News Paints Grim Picture of Humanity
Madeleine Bunting: The news portrays our species as one that murders, squabbles, bullies and dies. No wonder people switch off.
It finally reached tipping point last week. Over several months, there'd been the horrors of Darfur, Beslan, the ongoing nightmare of Aids and then Falluja. Each time I'd had a sense of angry frustration. Here was ghastly suffering and what could I, should I, do? Accusingly, the phrase, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing", reverberated in my head.
What finally tipped me over last week was the camera lingering on the faces of bereaved mothers and then on the faces of bewildered orphans in Sri Lanka. The intrusiveness of our media's thirst for information and images revolted me. Surely, these people had suffered more than enough without us insisting that their grief-stricken faces be beamed into a billion homes? What does it serve the viewer - the distracted parent, the lonely elderly, the teenager hopping between channels, the bewildered child, to witness such pain? It seemed a gesture of respect to switch off.
Does that sound like turning away, a shocking irresponsibility? A dereliction of the democratic responsibility to know what is going on in the world? But you don't need to know very much about the tsunami to gather the scale of tragedy, and send off the donation. You certainly don't need to watch hour after hour of agony every night.
The list of news stories that I can hardly bring myself to watch gets longer all the time. In part, it's the horror - Beslan resulted in some of the most shocking images ever seen on television; in part, it's the fury at the gratuitous emotional manipulation of television. That combination - the neat packaging of appalling tragedy for the ultimate objectives of the broadcasters (ratings, profits etc) - is repulsive.
Pat Barker picks up the issue up in her book Double Vision. The seasoned war reporter is staggered by his young girlfriend's refusal to watch the news. "I don't see the point. There's nothing I can do about it. If it's something like a famine, OK you can contribute, but with a lot of this there's nothing anybody can do except gawp and say, 'Ooh, isn't it awful?' when really they don't give a damn," she says. Drawing a distinction between newspapers and television, she concludes that while people can read the papers, "it's the voyeurism of looking at it, that's what's wrong. Do you know, some people never watch the news, on principle?"
Barker has a point. There has been a 9% drop in the amount of news watched by the 16-35-year-old age group over the past decade. Perhaps an increasing number of people find the news too distressing to watch - and, I suspect, this trend also hits newspapers with their declining circulation. A recent study in stress at Nottingham Trent University found that watching the news triggered depression, confusion, irritation, anger and anxiety. News comes at the price of your peace of mind.
It seems as if we have an asymmetrical relationship between the vast quantities of information now available and our ability to respond to it. Once you've joined the campaign, set up the standing order, written the odd letter to an MP, what then? Is that enough? Human ingenuity and skill have been poured into developing an extraordinary technological capacity to deliver information with speed and in volume, but our capacity to act on that information painfully lags behind. The tsunami showed all too starkly how we could hear of the plight of villagers long before the aid could reach them. That lag between information and action is sometimes only a few days, more often years. A flick of a switch accesses the former; the latter requires the infinitely complex task of developing forms of human cooperation between individuals and nations. Our technological ingenuity has far outstripped our skills for social organisation.
In the gap between the two, confusion over our moral responsibility flourishes. If you see the murdered, the raped, the bereaved on your screen, what is the moral responsibility engendered by this form of witness? Michael Ignatieff elegantly articulated a widely held view, that "television has become the principal mediation between the sufferings of strangers and the consciences of those in the world's few remaining zones of safety ... it has become the means ... by which we shoulder each other's fate."
But by knowing about terrible suffering all over the world, in what sense can you "shoulder" all those fates? Isn't it a sort of self-aggrandisement to claim that the viewer sitting on the sofa at home in the UK "shouldered the fate" of the tragic mothers of Beslan or Sri Lanka? "My brother's keeper" is a crucial ideal, but how does we translate it for an age of global information flows? How do we adapt and develop ideals of human solidarity conceived in an age of tribes and peasants to be meaningful now?
That question will become more acute if a fraction of the predictions of climate-change scientists come true. We have been warned of an increase in extreme weather - more floods, more droughts, more famines and more of the conflicts that scarce natural resources invariably trigger. That exacerbates the growing danger that our media culture could increasingly undermine the capacity for human beings to shape their destiny. The scale of suffering and the frequency of crisis becomes such that it only induces disengagement. The response becomes: "I don't know what I am to do with this information so I don't see the point of knowing it." Or, as Ignatieff puts it: "Television news bears some responsibility for that generalised misanthropy, that irritable resignation towards the criminal folly of fanatics and assassins, which legitimises one of the dangerous cultural moods of the time - the feeling that the world has become too crazy to deserve serious reflection."
Today and last Monday, the Media Guardian has carried comments on the thesis of John Lloyd in his book, What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. Later this week, it's the turn of the thinktank Demos to host a debate on Lloyd's thesis that the media occupies a parallel universe to the one in which everyone else tries to do their job and make sense of the world, one far removed from the pervasive cynicism, blaming, sensationalism and judgmentalism. He has tapped a vein of deep loathing and frustration towards the media - both television and newspapers. It goes well beyond a concern about our politics to a broader issue about how the media, with their preoccupation with violence, division and fault, are distorting our understanding of human nature.
