more engaged observer of these developments than Emily Bell. First digital editor of the UK’s ‘Guardian’ newspaper, she was wooed by New York’s Columbia University to head its Tow Center for Digital Journalism. She retains her association with The Guardian as a member of the Scott Trust (which owns The Guardian and The Observer). So she spans both the Atlantic and the worlds of old and new media.

When UnHerd was looking to focus on the future of journalism and the impact on it of social media, we were anxious to hear from her. These are lightly-edited excerpts from her interview with Nigel Cameron, our tech editor.    

Recommended reading

Social media. What are we to do?

By Nigel Cameron

Those pre-Facebook days

The dawn of the commercial internet was around 1995 – internet 1.0. Most publishers began to be aware that there was this thing called the internet that would affect their businesses and that they needed to do something about it. In the very early days for journalism it meant that we saw things through a pretty narrow lens. Publisher after publisher imagined a world in which they could just publish more – in other words they thought it would be an expansion of the existing pipes. A way of just pushing more text and still pictures onto the public, because of course that was what we were talking about back then. 

There was a period of around five years between 1995 and 2000 when publishers thought this would just be a big opportunity to basically put newspapers online, almost literally. I remember that the Daily Telegraph was the first – I recall going to the launch at the Science Museum. We watched a video of a newspaper on the internet, complete with the ads placed where they were in the print edition. 

Then we all started to work on what this would really mean. In 1999 my boss, Alan Rusbridger, wrote a piece in The Guardian about how he thought by 2020 we wouldn’t have print any more. A bit of an over-estimate, but the broad direction of travel he got right. 

When readers began to post…

So in the pre-Facebook period that stretches from 1995 to 2005 you had a lot of what now looks like pretty crude experimentation. Some of the more experimental – and I think The Guardian was the most experimental in the world – did begin to add talk threads, for instance, where readers would post things themselves. 

That may seem like very small fry these days, but it was a big philosophical step for a company that had spent over 100 years editing everything that it put under its masthead to allow not merely journalists, but anyone, to post things. It was a really significant change in how we thought about connecting to our readers, and also about taking risks.

But then in 2002-04 web 2.0 technologies started to emerge, and peer-to-peer networks, commenting systems, the ability of anybody to post multi-media from anywhere at any point… That was when the publishing industry started to realise that it wasn’t just going to be a disruption to the form or frequency with which they published, but a complete inversion of the way that people consumed, made, participated in, media. 

Some of us had already realised that this was going to be a really significant change. But we still saw the real-time social web as something that journalists could participate in as long as their news organisations were digitally literate enough – providing new kinds of services and voices to a much broader, often global, public. It was an exciting time, and don’t forget that up until 2005 we might not have been making huge amounts of money but we were certainly breaking even and seeing very good returns on advertising revenue. So when people say why on earth didn’t you all put up paywalls in 2000 or 1996, the answer was that there was a very healthy initial advertising environment. 

Facebook and Google: the advertising revolution

But that was where the real change occurred. The disruption from Facebook and Google wasn’t so much in the creation or distribution of content, but in the advertising model. It was totally re-created through targeting technologies based on people’s behavioural information. 

For broadsheets, broadly speaking, the split of revenue in high-quality news organisations was 70% advertising, and 30% reader or subscription revenue. You could invert that in the tabloid press. But advertising completely underwrote the press, and had done for 150 years. 

We could see that it was going to migrate. First, Craigslist came along with chronically low overheads and a free classified offer. In places like The Guardian that were heavily dependent on classifieds, we realised we had to re-think our own classified businesses. With the passage of time, we came to see a coming exit from classified – which was pretty terrifying for local papers and for big publishers. But we still felt that Google was really bad at delivering what we call display advertising, which would still be a pretty healthy business online if we could connect audiences to products in a slightly more creative way. But then that opportunity disappeared as phones became smartphones and Facebook went public.

The Guardian's modern mission

Will Guardian readers approve of their Editor's mission to understand?

By Tim Montgomerie

Today, in the real-time social web, nearly all social consumption takes place through mobile. Social and mobile are basically the same thing. We might have 30-40 apps loaded on our phones, but on average we only use five or six every day, and the percentage of overall usage is about 30-40%; news and weather apps are about 3%. So if you’re trying to get people to come to your owned and operated property, particularly in the mobile environment which is increasingly where your readership is located, well, you’re playing a losing game. 

In any case, digital for many in news organisations both on the commercial and editorial side always felt like a forced march. Print is a very specific set of skills, and some of them are transferable to digital but some are quite different. The journalists, the reporters, had the easiest time, because really in a way they were the ones least affected by how the format was being changed; and they really liked the idea that you could get stories out to people in different ways, and report them as they happen. But for everybody else, there was a lot of foot-dragging. People were pretty scared. They could see that disruption was not necessarily going to be a good thing for them. 

Facebook’s arrival was not just a challenge to traditional journalism and publishing, but also to a lot of other social networks set up between 2000 and 2010 – they were all swept away by Twitter and Facebook. And back in 2013-14 everyone thought Twitter was going to be bigger than Facebook. But then, through superior strategy, Facebook began to swallow up journalism and swallow up the rest of the world. 

Instagram and IPO: Facebook’s brilliant strategy

The two things it did that were absolutely genius moves in the market, which people underestimated at the time, were purchasing Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, which seemed an absurd amount of money, and pivoting into mobile; Instagram gave them a hinge. So pre- the Instagram purchase, and pre- the Public Offering, people thought that Facebook didn’t really get mobile, didn’t feel like a mobile site, and they were pretty stuck in their tech. Post- the IPO and re-investment in mobile with the purchase of Instagram, things started to look really different. 

And that’s when journalists began to really think, hang on a second, if this platform grows at the rate it’s growing at the moment… The thing about Twitter is it’s a broadcast platform – composed of links back to our world. Facebook has become much more of a walled garden. They have your identity, they publish long posts and pictures, and it’s very clear that they are encouraging you to do that regularly. I think 2013-14 was when people in the publishing industry really started to see Facebook as a revenue generator – that they might be able to reach a different audience on, or that could very easily take their business away overnight.

In 2014, I gave the annual lecture at the Reuters Institute, which was entitled prophetically “Silicon Valley and Journalism: Make-up or Break-up?” – in which I described the fraught nature of this relationship. Silicon Valley companies, especially Facebook and Google, and to some extent Twitter, were taking on some aspects of being publishers without picking up on the responsibility or the real cost of creation. And, therefore, it was beholden to the news industry and the Valley to work out what that relationship really meant, particularly since these platforms are not very clear about their intent. They don’t see themselves as publishers, or certainly didn’t in 2013 or 2014, even though those of us who study publishing do see that that is very clearly the direction of travel.   

The feeling that they could sidestep their responsibility by just insisting that this was a mutual technology was so patently not going to hold.

Facebook goes after the old publishers . . .

From 2015 we saw this rapid roll-out of new products aimed specifically at publishers. These were from Facebook, from Google, from Apple, from Twitter, all designed to capture more of your content and more of your audience’s attention and time and keep them within whichever app it was they were on. The idea was that it would be good for publishers, because there would be a beneficial financial relationship that would formalise the somewhat scrappy and somewhat adversarial relationships of the past. 

But the money just didn’t move quickly enough to the publishers, and in some sectors – particularly local journalism – the devastating effects of having two players (Facebook and Google) in the market mop up 90% of the growth, particularly in mobile, meant that local newspapers started to close. 

. . . and sees off the new?

And in the last year we’ve seen the digitally native companies that everybody thought would be the new institutions – the Buzzfeeds, the Voxes, and so on – beginning to fail. And they’ve begun to fail because they don’t have a model that can survive outside the patronage of something like Facebook, and Facebook is not going to pay Jonah Peretti (Buzzfeed CEO) enough to maintain a 2,000-person creative workforce around the country when Facebook can actually be doing that and making bigger margins on it for itself. 

Interestingly, right now, having a legacy brand is not necessarily a bad thing. There are reasons why companies like The Washington Post and The New York Times and even maybe to some extent The Guardian and the Financial Times and so on are weathering the storm, while all the VC-backed, advertising-based new players in the space like Vox and Buzzfeed are all facing bigger challenges than traditional publishers are. 

Impact of the 2016 US election

The game-changer in 2015-16 was the US election. It was about that point that people began to realise that the way to reach big audiences really was through Facebook. We at the Tow Center did a report on this, recently written up on Gizmodo, that the sites on the Right were being disadvantaged. 

The point was, this publisher wasn’t being honest about its effect on the news sphere. The 2016 election result, combined with Facebook getting rid of its curators, a series of disclosures about “fake news” and then Buzzfeed’s sensational series on it post the election, meant that things really changed. 

Facebook’s experiment with six fragile democracies

Facebook began to panic: how could they deliver good quality news to populations without being accused of spreading fake news? So they decided to run an experiment in six small geographically disparate markets – all with fragile emerging democracies – in which they re-adjusted their news feed. Editors in these markets began to notice that they were losing 60% of their traffic. These countries didn’t really have an established legacy press, so issues of media and news literacy were being learned by populations coming online through mobile and into an environment controlled by Facebook. 

