In which I express an opinion
battle_kitten made a post earlier this week that I never got around to replying to, what with my busy life. Now that I'm having a slack day, I thought I may as well get around to it, especially in light of Certain Recent Events.
The question:
"Do you like to read newspapers/stay updated on current events? How much do you read/how indepth? What topics? International/local? Business/Politics? etc etc"
I read that, thought "Hm, that's interesting", and went about my madcap, breakneck life. Then, I saw a couple of things that made me think of that question again.
The first of this was the Daily Express's interesting concept of what is newsworthy, with its recent front page "news" story that (and you may want to brace yourself before reading this) that teenagers who use Facebook post drunken pictures of themselves and talk about girls. The story in question is about the survivors of the Dunblane shootings about 12 or 13 years ago; these people are now 18 and, like most 18 year olds, enjoy drinking, attempted fornication and the use of social networking. Note also that, now that they're over 18, they don't have as much right to privacy under British law as minors would have (I don't know the details and am too lazy to check).
The Express therefore decided to have a look at these facebook profiles and run a story entitled "Anniversary Shame of Dunblane Survivors", in which a lady named Paula Murray affected outrage at the spectacle of these teenagers enjoying themselves instead of spending their lives in a monastery contemplating their loss, as they should have done. Graham Linehan of Father Ted fame has a bit of a rant about it here.
What annoys me most about this not the invasion of these kids' privacy; after all, the stuff was all on Facebook (fair enough, as it was all completely innocuous- the best the journalist could come up with was poor spelling and collecting chat-up lines). It's the spectacle of a presumably intelligent journalist writing something utterly nonsensical in an attempt to appeal to the people who she seems to think constitute her readership. It's a blatant attempt to cook up controversy about something completely uncontroversial, for no other reason than to generate easy copy and to keep the nation in the perpetual state of outrage that the press as a whole seem to require.
And this makes me wonder what the hell newspapers are for. Jade Goody died yesterday, as I'm sure everybody now knows, after having been the subject of tabloid front-page news for the past couple of months. All sound and fury, at best signifying nothing and at worst taking up space on newspaper pages and in the nation's spleens that could be better used in pursuit of something worthwhile, or at least entertaining. In theory, the press is a vital part of the political system; there's no point in having democracy without an informed electorate, and the flow of information needs to be separate from government.
But this idea, that newspapers are important, appears to have undergone a new mutation at some point, into the idea that anything that is published in a newspaper therefore must, by definition, be important. Also, there appears to be a widespread belief that buying a daily newspaper is a Good Thing, that it's a mark of being a full adult that can be satisfied by a Daily Mail habit. I can't see a way that this, combined with the natural competitive forces that shape the newspaper market, can be anything other than damaging. People want to read about the things that they're interested in; therefore, newspapers print stories about those subjects. Those subjects then become, by definition, News, something that everyone "ought" to know about to be a full adult. Now, in the case of Jade Goody, everyone obviously realises that this story is, at bottom, irrelevant trash. But when tabloids print trash about politics, reducing parties and policies into caricatures of themselves, the caricature becomes the story; people genuinely have arguments about "too much red tape and nanny state" even though these are just meaningless dysphemisms attached to random events to make them seem more newsworthy. "Political correctness" is probably the archetypal example of this; a label that has become an ideology.
I'm not even going to mention MMR.
Defenders of this kind of news often try to claim that they're making stories accessible, and try to paint their opponents as ivory tower elitists who long for a day when the Times was written for an audience in bowler hats and handlebar moustaches. I think the opposite is true, and that the tabloids are the true elitists. They're the ones claiming that their audiences are only capable of understanding cartoonish non-issues that have been manufactured by journalists. Surely a belief that important, complex issues (like what causes recessions) can be understood (at least in their basic forms) by everyone, and that this takes precedence over (for instance) demanding meaningless apologies, is the very opposite of elitist? Old-fashion and somewhat Enlightenment-esque, sure, and possibly not true, but definitely less elitist than assuming that anyone who reads a tabloid is an ape who needs to be pandered to.
So... do I read a newspaper? A bit. I don't think anyone needs to read a newspaper every day; whilst I realise that Barack Obama needs to be kept up to date with global events as and when they happen on a 24 hour basis, I don't think that's remotely true of me, and that it would fairly typical consumerist hubris to believe it. I mainly like newspapers to read on tube and train journeys when I'm not in the middle of a good book.
I think, on the whole, that I agree with Ben Goldacre, Cory Doctorow and their ilk when they claim that the newspaper as we know it may be in its death throes. I certainly hope so, and hope that this isn't just the cherishably naive belief of a technophilic liberal university graduate. Ben Goldacre talks about why blogs are better than newspapers at various points on his blog, most recently here and here.
