Seen the news today?

...towards 'restorative news'

IT’s amply been demonstrated that gloomy, violent and troubling television news reports encourage us to catastrophise our personal anxieties; they encourage us to focus more vividly on worst-case scenarios in our own lives. They spoil more than our day.

Researchers have documented the extent to which the enormous attention given to the 9/11 attacks in the United States, for example, with television networks endlessly running images of the collapsing World Trade Centre towers, intensified whatever stress and depression people had been feeling before 9/11.

Extended media coverage stepped up the impact of the terror attack.

One research group identified the emotions stirred up by vicarious exposure to the attack as ranging from shock and anger, through fear and anxiety to feelings of helplessness, guilt and depression. During the first week, shock and anger tended to subside, but anxiety and depression-related emotions deepened. The more time people spent in front of the television, the greater were the impacts.



BUT it happens all the time: “bad” news is not hard to find, and a diet of “bad” news has known physical and emotional consequences. Now it's the stupid economy. And those consequences are certain to flow on into society at large, given the spread and reach of mainstream media.

This could easily turn into a “so let’s shoot the messenger” rant… and, indeed, the media are commonly blamed for all sorts of societal failures. But I believe it’s a far deeper issue than that.

Sources of information have become so numerous, so pervasive, so heterogeneous, so entangled with entertainment and so idiosyncratic that any big “story” almost instantly shatters into dozens of angles, interpretations and versions. Meaning dissolves into floods of images and assertions: confirmations, denials and conspiracy theories, re-tellings, deceptions and misconceptions.

In this post-Murdoch era, print media have very largely abandoned their credibility. For various reasons, television, having never managed to find itself, has become background noise that’s influential only through the imagery it disseminates. Radio — a medium with tremendous potential — has very largely become a low-level promotional tool and source of free muzak. And the Internet thrives as a cauldron of hopelessly relativistic nonsense.

In this information environment, most of us inhabit tiny zones of immediate personal consequence and necessarily tend to exponentially trivialise information according to its distance from the centre that is ourself.

The forces of information overload are nudging us towards ever-narrowing individualisation and away from socialisation; ironically, globalisation is leading us not to any celebration of our universal humanity but away from it. Bespoke worlds are the order of the future. Games designers and the like are designing and manufacturing them now, and gaming principles are being experimented with in workplaces. We are become less articulate and more removed from decision-making as we undertake humanity’s next great migration: the journey to virtual worlds. There, we will find we all have become slaves.

In many ways, you could claim that journey began long ago, certainly with the advent of the printing press: the ability it gave us to freeze particular versions of narratives into an enduring, portable form that could be widely distributed. To the Western mind at least, bookish reality has long seemed to offer clearer certainties than the fluid mutability of oral tradition where a single narrative can unfold into many meanings depending on the contexts in which it is heard and the particular ways it is told. A book can seem to escape its contexts and, distanced from us, tempt us to grant it far more universality and authority than it ever, in fact, has deserved.

The book was brought low, though, as per-unit production costs fell and literacy became a norm. The paperback revolution placed ephemeral and trivial publications on shelves that, till then, had been reserved for “literature”, a status conferred by the fact of publication. Book publishers quickly turned status objects into recyclable pulp; no longer was typography a badge of esteem or authority.

At the same time, riding high on the fallacy that seeing in believing, television — a medium that was originally hailed as the harbinger of worldwide educational opportunity — was almost immediately lured into a business model that subordinated content to mass appeal and advertising revenues. Along with mass-market cinema, it made a god of entertainment and, in doing so, opened the door to new media able to far more cost-effectively serve that god.

The trajectory has been from elitism to populism, as though those are the only options, as though they are necessary polar opposites.

For as long as we see things that way, we are likely to remain blinded to the fundamental social need for narrative.

Narrative is the source of social meaning. As communities, we tend to care nothing for things we do know nothing about. “Knowing” in this context is not about facts or theories or data and statistics. It is about the intimacies of encounter.