We’ve been tracking that at the Tow Center, and some of it is definitely true. But most of that drop happened before the changes were announced. So we think that Facebook implements changes, then announces them, rather than the other way around.  

The shocking thing was the lack of notice. Facebook did this completely experimentally; they didn’t warn any of the news outlets in these territories, didn’t work with them, and then post hoc said that they were dropping the experiment. 

Inside Facebook they’re saying that what they’re trying to do is ensure that good journalism does better. That over time what they are trying to do is essentially the thing that they have always pretended they wouldn’t do, which is pick winners in this market and create a set of machine-readable standards through which certain types of publishers will do better. 

The overall effect is that the fake news and the spam sites and the viral sites are meant to be less prominent in the news feed, and higher quality news more so. The problem is we just don’t know how that’s going to play out, and I don’t think Facebook knows either. 

The need for regulation

But we do know that for publishers Facebook is this (sometimes but not always benign) dictatorship. And we know that the political conditions for living in an autocratic, repressive, regime are that you don’t have due process, and you can’t predict what’s going to happen tomorrow – the rule of law is flimsy or non-existent. And in a way that’s what Facebook has imposed on the publishing world: an opaque dictatorship with no real rules in terms of your own agency, and where you have no foresight or insight into changes it’s going to make. 

Even if, as techies say, screens are going away and we’ll be living with ambient media and different types of wearable technology in the future, it doesn’t mean we won’t have the same big data-aggregating companies controlling most of what you see and do and buy. And really only regulatory intervention will stop the landscape being completely dominated by the people who are currently dominating it.

I do think we will have this period, a bit like we did after the industrial revolution, of social and governmental reform and regulation. We have to decide whether or not it’s right for large pan-national organisations like Facebook to be the United Fruit of the 21st century – going into new territories, harvesting data (not bananas), perhaps causing democratic upheaval, and not paying the price.

And the future?

So I think in the future publishing and journalism will split between those that have the ability to aggregate audiences and reader-centric revenues offline, or in any case away from the big platforms, and those who can use the distributive super-powers of Big Tech to their advantage. 

We can expect to see a smaller number of bigger publishers, and we will we have to see a much bigger move toward civic media that is not dependent on the free market. Europe already has this through public-service broadcasting and public media traditions. In America there’s much less of it. But I don’t see how otherwise we’re going to replace local reporting, as it just isn’t going to be profitable in the environment we’ve created. 

‘Why doesn’t a group of them just get together and sort out what’s best for the NHS/foreign policy/how to teach English in schools [delete as applicable]?’ is another manifestation of the same desire. ‘Politics’ should be removed from the process, because ‘facts’ — as agreed upon by an apolitical committee — will tell us the truth.

This lament speaks to latent beliefs which are widespread : (1) that political assertions (such as ‘We should remain within the EU’, or ‘Putin affected our election result’) can be logically interrogated, with reference to evidence (‘facts’), such that their absolute truth or falseness may be deduced, and (2) that ‘they’ should do this evidential sifting for ‘us’.

Neither belief is correct; adherence to the second is politically dangerous. That danger is no longer theoretical: the hysteria over ‘fake news’ has led to a new German law to fine social media platforms which don’t remove news deemed to be fake (as well as hate-crime-speak; but these issues, conflated everywhere, are not quite the same). President Macron of France — the ‘why can’t we take politics out of politics’ desire made flesh — is proposing something similar: to criminalise parties deemed to spread fake news during an election.

Even absent legislation, there are similar urges in the UK. During last year’s general election there was no arbiter more powerful than the Channel 4 News fact-checker. Statements by mere politicians could be verified or nullified with reference to the decision of the makers of a television programme. It’s not that great a leap to imagine the creation of a Truth Committee to determine the claims which may or may not be made in a British general election.

No-one asks about the political proclivities of these fact-checkers: facts are independent of politics, is the theory. I’m going to argue that the theory is wrong. Before you dismiss me as an anti-evidence, irrational conspiracy nut (“It’s Channel 4 News, guv! Out to get me!”) let me say that I worship evidence and facts (if not Channel 4 News), and explain how I teach statistical inference to the scientists and physicians with whom it’s my blessing to work.

Our work is drug development, and the basic hypothesis, with regard to any molecular entity in development, is this: the drug is effective in the treatment of a particular disease. Is that hypothesis either true or false? I ask the scientists. Yes, they say. So how do we determine its true-false status?

“We conduct clinical trials, and you guys do funny things with the numbers — the facts, the data — at the end. We want to know more about those funny things,” they say. “That’s why we’re on this wretched course.”

I then ask: Are all swans black? while showing a picture of a white swan. We deduce that the black-swan theory is false, based on the fact of one white swan. But deduction is rarely available to us in experimental science: I change the picture to a single black swan (All swans are black: true or false?), then ten black swans (True or false?) then ten billion black swans (True or false?). In other words: there is a truth about this swan/drug, but it will be forever outwith our deductive reach. I say:

Imagine the drug is held, behind your head, by a puppet-master. If you could turn your head you could see the truth directly: but sadly, you’ve been shackled to the ground, facing away from the truth, deep within a cave. The puppet-master is behind you, in the mouth of the cave. The sun shines through the entrance, and casts a shadow of the truth onto the wall. All you can see is that shadow.

In other words, I nick everything from Plato (minus the fire). The concept is that all we ever have are the shadows on the wall of the cave, and it is the job of statistical inference to induce, from those shadows — the data, the facts — statements about the relative plausibility of a theory, conditional on those data/shadows. We do the best job humanly possible, but this is never the same as turning our eyes directly upon the truth.

I think the political analogy is obvious? Consider a theory about fake news and the EU referendum, that the result is flawed because we were ‘lied to’. Various facts flicker on the wall in front of us: the amount of money the UK sends to the EU, the net amount once rebates are taken into account, the theoretical spending power of a British chancellor once the EU has been left.

We all look at those same facts: the facts are not the issue. But we look at those facts, by necessity, from different perspectives: if I’m shackled at the far left of the line of prisoners, for example, and you’re at the far right, isn’t it probable that we would look at the same facts but come to different conclusions about the truth? Neither of us is ‘wrong’ — we are both rationally using facts to update our belief — but there’s nothing in this inference-machine that says our beliefs must instantly cohere, even if confronted with the same set of facts.

Politics isn’t science. The puppet-master in drug development is a randomised clinical trial: the best machine to generate data about experimental theories. And scientific hypotheses, while complex, are simple compared to the ones with which we engage in general elections.

In politics there are lots of puppet-masters, and lots of different truth-objects from which to choose in order to illustrate a general point. Consider benefit reform, and imagine all the different ways you could describe the truth about a particular policy, each one a pebble of truth on the beach outside the cave.

The Guardian might pick up the truth-object ‘Change can cause harm’, and cast shadows/stories about terrible cases of hardship. The Daily Mail might choose ‘Current rules lead to abuse’, and show you enormous families of the work-shy. Neither The Guardian nor the Mail are misleading you (and how you react to the shadows will be a function of where you are sitting in the line of prisoners, remember).

It’s not The Guardian’s or the Mail’s job to pick up every pebble on the beach for your benefit. It’s not anyone’s job: it is a job which is literally impossible. This – and the issue of perspective, which must inevitably alter your response to the facts – you could call ‘the voter’s dilemma’.

It’s a dilemma not resolved by passing the buck onto a ‘fact checker’ or a French judge or a German criminal court. The least worst option is to look at as many facts as possible (within agreed parameters — I’m no fan of hate-speech) and not to restrict (are you listening, ‘Stop Funding Hate‘?) the variety of ‘puppet-masters’ (who see themselves as truth-tellers, after all.)

So: are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

In terms of the ‘voter’s dilemma’, all news is ‘fake’, even when it’s completely honest. Facts alone can never tell you what to believe about a political theory: response to facts is determined by the prior experience of this life to which each of us is shackled.

And asking a third party to determine which facts we may inspect is like rolling a boulder over the mouth of the cave and shutting out the sun, while wriggling deeper into the stifling darkness. Here is the news: a sore backside, followed by suffocation, isn’t the same thing as enlightenment.

Journalism faces a twin crisis. Its economic problems are well known. The young person who is happy to spend £2 for a Caffe Americano from Starbucks or even £3.40 for a Strawberries and Cream Frapuccino Blended Crème will, alongside the paper cup bearing their scribbled name and the green Mermaid logo, also clutch a free-sheet like the Metro – if they clutch any newspaper at all. While they may be willing to pay for quality coffee they’re unwilling to invest in quality journalism.

This makes it harder for newspapers like The Times to invest in the campaigning journalism that saw Andrew Norfolk expose Rotherham’s child sex scandal. The economic weakness, accelerated by Facebook and Google’s hoovering up of advertising revenues, reinforces the other big weakness – a herd-like remoteness from how many people now struggle through their lives.