That's all for now. Hopefully it'll teach Amy not to go asking questions on her LJ.
The question:
"Do you like to read newspapers/stay updated on current events? How much do you read/how indepth? What topics? International/local? Business/Politics? etc etc"
I read that, thought "Hm, that's interesting", and went about my madcap, breakneck life. Then, I saw a couple of things that made me think of that question again.
The first of this was the Daily Express's interesting concept of what is newsworthy, with its recent front page "news" story that (and you may want to brace yourself before reading this) that teenagers who use Facebook post drunken pictures of themselves and talk about girls. The story in question is about the survivors of the Dunblane shootings about 12 or 13 years ago; these people are now 18 and, like most 18 year olds, enjoy drinking, attempted fornication and the use of social networking. Note also that, now that they're over 18, they don't have as much right to privacy under British law as minors would have (I don't know the details and am too lazy to check).
The Express therefore decided to have a look at these facebook profiles and run a story entitled "Anniversary Shame of Dunblane Survivors", in which a lady named Paula Murray affected outrage at the spectacle of these teenagers enjoying themselves instead of spending their lives in a monastery contemplating their loss, as they should have done. Graham Linehan of Father Ted fame has a bit of a rant about it here.
What annoys me most about this not the invasion of these kids' privacy; after all, the stuff was all on Facebook (fair enough, as it was all completely innocuous- the best the journalist could come up with was poor spelling and collecting chat-up lines). It's the spectacle of a presumably intelligent journalist writing something utterly nonsensical in an attempt to appeal to the people who she seems to think constitute her readership. It's a blatant attempt to cook up controversy about something completely uncontroversial, for no other reason than to generate easy copy and to keep the nation in the perpetual state of outrage that the press as a whole seem to require.
And this makes me wonder what the hell newspapers are for. Jade Goody died yesterday, as I'm sure everybody now knows, after having been the subject of tabloid front-page news for the past couple of months. All sound and fury, at best signifying nothing and at worst taking up space on newspaper pages and in the nation's spleens that could be better used in pursuit of something worthwhile, or at least entertaining. In theory, the press is a vital part of the political system; there's no point in having democracy without an informed electorate, and the flow of information needs to be separate from government.
But this idea, that newspapers are important, appears to have undergone a new mutation at some point, into the idea that anything that is published in a newspaper therefore must, by definition, be important. Also, there appears to be a widespread belief that buying a daily newspaper is a Good Thing, that it's a mark of being a full adult that can be satisfied by a Daily Mail habit. I can't see a way that this, combined with the natural competitive forces that shape the newspaper market, can be anything other than damaging. People want to read about the things that they're interested in; therefore, newspapers print stories about those subjects. Those subjects then become, by definition, News, something that everyone "ought" to know about to be a full adult. Now, in the case of Jade Goody, everyone obviously realises that this story is, at bottom, irrelevant trash. But when tabloids print trash about politics, reducing parties and policies into caricatures of themselves, the caricature becomes the story; people genuinely have arguments about "too much red tape and nanny state" even though these are just meaningless dysphemisms attached to random events to make them seem more newsworthy. "Political correctness" is probably the archetypal example of this; a label that has become an ideology.
I'm not even going to mention MMR.
Defenders of this kind of news often try to claim that they're making stories accessible, and try to paint their opponents as ivory tower elitists who long for a day when the Times was written for an audience in bowler hats and handlebar moustaches. I think the opposite is true, and that the tabloids are the true elitists. They're the ones claiming that their audiences are only capable of understanding cartoonish non-issues that have been manufactured by journalists. Surely a belief that important, complex issues (like what causes recessions) can be understood (at least in their basic forms) by everyone, and that this takes precedence over (for instance) demanding meaningless apologies, is the very opposite of elitist? Old-fashion and somewhat Enlightenment-esque, sure, and possibly not true, but definitely less elitist than assuming that anyone who reads a tabloid is an ape who needs to be pandered to.
So... do I read a newspaper? A bit. I don't think anyone needs to read a newspaper every day; whilst I realise that Barack Obama needs to be kept up to date with global events as and when they happen on a 24 hour basis, I don't think that's remotely true of me, and that it would fairly typical consumerist hubris to believe it. I mainly like newspapers to read on tube and train journeys when I'm not in the middle of a good book.
I think, on the whole, that I agree with Ben Goldacre, Cory Doctorow and their ilk when they claim that the newspaper as we know it may be in its death throes. I certainly hope so, and hope that this isn't just the cherishably naive belief of a technophilic liberal university graduate. Ben Goldacre talks about why blogs are better than newspapers at various points on his blog, most recently here and here.
That's all for now. Hopefully it'll teach Amy not to go asking questions on her LJ.