It seems to me that we’re not helped by news styles that present world events as a disordered succession of ugly detonations; as ongoing tableaux of inexplicable violence and catastrophe that sometimes occur close at hand and at other times explode far away. “News” has become a sensationalist feeding frenzy. It does nothing but cultivate a widespread state of anxiety and hovering gloom. Its widespread consequences are most likely to include the rekindling of atavistic fears of strangers, change and risk exposure. And this is what the “news” media and much internet chatter tends very largely to do.

As a daily newspaper journalist it often nagged at me that what I was doing — what “we” were doing — was excerpting incidents from the ongoing flow of activity around us and clipping it to fit in five, ten or twenty column inches of type as if they were independent, free-standing events. Of course, they were not.

The incidents we presented as “news” were all part of far larger stories of causes and consequences, people and circumstances, very little of which could possibly fit into the stories we published. And, of course, by the time any of these stories were read, life had moved on. A news story gives a glimpse of what was, not what is. And it is a partial, incomplete glimpse at best. Seldom does a news story have room for any meaning.

I had a particular loathing of court and crime stories. They are basically cheap and easy to get, a stenographic job at best. And they trivialise it all. The format is simple: a few words from the charge sheet, maybe a pithy quote from the judge (if there’s one to be had), and a note of sentencing. There is no room in the story for explanations, and subsequent appeals seldom make it into print. But, if you sit down with the perpetrator or the victim, with an arresting officer, with a lawyer, or with somebody’s mother, you can find stories, real stories. These stories often have little to do with the charge or the sentence, and everything to do with the intimacies of encounter that carry meaning. What happens in court is the depersonalised working out of an institutional process, and the less intimacy the better. Nobody really lives there.

The reader gets nothing of substance from this sort of reporting, nothing of use and no understanding or meaning.

News is, I believe, absolutely necessary. It is essential to us individually and communally. But news need not be clinically depressing. Nor does it all need to be escapist jolliness. It just needs to be real.

But news gathering and presentation are in crisis. You’ll find it evidenced everywhere, whether it be in the opinionated inaccuracies of an amateur’s blog, in a manicured segment of a prestigious television network’s prime time newscast, in a carefully edited radio news item with its obligatory clip of gritty actuality, or in a facts-filled item in a leading daily newspaper. The crisis is its meaninglessness.

Meaninglessness is what gets in the way of our engaging and our understanding.

To introduce meaning to news presentation, there is a desperate need to learn afresh from the basic elements of effective narrative as they’ve been known for millennia in oral traditions.

An effective narrative shows transformation and consequence, in involves change; a narrative has characters whose actions make sense, even if only to them. An effective narrative is essentially compassionate. An effective narrative invites us to enter into a situation and relate it to our own experience. An effective narrative respects all of it characters, even the “evil-doers”. An effective narrative helps us to understand ourselves, not just our surroundings. An effective narrative challenges and changes our assumptions and enhances our way of seeing things.

How might it be applied to news work?

A community newspaper I once edited won an award because one of my staff was willing to spend a week working alongside a make-work project team, spot-spraying and grubbing thistles on farmland. Mainstream coverage tended to feed a stereotype of lazy bums and beneficiaries getting a timely taste of the meaning of a day’s work. My reporter was able to write about an energetic group of people delighted to be part of a team with some purpose available to it, with a role and a challenge, instead of feeling isolated by a contemptuous community that they felt consistently denied them opportunities to work.

The feedback from the coverage was all positive and I believe the community benefitted. My reporter got over her blisters and aching back and, I think, was all the more glad to be a journalist.

To cover crime, I encouraged reporters to talk to police, criminals and criminologists and write about perceived “problems” rather than cryptic entries on charge sheets; to look into why different types of crime might be happening. To cover local body meetings, I encouraged reporters to get out and talk with the people who would be affected by a decision before the meeting at which a decision would be made, rather than transcribing agenda entries.

I wouldn't say that this is never happening, just that we could use is as a norm.

The key to what I’d call “restorative journalism” is getting the story, not just the “facts”; facts tell us far less than they purport; the story tells us far more.

Shared stories draw us together; facts, too often, push us apart.