Headquartered in big cities like London, New York and Los Angeles the average newsroom has always reflected the values of metropolitan areas. Journalists are invariably better off, more secular, liberal and left-wing. But, as the last eighteen months have demonstrated, when few in the media anticipated – or even felt equipped to explain – the votes for Brexit, Trump and then (in huge numbers) for Corbyn, the gap between the reporters and the reported upon has become a yawning one.

Media outlets that are rightly so careful to properly promote more women and ethnic minorities have been largely blind to absences of deeper forms of diversity and therefore capacities for understanding in their teams. I recently asked a BBC editor if any of the people working on his flagship current affairs show had backed Brexit. He thought not. The New York Times admitted its failure to understand its country’s election partly reflected a lack of journalists with religious knowledge. In one of the most religiously observant nations on earth where evangelicals and Catholics can decide presidential fortunes that’s not an insignificant failure.

The gap has many explanations. There are fewer local and regional reporters. Media models that are working commercially are specialising. That includes high-end financial titles like the FT and Wall Street Journal or controversial, ideological platforms like Fox News – where anchors earn as much as CEOs. Neither connect or unite.

Talking to UnHerd.com, the new media platform I’m editing, the BBC’s Jonathan Dimbleby pointed to the contribution of technology. Journalists were traditionally isolated from their HQs and, without mobile phones, filed by primitive methods of communication. Today, with Twitter, every hack knows what other hacks have instantly concluded about a topic. Independent thinking isn’t impossible – but it’s harder. Dimbleby also points to a celebrity factor. He notes how top BBC talents are omnipresent:

“They have to keep talking. They’re wanted on television, on radio, online. How they have time to think for themselves – to have those background conversations with people who give them a unique insight – I do not know. I fear looking and listening, they don’t have enough time.”

It is regrettable that the BBC isn’t different enough from other players – its unique funding system should mean public service can trump ratings. It should be the ways in which a 24/7 rolling news culture encourages short-termism in western societies – where politicians are judged on latest polling ratings and businesses on quarterly returns. Because, rather than endlessly debated biases to left or right, the most damaging biases of ‘fast news’ are to the new over the important; to the negative over the positive; to the controversial over the consensual; to celebrity over the learned; and to politics over the cultural, technological and other upstream influences on our times (watch video).

I suspect that an unwillingness to examine the weaknesses of ‘fast news’ led outlets like CNN to encourage a shifting of blame to ‘fake news’. While there is much that is untrustworthy on the wild-world-web it was CNN and other supposed media grown-ups that gave Trump $5.6 billion of free coverage. They gave him that coverage because more people stopped channel hopping when his orange visage was on screen than when Hillary Clinton or any of his rivals for the Republican nomination were ‘live’.

We’ll make mistakes at UnHerd and having put our heads above the parapet I know those mistakes will be seized upon. But when even the BBC’s general election coverage was trusted by less than half of Britons, experiments in journalism may be risky but are vital. Our aim to master a few topics and by publishing diverse ideological perspectives we hope to gain audience trust. By doing less politics and more history we hope to provide more context. We’re looking forward to debating our approach and learning from an industry which still employs some of the most talented and public-spirited of truth-seekers. Hopefully, ventures like UnHerd, will encourage the industry to bring out the best in those talents.

In this sixth and final reflection Jonathan Dimbleby remembers how ITV[1. Formed in 1955 as a commercially-funded rival to the BBC, which was and is financed by a licence fee that was paid for by all households with a TV] was once a real rival to the BBC in Britain as a source of intelligent news and of investigative reporting. There was Alastair Burnet, who presented News at Ten and also edited The Economist during a distinguished career[1. The Irish Independent captured Sir Robin Day’s description of him as “the booster rocket that put ITN into orbit”]; there were programmes like Brian Walden’s Weekend World – that we highlighted two days ago – and which hosted extended and forensic interviews of politicians; and there was the investigative programme World in Action. ITV and ITN, remembers Dimbleby, exposed the blue asbestos scandal, nuclear waste issues at Sellafield, and began the exposure of the miscarriage of justice that put the Guildford Six in prison. It also forced a slightly complacent and old-fashioned BBC to raise its game. Regrettably, because of commercial pressures, ITV doesn’t offer programming of similar pedigree today. Instead – because viewers have so many alternatives – news is often sensationalised in order to attract any attention at all. But, as Jonathan Dimbleby concludes, there’s still BBC Radio 4 and its continuing commitment to Reithian[2. The BBC’s own summary of John Reith’s belief that the Corporation, for which he was the first director-general- must inform, educate and entertain] standards. Although I suspect that not absolutely everyone will agree that.

Watch the other clips from UnHerd’s interview with Jonathan Dimbleby.

In the fifth clip from our extended interview with Jonathan Dimbleby he expressed a similar wish for more people from universities, cultural institutions and commerce to take part in programmes like his own Any Questions? panel.

Click here for all of the clips from our Dimbleby interview.

• The danger of competition between rolling news channels producing a focus on the new rather than ‘what matters’…
• How modern technologies (where every reporter follows every other reporter’s opinion on Twitter and other social media) can produce a hive-likemindedness – a herd-like tendency that is exacerbated by the over-deployment of top reporting talents on multiple platforms, leaving them inadequate time to think freshly about a story…
• And the responsibility of mainstream broadcasters to keep challenging the strong desire in all of us – fed, argues Jonathan Dimbleby, by too many newspapers, columnists and wild-world-web platforms – to believe what we want to believe from narrowcast platforms with a mission to entertain rather than enlighten.

In today’s fourth clip (there are two more to come) the host of BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? panel programme turns to the decline of the long-form TV interview – made most famous by Brian Walden on Sunday mornings (and for those feeling nostalgic at even the mention of the great Mr W’s name here is a jog down memory lane for you). In addition to arguing that these long and forensic examinations of a politician’s policies or prospective policies added to the quality of governance, Jonathan (from 3 minutes 41 seconds) notes that the simultaneous rise of the “chippy”, even “rude” political interviewer is actually a gift to the MP or minister. Politicians know that an unnecessarily hostile interviewer helps them, because some of the audience will start to feel more sympathetic to the target of the journalistic sneer. Donald Trump’s endless attacks on the press reflect his awareness, after all, that only the press rivals him for unpopularity and untrustworthiness. Personally, I think that an increasing proportion of the public, because of the anti-politics mood, enjoys seeing their ‘overlords’ getting Paxman’d. What is true, however, is that too many interviewers like the attention of the bright lights – and that risks taking attention away from the politician’s command of the subject matter – that should be in the spotlight and, under the great Mr Walden, nearly always was.

Conscious of human beings’ limited time to consume news – rather than read, exercise, rest or as Allan Mallinson recommends, study more history – this three minute clip concludes with his worry that there’s a tendency in all of us to choose to believe what we want to believe. While that tendency may have always existed it’s more of a danger when so many narrow-versus-broad-cast platforms (and that must include the Trump White House and his Twitter stream) are so ready to serve up what audiences want to consume. As David Frum warned – so pertinently – so much news is now little more than a subsidiary of the entertainment industry.

David Frum’s 2012 interview about the ‘Conservative Entertainment Complex’ is well worth your time btw…

“I’ve often thought that if I’d been a journalist in the Holy Land at the time of our Lord’s ministry, I should have spent my time looking into what was happening in Herod’s court. I’d be wanting to sign Salome for her exclusive memoirs, and finding out what Pilate was up to, and — I would have missed completely the most important event there ever was.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge[1. Quoted in How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society by John Sommerville, 1999]

Allan Mallinson imagines the recollections of a hack who was there… and who did miss the story…

***

I nearly wasn’t there at all.

At this distance in time, I’ll admit it: if it hadn’t been for the Centurion, I don’t think I’d have been there at all. Jerusalem was a fine place – everything a foreign correspondent needed: contacts, plenty of stories, and all the comforts. But it always got crowded at “Passover.” Prices shot up and you couldn’t get anyone to do anything (except slaves). It was against their religion. So I’d planned to take a short holiday by the sea. At first I thought I’d go up north to Galilee. It was pretty quiet there – and great fish. But it was quite a hike up the Jordan valley, and the roads were bad, or else you took the direct route through Samaria, where nothing ever happened. We’d call it “flyover country” today (and, yes, full of immigrants).

Anyway, the Centurion tipped me off that there might be trouble. All leave had been cancelled for the Temple Guards. The Jewish authorities were boiling up because of subversives from out of town. From Galilee in fact, which was another good reason not to head north. I certainly didn’t want to fall under suspicion myself.

Lucky break: Herod coming to Jerusalem

And then I heard from a source at the Roman prefect’s office that Herod was actually coming to Jerusalem for the feast. I might get an interview with him there. Another exclusive with Herod Antipas would do me no harm with the editor. He was obsessed with Herod’s court, ever since the Salome business a couple of years ago.

That was my first real scoop. Salome was Herod’s step-daughter, and the star turn at his birthday party. I’d somehow managed to wangle an invite – celebrities always liked having their parties splashed (and what parties Herod threw!).

