Reviewed by Gordon McLauchlan
The
News – A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton, published by
Hamish Hamilton, is beautifully designed and made, but the contents are hugely
disappointing. As a stylist, on this subject anyway, de Botton writes with the
laboured condescension of a teacher taking a third form English class. He first
states the obvious and then elaborates on it at length.
The condescension comes from the relentless use of “we” and
“us”. He tells me about how “we“ react to situations when I certainly don’t. He
might want me to be one of “us” but I’m not.
He writes: “The news is committed to laying before us
whatever is supposed to be most unusual and important in the world: a snowfall
in the tropics; a love child for the president; a set of conjoined twins. Yet
for all its determined pursuit of the anomalous, the one thing the news
skilfully avoids training its eye on is itself, and the predominant position it
has achieved in our lives. ‘Half of
Humanity Daily Spellbound by the News’ is a headline we are never likely to see
from organisations otherwise devoted to the remarkable and the noteworthy, the
corrupt and the shocking’.”
Apart from the fact this is hardly true of an industry
which is too often self-referencing, the rather pedestrian prose demonstrates
why he would never hold down a job in the news media.
He spends thousands of words explaining that news is mainly
designed to shock or at least affront us in some way, which could be summed up in
the adage that just as no news is good news good news is no news. The now
defunct Auckland Star many years ago
adopted a policy of having one good-news story on the front page every day.
Good fun and a worthy cause but fairly short-lived.
De Botton seems unable to grasp the difference between news
and commentary. He keeps insisting that a failure of news media is that it
tells what is happening but not back-grounding why. It is the first function of
a news journalists to say what is
happening and then, if the reason is obvious, why. But often why is complex and obscure and takes
time to be understood. It is then left to feature writers, film-makers, perhaps
eventually historians.
In
a wordy chapter on economic news, he writes: “At present mainstream news
organisations chiefly track the day- to-day activities within the economic
establishment. They tell us what is going on, but not with any conviction of
what might or should happen.”
I don’t know what he reads but the newspapers and magazines
I read are far too full of commentaries by people with strong convictions saying
what might or should happen.
He makes the point, laboriously, that in mass media
business and economic news is too often esoteric with economists actually
writing to other economists on arcane matters which will have little or no affect
on the lives of ordinary people. Most of it isn’t real news at all. (That’s
about half a chapter summed up.) But what he misses is what is obvious in this
country too – that journalists writing on news pages on day-to-day economic
matters of real concern to ordinary people are too often innumerate and recklessly
bandy percentages and averages around, confusing readers because they can’t
analyse the information they are processing.
The
state of modern media has become a source of endless commentary as it fragments
from a relatively few, once majestic and powerful newspapers, magazines, and
national radio and television stations into a myriad of voices each shouting
stridently to be heard.
The cacophony of blogs and tabloids with their extreme,
outlandish and mostly unreliable voices reminds me of a speech made a few years
ago to a PEN writers’ conference in Helsinki by the Finnish Minister for the Culture,
Claes Andersson, psychiatrist, novelists, poet and jazz musician . He said that
when he was a boy everyone had to be cautious and measured in what they said or
wrote; nowadays anyone can say anything they like, but no one is listening.
I think it was a mistake for Alain de Botton, pop
philosopher with an alert mind, to venture into this modern media maelstrom
without a deeper understanding of what is happening. Too many intelligent,
experienced professionals have been there before him and many will follow.
About the reviewer:
Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland-based writer and commentator and regular reviewer on this blog.
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