What the media portray, like one of those fairground mirrors, is a grotesque species that murders, squabbles, bullies and dies. What gets omitted is the extraordinary ordinariness that keeps people getting up in the morning; the humour, innocence, generosity, love and friendship - the very human characteristics that might begin to inspire more confidence in our ability to alleviate, rather than simply know about, the suffering of others.
What finally tipped me over last week was the camera lingering on the faces of bereaved mothers and then on the faces of bewildered orphans in Sri Lanka. The intrusiveness of our media's thirst for information and images revolted me. Surely, these people had suffered more than enough without us insisting that their grief-stricken faces be beamed into a billion homes? What does it serve the viewer - the distracted parent, the lonely elderly, the teenager hopping between channels, the bewildered child, to witness such pain? It seemed a gesture of respect to switch off.
Does that sound like turning away, a shocking irresponsibility? A dereliction of the democratic responsibility to know what is going on in the world? But you don't need to know very much about the tsunami to gather the scale of tragedy, and send off the donation. You certainly don't need to watch hour after hour of agony every night.
The list of news stories that I can hardly bring myself to watch gets longer all the time. In part, it's the horror - Beslan resulted in some of the most shocking images ever seen on television; in part, it's the fury at the gratuitous emotional manipulation of television. That combination - the neat packaging of appalling tragedy for the ultimate objectives of the broadcasters (ratings, profits etc) - is repulsive.
Pat Barker picks up the issue up in her book Double Vision. The seasoned war reporter is staggered by his young girlfriend's refusal to watch the news. "I don't see the point. There's nothing I can do about it. If it's something like a famine, OK you can contribute, but with a lot of this there's nothing anybody can do except gawp and say, 'Ooh, isn't it awful?' when really they don't give a damn," she says. Drawing a distinction between newspapers and television, she concludes that while people can read the papers, "it's the voyeurism of looking at it, that's what's wrong. Do you know, some people never watch the news, on principle?"
Barker has a point. There has been a 9% drop in the amount of news watched by the 16-35-year-old age group over the past decade. Perhaps an increasing number of people find the news too distressing to watch - and, I suspect, this trend also hits newspapers with their declining circulation. A recent study in stress at Nottingham Trent University found that watching the news triggered depression, confusion, irritation, anger and anxiety. News comes at the price of your peace of mind.
It seems as if we have an asymmetrical relationship between the vast quantities of information now available and our ability to respond to it. Once you've joined the campaign, set up the standing order, written the odd letter to an MP, what then? Is that enough? Human ingenuity and skill have been poured into developing an extraordinary technological capacity to deliver information with speed and in volume, but our capacity to act on that information painfully lags behind. The tsunami showed all too starkly how we could hear of the plight of villagers long before the aid could reach them. That lag between information and action is sometimes only a few days, more often years. A flick of a switch accesses the former; the latter requires the infinitely complex task of developing forms of human cooperation between individuals and nations. Our technological ingenuity has far outstripped our skills for social organisation.
In the gap between the two, confusion over our moral responsibility flourishes. If you see the murdered, the raped, the bereaved on your screen, what is the moral responsibility engendered by this form of witness? Michael Ignatieff elegantly articulated a widely held view, that "television has become the principal mediation between the sufferings of strangers and the consciences of those in the world's few remaining zones of safety ... it has become the means ... by which we shoulder each other's fate."
But by knowing about terrible suffering all over the world, in what sense can you "shoulder" all those fates? Isn't it a sort of self-aggrandisement to claim that the viewer sitting on the sofa at home in the UK "shouldered the fate" of the tragic mothers of Beslan or Sri Lanka? "My brother's keeper" is a crucial ideal, but how does we translate it for an age of global information flows? How do we adapt and develop ideals of human solidarity conceived in an age of tribes and peasants to be meaningful now?
That question will become more acute if a fraction of the predictions of climate-change scientists come true. We have been warned of an increase in extreme weather - more floods, more droughts, more famines and more of the conflicts that scarce natural resources invariably trigger. That exacerbates the growing danger that our media culture could increasingly undermine the capacity for human beings to shape their destiny. The scale of suffering and the frequency of crisis becomes such that it only induces disengagement. The response becomes: "I don't know what I am to do with this information so I don't see the point of knowing it." Or, as Ignatieff puts it: "Television news bears some responsibility for that generalised misanthropy, that irritable resignation towards the criminal folly of fanatics and assassins, which legitimises one of the dangerous cultural moods of the time - the feeling that the world has become too crazy to deserve serious reflection."
Today and last Monday, the Media Guardian has carried comments on the thesis of John Lloyd in his book, What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. Later this week, it's the turn of the thinktank Demos to host a debate on Lloyd's thesis that the media occupies a parallel universe to the one in which everyone else tries to do their job and make sense of the world, one far removed from the pervasive cynicism, blaming, sensationalism and judgmentalism. He has tapped a vein of deep loathing and frustration towards the media - both television and newspapers. It goes well beyond a concern about our politics to a broader issue about how the media, with their preoccupation with violence, division and fault, are distorting our understanding of human nature.
What the media portray, like one of those fairground mirrors, is a grotesque species that murders, squabbles, bullies and dies. What gets omitted is the extraordinary ordinariness that keeps people getting up in the morning; the humour, innocence, generosity, love and friendship - the very human characteristics that might begin to inspire more confidence in our ability to alleviate, rather than simply know about, the suffering of others.
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