She could dance, that girl – Salome – and she certainly knew how to dispose of her seven veils. Herod was hot for her, plain to see. So when she’d finished he promised her anything she wanted – up to a quarter of his kingdom. But did she ask for diamonds, like a good Jewish girl? No! She asked for some poor boob’s head on a plate! It seems a man called John had been going about moralising and dunking people in the Jordan – what the Jews called mikveh, and the ones who spoke Greek called baptism. What this “baptism” was I never discovered, but John “the Baptiser” overstepped the mark one day when he slated Herod for marrying his brother’s sister. Not surprisingly, Herod threw him in jail. Not content with letting him languish there – he’d been locked up for a good three years – Herod’s wife, Herodias, wanted him dead. So that was that.

Anyway, another scoop about Herod and Salome would be great and so I’d resigned myself to staying put for Passover.

Well, the Sunday before, I was just off for a bath and lunch at the Centurions’ Club (where I was an honorary member on account of some good copy I’d sent back while embedded with the Cohors Italica in Caesarea), when I ran into a big crowd of noisy Jews waving palm leaves near the Golden Gate (that’s the east side, towards the Mount of Olives). I thought it must be Herod and his team arriving, but after pushing through the smelly crowds, it was just a man on a donkey.

Not any old man, obviously, because they were all shouting “blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord.”  Jews are an excitable lot and had a thing about “holy men” – especially if they had long hair and looked a bit wild.

I briefly contemplated filing something about this “Lord” he was coming in the name of. But what was he promising – tax cuts, benefits, civil rights (the Jews had some cranky ideas)? I’d heard it all before, of course, but that’s politics. But then they said that by “Lord” they meant “God.”

This completely put me off, because the Jews were always going on about “God” – they only had the one, which for some reason made them feel superior. They were always claiming to be the “chosen people”, by this one god, but they were the only people in the world who believed it (I’d once filed a story under the headline “How Odd of ‘God’ to Choose the Jews”, which my editor liked).

Sadducees versus Pharisees

And to tell the truth, I nearly forgot to ask who exactly the man on the donkey was, because by now I was running late, and the centurions were lunching a rich Jew from Arimathea (a place in the hills, north-west of the city), a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jews’ council, and I’d heard there was a bit of in-fighting there – possibly a leadership challenge: people were saying that Annas’s days were numbered, and his son-in-law Caiaphas was the coming man (popular with the voters). Leadership challenges always made for good copy.

It could get complicated, because there were two parties at that time, the Sadducees, who were hardliners, the nasty party, and the Pharisees, who liked arguing, although they were always trying to catch you out. Anyway, you just made most of it up, frankly, because nobody could ever check your sources.

A non-story

Well, the man on the donkey turned out to be another Galilean, called Jesus of Nazareth. Now, I’d heard of him, for he was a great one for giving his opinion on everything, and some of it, so they said, pretty controversial. Interestingly, though, he never seemed to upset the Romans – just other Jews. In fact, I’d tried to write a piece about him a couple of years before when I’d been in Galilee for one of Herod’s parties. (He wasn’t at the party, of course. He didn’t move in those circles. I think he was a joiner or something).

The trouble was, he spoke in riddles half the time – or parables as his lot called them – and the editor didn’t want long copy. That’s the thing about Latin: it’s great for epithets – “sound bites” we’d call them today (“Multum in parvo”[2. ‘Much out of little’] et cetera). Longer stuff – those “parables” – weren’t what busy readers wanted (my editor was insistent about that). 

Fast-forward again

I don’t know where this Jesus went after his not-so-grand entrance into Jerusalem, but it was the last I heard of him until the following Friday, when there was an unholy row at the Sanhedrin.

I’d just left the prefect’s monthly breakfast for foreign correspondents – I was always invited, though technically not “foreign” (and I vaguely knew the Pontii – Pontius Pilate’s family – from back at home, who were pretty smart and on good terms with the Emperor) – when word came that the Temple Guards had arrested Jesus and were out for blood. Apparently, when they’d come for him, in a garden somewhere, a “disciple” called “Rocky” had cut off a Guard’s ear and they’d all made a run for it in the confusion. Except for Jesus, who’d gone quietly. (Why he went quietly when he could have got away I never could work out).

By the time I got to the Sanhedrin, the whole thing was over: Guilty. I wasn’t sure what exactly the charge was, but apparently it was a capital offence. (I think he’d said something like he was King of the Jews).

Now – and here’s the interesting bit (well, it would have been if things had turned out differently) – the Sanhedrin couldn’t sentence Jesus because of their quirky laws about killing people during religious festivals, so they sent him to Pilate.

Fortunately, I managed to get back to the prefecture just in time to hear a bit of the inquisition – and basically there was no case to answer. Pilate could be a sh*t but being Roman he was fair when it came to the Law. Consequently he pronounced that he could find no fault in the man. (Later, he told me his wife had had bad dreams about something like this).

Anyway, one of his advisers suddenly remembered that Jesus was a Galilean and therefore not under his jurisdiction, so Pilate sent him on to Herod. (Nazareth is in Galilee, though Jesus had been born in Bethlehem for some reason, which is in Judea, hence the confusion – enough for any decent defence brief to use to get an adjournment). What happened next, I don’t know; it wasn’t important really (these lawyers…), but back he came sharp to Pilate.

This was getting tedious and I was getting annoyed. I had, after all, hoped to get away for a few hours’ rest before Herod’s Passover party but Pilate, cleverly, decided to use the old “presidential pardon” thing, whereby at one of the big Jewish festivals the custom was to release a prisoner. He went onto the balcony and told the crowd – which had got pretty big and noisy – that he’d pardon and release Jesus.

But what did they do – the same, many of them, who’d been waving the palms the Sunday before? They all screamed “Release Barabbas!”

Now, Barabbas was a robber. “Gods above”, I thought: these people! It must all have been whipped up by someone – the Sadducees probably, or the Pharisees, or both. And after that, really, Jesus’s number was up.

I forget where they crucified him exactly. All I remember is that in the afternoon it went very dark and I thought we were in for one of those Vulcanesque Judean storms. But it didn’t actually rain and so I got to Herod’s party in good order. And I got a pearler of an exclusive with Herodias (who was herself, by the way, a real looker, as our readers always liked to be reminded). She let slip that Salome was going to be married – again – to one of Herod’s brothers. At least, that’s what I recall… But it was a time ago. And, frankly, it was pretty seedy and incestuous. Most importantly, the editor was thrilled with the story.

And that was that, except…

Next day, a queer thing happened. The rich Jew I’d met at the Centurions’ Club – Joseph from Arimathea – sought me out and told me that there’d been a gross miscarriage of justice. The charges against this Jesus of Nazareth had all been trumped up, he said, and that he’d been the sole dissenting voice in the Sanhedrin. He was adamant that Jesus was a man of peace (not, I have to say, my idea of peace – Pax Romana – but all the same…) and that he’d been put to death unjustly. In fact, he said, Jesus had taken on himself the sins of the world.

Weird.

I did have to agree that the way the Sanhedrin had gone about things didn’t look good – and Joseph of Arimathea had guts. He’d actually gone to Pilate in the afternoon and asked if he could take Jesus’s body off the wooden cross used to execute him and put it in a tomb that he’d had made for himself. That was generous but very risky – risky the Jews had very legalistic notions about what they could and couldn’t do on a Friday.

I thought briefly about filing something about the judges being out of touch, but as this Jesus wasn’t a Roman citizen, I doubted the editor would give it space. Was there another angle: his wife or girlfriend or whoever? Frankly Joseph, I said, sex sells.

He then told me a pretty racy story about a prostitute (well, that’s what she sounded like to me) and some scented hair oil but I couldn’t see how I’d make it work. Besides, I had to live in this place for at least another couple of years and I didn’t want to be declared persona non grata by the Sanhedrin, let alone Pilate. Come to think of it, being declared PNG might have been the least of my worries.

What was the point anyway?

Jesus was dead – dead and buried.

End of story.

There was no story.

So I gave him some lunch – the poor chap evidently hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before – and then, at long last, I set off for a couple of weeks by the Dead Sea at Qumran (though not before I’d filed the Salome story – for which, incidentally, the editor gave me a considerable bonus at Saturnalia).

The last I heard of Joseph of Arimathea, he’d been having a bad time with the Jews – jailed no less – but he’d managed to escape and get away on a boat for Britannia, which shows just how desperate he must have been[3. Local legend has it that Joseph of Arimathea was sent to England to preach the Gospel, taking with him the Holy Grail, and founding Glastonbury Abbey].

A postscript

It wasn’t quite the last of the story, though. I’d followed events in Palestine in a fairly desultory way after leaving eighteen months later – it all began to fall apart quite quickly after the death of the Emperor, Tiberius – and I kicked myself that I’d missed a couple of big stories. There was a hell of a revolt in Samaria which I should have seen coming, if only I’d not ignored the place (like everyone else in Jerusalem), and, second, huge fallout from that Jesus of Nazareth episode. It seems he’d had some pretty inspirational things to say after all, and though dead and gone he’d got himself quite a following well beyond Judea.

There were even stories that he’d been seen alive, so I’d obviously missed a trick in not finding out from Joseph of Arimathea what the game was. Had they switched bodies? Paid for a substitute to be crucified? Clearly something was going on – and I’d failed to sniff it out.

Of course, that’s if the editor would have been interested. You can’t sell stories just because you reckon they may be important if it’s not what people want to read.

Then the other day, the strangest thing: I got a letter from the centurion who’d tipped me off about the Temple Guards – Cornelius, whom I’d got know with the Cohors Italica. (He’d struck me then as being a thoughtful officer, not at all your average miles). Well, he’d left the army not long after the Samarian rising and joined the “Christians”, as the followers of the late Jesus were calling themselves. And he’d caused quite a stir, it seems, because of course he wasn’t circumcised. Apparently, though, the Christians decided that circumcision wasn’t necessary – that you didn’t need to be Jewish to enter into the kingdom of their one God.

(They’d even appointed Cornelius a leader – “episkopos”, preferring to do everything in Greek, apparently – in Caesarea).

So you know, I think I may have missed the biggest scoop ever. In fact, the greatest story ever told…

Or never told – not by me at least.

And at The Jupiter we thought we were the best.

***

Further to the extended caption under the image of the nails, the theologian John Piper spotlights the very public horror that was a tortuous death by crucifixion.

Jonathan worries that scope for free and independent thinking is further endangered by the way that the BBC’s biggest journalistic names are now churned on multiple platforms – reporting their take on a story or subject to both old and new media platforms – one after another after another. This limits thinking time and opportunities for basic journalistic researching that might alter or at least enrich what is reported. He doesn’t pull his punches at the end of this second when he talks about how the BBC uses its best known and “really authoritative” editors:

“They have to keep talking. They’re wanted on the television. They’re wanted on radio. They’re wanted online. How they have time to think for themselves – to have those background conversations with people who give them a unique insight – I do not know. I fear looking and listening generally, they don’t have enough time.“

RELATED LINKS

• Jonathan Dimbleby’s interview for UnHerd was recorded on 12th July and his remarks also appear in our audio documentary on the news industry.
• The first clip in this series was published yesterday and captured Jonathan’s concern that competition between rolling news stations (and, he might have added, with social media feeds) can distract us from what matters – which is exactly the diagnosis of UnHerd’s launch video.

As part of our series on the news industry’s focus on the new, the controversial, the negative and the political – rather than the important, the consensual, the positive, and the cultural, technological and religious – we spoke to the veteran British journalist Jonathan Dimbleby about how journalism has changed during his time at the centre of British current affairs.

We’ll publish his observations in a series of video clips – beginning with his thoughts on how competition between 24/7 news platforms distracts us from what matters…

• Jonathan Dimbleby’s interview for UnHerd was recorded on 12th July and his remarks also appear in our audio documentary on the news industry.
• Clip two is now online: Listening to today’s constantly transmitting journalists, I worry they lack thinking time

The New York Observer publishes an annual “media rich list” that details how much our journalists earn. Fox News show host Sean Hannity (pictured, right) topped the 2016 list last year with over $29 million in salary from two programmes.[1. Howard Altman, ‘The hosts with the most : the best paid New Yorkers in TV news’, The New York Observer, 16 November 2016 https://observer.com/2016/11/the-hosts-with-the-most-the-richest-new-yorkers-in-tv-news/] His progressive counterpart, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, finished tenth by earning “only” $7 million.

This is a staggering amount of money. Mr. Hannity’s earnings, for example, would have placed him in the seventeenth slot among corporate CEOs in America, according to a New York Times analysis.[2. Jon Huang and Karl Russell, ‘The Highest Paid CEOs in 2016’, The New York Times, 26 May 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/26/business/highest-paid-ceos.html] He made more in 2016 than current U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson did running Exxon Mobil, one of the largest companies in the world. He also earned more than the CEO of General Motors, America’s largest automobile company, and Howard Schultz, CEO of the globally ubiquitous Starbucks.

These people do not get to this level of wealth and status by delivering thoughtful, in-depth critiques of policy issues. Hosts like Hannity and Maddow entertain a consistent viewer base by reinforcing their biases. Guests on shows like these aren’t interviewed so much as either skewered like lambs to slaughter, if they represent views disfavored by the host, or used as props providing “expert” opinions that agree with the host’s. This format informs in the same way a pure sugar diet feeds a body: you get a lot of quick energy but very little that is truly nutritious.

A££ The New$ That’s Fit to Print

Print journalists also make incredible sums of money. While the salaries of leading columnists such as the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman or Paul Krugman are often “only” $300,000 or so,[3. Andrew Stiles, ‘Poor Paul Krugman’, The Washington Free Beacon, 21 April 2014 https://freebeacon.com/blog/poor-paul-krugman/] these stars of the printed page earn much more from book sales, contracts as consultants to television networks, or speaking fees in the neighborhood of $50,000 per talk. The fact that they won’t compete with America’s top fifty corporate CEO’s for compensation doesn’t mean they aren’t well ensconced in what some often call “the top 1%”.

Again, you do not get to this point by delivering unpredictable commentary. They are essentially advocates, lawyers who make the best cases possible for their points of view. The liberal economist and columnist Paul Krugman, for example, is regularly hoisted upon his own petard by conservatives pointing out his contradictions in the service of bashing Republicans.[4. See e.g. https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2013/10/niall-ferguson-paul-krugman-gets-it-wrong-again-and-again-and-again-why-does-anyone-still-listen-to-him/ ] But let’s not just pick on Paul: plenty of journalists on the right have spent the better part of the last year contorting themselves into pretzels to explain why Donald Trump is the perfect expression of Republican Party or conservative principles.

Failure to go along with the herd can be catastrophic. Mark Lasswell had been the opinion page editor at the Wall Street Journal, one of the most important jobs in conservative journalism. As the paper started to move to a pro-Trump position following the Donald’s capture of the GOP nomination, many reports allege that Lasswell, who was allegedly willing to publish pieces critical of Trump, was essentially forced out.[5. Rosie Gray, ‘Conflict over Trump forces out an opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal’, The Atlantic, 10 February 2017 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/conflict-over-trump-forces-out-an-opinion-editor-at-the-wall-street-journal/516318/] Far easier for a journalist to run with the herd than to courageously buck it.

Gossip with microphones

Less formally partisan or opinionated journalism, however, is little better. They, too, make huge amounts of money. And while partisanship doesn’t butter their bread, their reliance on “in-the-know” sources means they rise by feeding other people’s agendas. Thus they rarely provide critical analysis of what is reported: instead, the latest leak is breathlessly fed to the people as gospel truth. Again, journalism provides a sugar high but few nutrients.

This reliance also means Americans are constantly fed with stories about internal power struggles, especially in the White House. If official X is your primary source and official Y is trying to displace X, this matters intently to you as your pipeline into juicy Presidential material may dry up. Who’s in and who’s out in the White House therefore matters terribly to political journalists, hence all the stories on whether Steve Bannon or Jared Kushner is ascendant in their supposed battle for the President’s ear.[6. See, e.g., https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/jared-kushner-steve-bannon-white-house-civil-war; https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/stephen-bannon-white-house.html; https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/17/trumps-game-of-thrones-heres-what-you-mightve-missed-in-the-bannon-vs-kushner-battle-commentary.html ] How this information helps American citizens decide what they think about policies that might affect their lives is at best obscure.

Today’s gladiators

These factors combine to create an adversarial style of reporting more akin to a Roman ampitheatre than to the voting booth. Political or policy questions are always personalised; someone wins or loses. There are also always only two sides to any battle: viewers or readers who want neither Team Red nor Team Blue to win are ignored or implicitly told to get with the programme.

The coverage of the proposed Republican changes to Obamacare is a case in point. These changes will affect the availability and cost of health insurance to tens of millions of people, literally in some cases a matter of life or death. Instead of discussing the plan’s specific details, media coverage instead focuses on whether the Republicans can garner 51 votes in the Senate to procure its passage. Readers who want to know mundane details like what health services might be covered under plans financed by the Senate GOP proposal have to try to search for this information like Stanley had to march through the Congo to find Livingston.

Whither democracy?

Newspaper subscriptions are in steep decline, although the way the media have turned coverage of President Trump into a reality show where we are invited each day to see if he has been voted off our political island is producing huge profits for anti-Trump outlets.[7. Insert FT link] The number of viewers of one of the three major networks’ nightly news programmes has plummeted since 1980[8. https://www.stateofthemedia.org/2011/network-essay/data-page-5/ ; https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/evening-news-ratings-week-of-february-6-2/320609] but the journalists, who still obtain status and wealth from their pursuits, remain in denial. And the body politic is the worse off for it.

The Washington Post recently adopted a new motto: “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. True perhaps, but the plant of democracy also withers and dies if the sunlight it receives is so heavily filtered that neither light nor heat is transferred. This is the original sin of modern American journalism. If American democracy dies, it will be because journalists who are committing this sin are failing to repent before it’s too late.

***

> Henry Olsen is Editor of UnHerd’s ‘flyover country’ section and he uses his introductory guide to his work to identify eight distinct populisms that are stalking western democracy.

“Coverage of Mr Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever.” (1)

A recent review of CNN’s news coverage found 92% of it devoted to Donald J. Trump.

The details are astonishing. Of 13 hours, 27 minutes of actual news coverage on the day chosen, 12 hours, 19 minutes, was devoted to the Trump presidency. Everything else? “A mere 68 minutes – a little more than three minutes per hour” versus nearly 40 for Trump. And while CNN claims just to be doing the right thing (and it has been viciously attacked by Trump for its coverage), doing the right thing is also proving highly profitable. (2)

Taking a different tack, New York Times journalist Farhad Manjoo decided to try and spend a week entirely avoiding everything about Trump, and following other stories instead. “In one way, my experiment failed: I could find almost no Trump-free part of the press.” (3)

Manjoo goes further: “He has taken up semi-permanent residence on every outlet of any kind, political or not. He is no longer just the message. In many cases, he has become the medium, the ether through which all other stories flow.” Trump in sport, reality TV, fictional storylines.

Yet it’s not simply wall-to-wall coverage. The Washington Post newspaper, famed for its role in bringing down Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, has made an unprecedented move. It now has a subtitle, or a “strapline”, to use the British marketing term. It’s a Trump strapline: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” (4) The paper has redefined its identity for the Trump era. Have no fear, there will certainly be no darkness for Trump in the pages of the Post.  On a quick check today, 13 out of the top 14 stories on the paper’s website are on this one subject. If Democracy Dies in Darkness, what dies when the super-trooper shines every day and all day on this one fellow?

If the “Trump rate” is the extraordinary CNN 92%, what are they not reporting?

Five Stories

Here are five stories that have broken since the election in the technology field. Every one of them is important. Enormously important. Every one of them has had far less prominence than is due. Because of the Trump phenomenon.

1. China’s Quantum Quantum Leap

In a move with potentially enormous implications for U.S. and western science and security, China has – according to Scientific American – tested the spooky phenomenon known as “quantum entanglement” at a much greater distance than has been done before. Quantum mechanics is hard for us to grasp as it involves properties of matter that seem to make no sense, including “entanglement” – essentially, that a change made to the state of one particle will immediately affect another, even if it is at a great distance.

The Chinese experiment involved a satellite and stations on the ground more than 1,200km apart. According to Scientific American, the test “firmly establishes China as the front-runner in a burgeoning ‘quantum space race’ to create a secure, quantum-based global communications network – that is, a potentially unhackable ‘quantum internet’ that would be of immense geopolitical importance.”

“China has taken the leadership in quantum communication,” says Nicolas Gisin, a physicist at the University of Geneva. (5)

2. CRISPR: editing our genes

For generations, scientists, ethicists and the public have displayed anxiety as genetics has moved ever nearer to perfecting the methods that would enable us to make changes in humans – including changes that our children will inherit. While the motivation may be to cure disease, once changes can be made we all know that there will be pressure to get rid of features like shortness and fatness and baldness – and engineer in superior looks and intelligence.

Until recently, this has seemed far-fetched as only very limited efforts to make genetic changes have been possible. But fast progress in gene editing has now led to expectation of human use of the technology with the development of CRISPR – and on February 15, 2017, a long-running patent dispute as to who owns the technology was finally decided by the US Patent and Trademark Office. (6) In a clarion call in the May issue of Wired Magazine, futurist Amy Webb calls for a “national biology policy” that encompasses the ethical implications of the revolution in genetics. “The US currently has no co-ordinated biology strategy. As a result, CRISPR, along with other emerging technologies, is developing faster than our government’s ability to address it.” (7)

3. Automation and jobs

The threat of artificial intelligence/robot automation to human jobs keeps getting more serious (and being entirely ignored by governments). The latest worrying report comes not from some Luddite think tank but global consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Their conclusion, as reported in Fortune Magazine, is that “Nearly 40% of US jobs could soon be given to robots… Researchers suggested that automated bots could take nearly four in 10 (38%) jobs in the US, and take 30% of jobs in the United Kingdom, 35% in Germany, and 21% in Japan.” (8)

4. The sex robots are coming

In a July 5 report on USA Today Network, Mary Bowerman writes of latest developments in sex robots, as manufacturers of “anatomically correct” sex dolls add AI features. Retailing for between $5,000 and $15,000, these robots are programmable in complex ways – to shape certain of their features and to understand user wants. Their dissemination at decreasing cost has wide social implications (for example, there are already reports of a Japanese manufacturer selling child models). This dimension of the digital revolution has been creeping up on us with little public discussion or understanding. Is the future one in which we have sex with robots and reproduce through in vitro fertilisation? (9)

5. Cybersecurity . . . or not

Threats to computer security continue to grow. Two new reports show a wide variety of awareness and action around the world – one from a United Nations index to help differentiate countries taking them seriously from others that do not (50% have no formal national strategy in place), and another from IFSEC News. The core problem is that computers and physical equipment are increasingly linked up – “cyber-physical systems” is one term used in the trade. If instead of stealing your credit card details a hacker can bring down your home heating system, or take control of a power grid, the stakes just went up enormously. The “Internet of Things” is about just that: linking things and computers, with potentially enormous benefits in convenience and profitability – and risks just as great. (10)

Trumping the Darkness

The Washington Post’s slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” has (re)defined its mission in terms every reader will associate with the need to challenge the serial dishonesty and “fake news” of the administration and its most committed supporters. The Post is to be commended for its absolute determination to bring the truth to light. Yet there is much more to democracy than politics, and much more to politics than the doings and sayings of the political class.

The irony is plain to see. The Trump administration shows little interest in either science and technology – or indeed the arts – which are all being targeted for big spending cuts; so why play along by making editorial choices that starkly parallel the one-dimensional universe of the White House?

At the heart of Washington’s current tragedy lies the fact that the administration has been able to shape the news-reporting agenda – in disagreement just as in those areas where the press has been supportive. Trump’s absolute dominance of the media focus is the one area where supporters and critics alike are continuing to work together.

We quoted at the start Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times: “Coverage of Mr Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever.” It’s also eclipsed these five vitally important stories – vital, not least, to the greatness of America.

How to be a better news consumer

I’ve developed a few rules of thumb to mitigate the wastefulness of my addiction. Because, for any addict, tinkering around the edges – taking one less slug of those two bottles of vodka – is doomed to failure, I rarely obey these guidelines. That doesn’t mean they’re not good rules:

• Resist process stories when you only care about the result. Take elections. For those of us who follow political races the way horse fanciers do the Grand National, elections are entertainment. But if policy U-turns, interview gaffes, inaccurate polls, and vicious recriminations are not your idea of fun, skip the lot. Go to bed early on Election Day. Wake up and find out who won.
• Resist stories about what might happen. Most of it won’t. This includes policies that a government is “considering”, and an endless string of “promising” studies that might lead to a cure for cancer, ageing, psoriasis, hair loss, depression, and a crap sense of humour. You will never hear about most of these nostrums again. For that matter, regard all “studies” (“Research reveals women really are terrible drivers”) with suspicion. Methodology is all, and most of the time said-study was conducted on dung beetles, only six of which agreed to take part. Short-staffed newspapers are highly dependent on “studies” that arrive unbidden to fill out the lead section.
• Be discerning. To respect your time is to respect yourself. With news in print, taking a moment to determine whether you’re really interested in an article can seem like more bother than going ahead and reading the damn thing – but the effort repays itself. To this end, it helps to deliberately interrupt your concentration. As a giving-a-shit test, I sometimes look away, only to return to the article and suddenly realise, Oh!  I don’t care about Moldova! Purposefully disrupt the mindless, habitual grind through a publication just because it’s there.
• With TV programmes, use fast-forward. All news junkies should put news programmes on series record, to elide both adverts and earnest panels droning on about another feeble educational initiative. Personally, I never want to watch another interview with Diane Abbott. Think of that TV remote as the electronic equivalent of Dorothy’s shoes.

• To hone discernment, experiment with consuming old news. Information of enduring value will be just as fresh and pertinent a week later, if not a month or a year later. The stuff that dates within a day or so you could probably live without altogether.
• Don’t double up. Social media, websites, TV, and print constantly replicate the same information. You can end up consuming the exact same news repeatedly in different formats.
• Don’t use talk radio or 24-hour news channels for background chatter. Put on some music.  In other words, pay attention, or do something else. Too often, I only half-listen (“half” = not listening) to TV news – which is more pointless than being utterly riveted by Judge Judy.
• Discard this notion that news is necessarily a productive use of time. The news habit is indolent. News for me is clearly a method of filling time, if not killing time, in a manner that I have persuaded myself is not shameful. But when unthinking – when amounting to a kind of sleep-walking through tracts of your day – news OD is no more noble than lying in the gutter with a needle in your arm.

The benefits of news consumption

Given the precariousness of contemporary journalism, this is an obtuse juncture at which to encourage its shrinking customer base to desert en masse. I may poo-poo the idea that news neurotics like me are motivated by civic duty, but reliable, responsible, and respectably funded reporting really is critical for democracies, and critical to the world I wish to inhabit. We’ve been a little hard here on us news junkies, so let’s conclude with our redeeming qualities. I’ve flirted with cold turkey, but I know myself: I can’t do it. I don’t really want to quit. (This is where my fellow sick puppies in the church basement withhold their biscuits.)

It’s a pleasure to begin the day concentrating on something. That Telegraph could be Voltaire instead, but I don’t want to get out of bed and plunge right into Voltaire. Newspapers require a serial concentration that’s not too demanding. Moreover, there’s a convivial aspect to this ritual. I share choice titbits with my husband: “Did you know one in six Canadians is now foreign-born?” or “Finally, The Times has stopped promoting this paranoid, classist idea that the new cladding on Grenfell Tower was ‘to make the building more attractive for wealthy onlookers’.”

For both my husband and me, news supplies a medium through which to express ourselves and explore what each other believes. When shy of catastrophic, news is play – novel material to joke about, to rail against, and to fight over. It’s fun.

The news also places us all into a larger context, and binds us, however tentatively, to a larger collective existence, one full of incident and moment, even when our own lives are deadly dull. Granted, this cheap form of “community” doesn’t threaten to put us in contact with actual other people. But in theory, it should still make us more empathetic. Because I’m something of a loner, if not a misanthrope, my sampling of second-hand pathos at least beats grumpy isolation. The news keeps me company.

When I do venture out, the news gives me a passel of subjects about which friends and strangers alike are also clued up, so we always have something to talk about.  I cheerfully use the news as a social crutch.

Inferior retention may be infuriating, but after mainlining the news for most of my adult life, I’m better informed in a broad way, even if I don’t remember all the particulars. Over time, this ragbag of information has allowed me to build what I like to believe is a consistent political perspective, as well as a cohesive version of what makes people tick, even if in both instances these views are pretty bleak. (How much more of an optimist I might be if I spurned the news is a good question.) All the articles I think I’ve forgotten are rattling around in my head somewhere, and they have contributed to who I am and what I think.

For me, news provides ideas for fiction, a form that constructs simulacrums of just the sort of thing that happens to people in the news, just tidied up. For example, So Much for That was partially inspired by an article about how medical bills for people with health insurance were then the leading cause of American personal bankruptcies. Because the news is chock-full of you-could-not-make-this-up, novelists’ fiercest commercial competition by far is reality, which consistently outpaces – in outrage, in hilarity, in poignancy, in heartbreak – anything we might invent. Happily, by retouching here and there, we can help ourselves to current events, and any fiction writer who passed on all this free stuff would be a fool.

I eagerly follow some issues (demography, debt, immigration, Venezuela), while boycotting others (most sports, fashion, New York State politics, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks), because you simply cannot care about everything in the whole wide world. Yet the news can interest me in subjects about which I’d previously not given a toss. (Honeybees. Invasive carp.) Like concentration, interest is a pleasure in itself. Giving a shit feels better than indifference. As I age, I can feel the encroachment of a corrosive apathy that laps at my toes like an incoming tide of acid. To forestall that ennui, I slide into my usual news routine like pulling on wellies.

A natural polymath, I’ve a sentimental affection for the newspaper, in which I’m forever shopping for those tiny squib stories that crack me up. A few years ago I constructed a two-by-three foot collage of clippings, from the days when I mostly read hardcopy. Headlines include, “Woman sues for being born” and “Man kills wife for serving too many Brussels sprouts.” There’s a long article about a Briton who was arrested and prosecuted for barking at a dog. You can’t let gold dust like this slip through your fingers!

News is history in the making. Breaking news crashes like a wave that will never again hit the beach with the same distinctive curl.  Each instant comes around once. Revisiting it as the past doesn’t feel the same as being right there when the eternal present is unrolling, and the verdict on absolutely everything is still out. The news allows us to participate in the real-time narrative of our species, our planet, our universe. I’m addicted to the news for the same reasons I read and write fiction: I love suspense; I love psychological puzzles; I love conflict, irony, contradiction, and even my own bafflement; I love story. My daily news fix always entails an element of excitement. I turn on an evening broadcast with equal parts anxiety and appetite. This is the big story, the only truly big story, comprising a virtually infinite number of smaller stories, one of which belongs to each of us. The news helps us to inhabit the uniqueness of this very moment, and thus to inhabit the uniqueness of our era, and the singularity of our own lives.

Once a month or so, however, the brilliant Sean Glynn will be producing a much more structured interviews-based programme – not unlike BBC Radio 4’s Analysis programmes, which many of our British readers will be familiar with. Sean’s already working with the journalist Juliet Samuel on a programme for our second ‘deep dive’ series – ‘Capitalism on a knife-edge’.

Our first audio starts off with Lionel Shriver talking about her news-aholicism – and I hope you’ve already read her brilliant essay detailing her addiction. With the help of stellar guests such as broadcasters Jonathan Dimbleby and Justin Webb, and former Downing Street heads of communication Alastair Campbell and Craig Oliver, we examine my concern that the demands of 24/7 media are pulling politicians, business leaders and other public figures away from a focus on the long-term. And as I wrote in Thursday’s London Evening Standard, the eastern economies could be the big beneficiaries of our loss of focus:

“While, for example, Trump is tweeting about the media and the media is tweeting about him, China is organising its $900 billion One Belt, One Road series of infrastructure investments to encircle the globe. It has knitted old US allies into a new Pacific area free-trade zone. And it is beginning to show signs of winning the space race. In times when global power is shifting I recommend reading less news and more history.”

Michael Burleigh, one of UnHerd’s two resident historian columnists (Allan Mallinson being the other), has written about China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative for us today…. but before you read his piece have a listen to the audio documentary below. We discovered a large amount of consensus around the concern…

https://soundcloud.com/user-350933778/the-unheard-news-in-crisis

To make sure that you don’t miss a post, subscribe to the UnHerd podcasts here via iTunes.

7am
News bulletin

7.07am
Standard news report or interview

7.12am
A review of the newspapers but also a canter through a few national and international periodicals with selections chosen by the BBC’s arts, technology and diplomatic editors

7.18am
‘Mind the gap’: interview conducted by a local BBC reporter in one of the BBC’s many studios around the country… with a headteacher, small business person, trade unionist or similar community-focused figure on an issue that the reporter feels is overlooked by the London media

7.26am
Five things that happened in Parliament yesterday

7.30am
News & sport summary

7.33am
‘Today’s yesterday’ feature: two historians examine latest developments in the context of major events in the past

7.39am
Head-to-head review – two insightful figures from politics, business, education, science or culture talk about a book they’re both reading, or eg a play or film they’ve both seen, and what they’ve learnt from it.

7.48am
The utterly forgettable ‘Thought for the day’ scrapped and replaced with ‘contrarian of the day’ (so long as the contrarian aims to bring more light than heat)

• Mums who stay at home and look after their children should be rewarded, not made to feel they are dinosaurs
• France is a better friend to Britain than America
• Why I regret my abortion
• Prostitution is natural and healthy
• I read the Daily Mail and love it
• The world is safer because Saddam Hussein is gone

7.52am
Standard news report or interview

7.58am
‘Fact of our time’: not new but true – here’s a key fact about life expectancy; drug addiction; access to technology; new surgical techniques; commuting times… that puts each day’s fast-moving events into perspective.

8am
News bulletin

8.07am
The main interview of a meaty 15 minute length – and not necessarily with a politician but by way of example…

1. The TV producer of Hollyoaks to discuss viewer concerns about the latest controversial storyline of this teenage soap;
2. Facebook’s London chief management officer on inconsistencies in their child protection policies;
3. The Vice Chancellor of Exeter University on evidence of a declining pay premium for graduates;
4. The Saudi Ambassador explaining his country’s position on Qatar…

And then after that joust…

8.22am
‘Let me finish’: a public figure is invited to speak for 150 seconds without interruption. The only condition being that they can’t be party political

8.25am
Not the English speaking world but the under-reported world: a regular look at news from parts of the world where there are fewer cameras and fewer English speakers (ie not America)

8.30am
News & sport summary

8.33am
‘Today’s tomorrow feature’: two scientists, academics or ethicists look upstream to major developments in technology, culture and geopolitics that are heading our way

8.42am
‘No easy answer’: a five-minute slot in which a complex and perennial policy challenge is explained e.g. Baumol’s cost disease, tax avoidance, regulatory capture, infrastructure cost-overruns

8.47am
Standard news report or interview

8.52am
From our own correspondents – each programme ending with expert BBC editors and presenters bringing their latest knowledge into the corporation’s flagship radio programme. For example:

• In Our Time, Briefly: Talking to Melvyn Bragg, an academic explains the background to the news – e.g. the Sunni-Shia split, CRISPR gene editing technology etc
• More or Less FactCheck: A regular slot for Tim Harford – but with a right to reply from think tanks with a different take
• Thought for the Day may have gone in this revamped Today programme but a regular slot for Martin Bashir, Religion Editor, to help an increasingly secular Britain understand a still very faith-driven world
• The BBC’s media editor and guest journalist from outside the Corporation reviewing the headlines from a year ago – and asking if the big stories preoccupying us then had any lasting significance.

UnHerd.com
@UnHerd

Read YouGov’s polling for UnHerd on what US and UK adults think about the news industry and its values.

How much news do we watch?

• A third of Britons spend more than an hour a day consuming the news.
• Less than one-in-twenty admitted to more than three hours.
• A fifth are at the opposite extreme devoting none or almost none of their time to the news.
• The rest of us are in the middle: some news, but no more than an hour.
• Americans are less likely to hold back… The split between those clocking up sixty minutes or less as opposed to over an hour is roughly equal, whereas in the UK it’s two-to-one in favour of restraint.
• Furthermore, there’s a substantial population of Lionel Shriver-ish newsaholics – with more than one-in-ten Americans consuming over three hours of news every day.

What do we think of the news industry’s qualities?

• Perhaps Americans consume more news than the British because they have a higher opinion of their news providers and journalists? Respondents in both nations were asked asked about six ‘news quality’ issues from political bias to coverage of good news….
• On each issue, US respondents had a less negative view than their UK counterparts.
• The trans-Atlantic divide was especially wide on the issue of balance. 57 per cent Americans agreed that the news media were politically biased, while 12 per cent disagreed. The corresponding British figures were 77 per cent and 2 per cent.
• The second widest divide was on whether the news media “represent the weak against the powerful”. Just 11 per cent of Britons were inclined to agree as opposed to 23 per cent of Americans.
• However, it should be emphasised that these differences don’t result from a high American opinion of the news, but rather an even lower British opinion.

Books and history Versus 24/7 news

• We also asked respondents whether they’d be better citizens if they spent more – or less – time consuming the news. In both countries the majority of people took a neutral position, either feeling it would make no difference or answering ‘don’t know’.
• However, a substantial minority (three-in-ten Britons and four-in-ten Americans) thought that changing their exposure to the news would make them better citizens. In both countries the balance of opinion was substantially in favour of reducing rather than increasing their exposure.
• Given that perceptions of the news are even more negative in the UK than US, it’s not surprising that the British balance in favour in news reduction was more pronounced than in America.
• Allan Mallinson will be pleased that his recommendation for more history and less news has such an instinctively supportive audience.

It should be said our questions do not distinguish between different parts of the news media. For instance, we don’t know whether British respondents were mainly basing their perceptions of political bias on broadcast or print journalism. A case could made for both: UK newspapers are obviously partisan, but on the other hand there may be greater annoyance at subtle forms of bias in the supposedly neutral broadcast media. Either way, Americans are comparatively happier with the news they get, which could be why they consume more of it. That said, it is clear that millions of people in both countries are looking for a better way to stay informed.

It became a catchphrase.

There wasn’t much news in the BBC’s wartime bulletins, however, and what there was was measured, censored, and sometimes doctored. How could it be otherwise in a war of national survival?

Nor were there many bulletins on the Home Service (the only station, except for the Forces’ and Overseas services) – just four in the day, fifteen minutes each.[1. BBC Genome, radio listings for 30 May 1940, https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbchomeservice/basic/1940-05-30] People had things to do. So no need to talk about the future much: first win the war.

No need to talk about the past either: most people had lived it. 1914-18 had not been the war to end all wars; Britain had failed to re-arm early enough and was now paying the price. But this time there’d be no half-measures. Churchill said the aim was “Victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be.”[2. Speech to House of Commons on becoming PM, 13 May, 1940]

And he gained that victory without constant recourse to the media.

Chronic news syndrome

Contrast this with the daily news output of the Home Service’s successor, BBC Radio 4.[3. Radio 4: one of the BBC’s five principal national stations, its motto: Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.] It begins at 5.30am with a 15-minute “News briefing”. Then comes three hours of the Today programme, “the nation’s noticeboard.” In essence, Today is news – lots of it (well, repeated), interspersed with two-minute diversions into sport, faith, sport, weather, sport, the markets, and sport (although NOT if UnHerd gets its way). And just in case you missed anything, when Today ends with the 9 o’clock pips, there’s a summary of… the news. And again at midday. And then an hour later there’s 45 minutes of news. At 5pm there’s a whole hour of it, followed inexplicably at 6pm by another half hour’s news. Then, mercifully, nothing (usually) until 10pm, when there’s a final 45 minutes.

Did I say “final”? Well, not quite, because when the day ends, there’s The Midnight News – “the latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4” (half an hour of it).

There’s no such thing in the newsroom any longer as “a slow news day.” News expands to fill the time available for its excretion.[4. Parkinson’s Law – “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion” – modified, Mallinson]

Repetition is a full-time job – not just on Radio 4 but the BBC TV News Channel, “Britain’s most-watched news channel, delivering breaking news and analysis all day, every day.”

And “all day” means all night too: 24-hour news – “and analysis.”

Yet with a few exceptions, the analysis is rarely historical. Usually it’s speculation on what next, informed by the transitory. The repetition of news just creates more heat than it generates light.

The past isn’t past

Churchill once said that the Balkans produce more history than they can consume. Today, the BBC produces more news than anyone can consume, but curiously little history – news-related history (The Tudors is stretching it). It’s not just the BBC, it’s everyone – CNN, Sky, Fox, Al Jazeera &c &c (even the Balkans).

Why does this matter?

Because news without historical context is just facts, not the whole truth. In a memorable campaign speech in Philadelphia before his election in 2008, Barack Obama explained why: “As William Faulkner once wrote, ‘The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact it isn’t even past.’ ”[6. “A More Perfect Union”, 18 March 2008.]

Now, for reasons that may or may not be significant, Obama got the wording wrong. Faulkner put it more succinctly: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”[7. Requiem for a Nun (1950).] But they were both talking about the way that history haunts the Southern States of America.

If the past isn’t past, then news is the latest draft of history. News is indeed incremental history.

How, therefore, can news be understood without understanding the history?

Is it just that the Southern States are uncommonly stuck in the past? Clearly not: it’s the same – worse, perhaps – in Northern Ireland. And in the Balkans; and India-Pakistan; and the Middle East…

Anywhere there’s news, there’s “previous.”

There is a history in all men’s lives (Henry IV, Pt II).

But can’t the facts just speak for themselves? For we are where we are and can only go on from here.

Except that “here” in the “never past” isn’t a fixed point. You can’t zero history like an odometer. And what’s the point of consuming news if it’s not to inform judgement about how to proceed? Repetitive news without historical context just risks a brushfire of facts. Fanned by commentators, it can soon get out of control. Mark Sedwill, the UK National Security Adviser, said recently that the world is less dangerous than it was, but the threat is more complex.[8. Speaking at the RUSI Land Warfare Conference, 27 June 2017.] If that’s so (and I wouldn’t dispute that it’s more complex than in 1940), news needs more context.

Curing chronic news syndrome

So what’s the solution?

Abolish half the news programmes – or at least half of the programmes (ie shorten them). Adopt the Home Service 1940 model, including TV, and give the extra time to history. They already know they need it: “History hours on BBC One are limited”, says Tom McDonald, head of factual commissioning.[9. BBC commissioning, history on BBC one  www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/tv/articles/history-bbc-one]

In Britain (perhaps even in the world) the BBC is uniquely placed to re-root news in a way that couldn’t be more different from the commercial channels’ “breaking news” culture. As a public service broadcaster, with its unique funding stream, it should lead the way in saving news from its crisis. Only it has the resources, breadth of journalism and history credentials to do this. Redirect the talent and energy of half the news staff into researching the continuum and then relating the latest events in historical context.

Better to Keep Calm and Study History than just Carry On.

Of course, deciding what point in history to start will be tricky. For some places it’s probably easy enough: America, for instance – 1492. I know there were Native Americans before 1492, but that’s archaeology. In fact, for the US we could probably draw the line fairly safely at 1774. In Britain it would be 1688. Yes, I know: the Tudors? But although David Starkey and Hilary Mantel[10. Dr David Starkey: preeminent British TV historian of the Tudors. Dame Hilary Mantel: preeminent British historical novelist of the Tudors.] make them interesting, are they really important? (Not everything in history is important.) For the rest of Europe we could begin at 1789 – or, skipping all the Napoleonic nonsense, 1815. Frankly, I’d be happy enough with 1945 – the end of the war we’re increasingly forgetting – as long as we remember how got there. The Middle East? It all began in 571AD, though perhaps there should be mention of the Garden of Eden, which was in Iraq before Saddam and Donald Rumsfeld.

And the Balkans – those proud, brave but obstinate Serbs? Probably, like Pooh-Bah’s ancestry, we’d have to go back to “a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.”[11. The Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan. Pooh Bah (holder of many offices): “I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can’t help it. I was born sneering.” ] Professional historians could advise.

News is history. We should make it history.

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Watch UnHerd’s video featuring Allan Mallinson’s point about WWII coverage.