Monthly Archives: June 2007

Anything new under the sun?

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We’re often berat­ing ourselves in the media for over­look­ing import­ant social and his­tor­ical devel­op­ments. Take the rise of Waha­bism in Islam, for example. It appeared by stealth, you might ima­gine. And now read Amer­ican journ­al­ist Charles Dud­ley Warner from 1881, on the impact of the wires on news­pa­pers.

…con­sider how much space is taken up with mere tri­vi­al­it­ies and vul­gar­it­ies under the name of news.

And this evil is likely to con­tinue and increase until news-gatherers learn that more import­ant than the reports of acci­dents and cas­u­al­ties is the intel­li­gence of opin­ions and thoughts, the moral and intel­lec­tual move­ments of mod­ern life.

A hor­rible assas­sin­a­tion in India is instantly tele­graphed; but the pro­gress of such a vast move­ment as that of the Waha­bee revival in Islam, which may change the des­tiny of great provinces, never gets itself put upon the wires.

The recur­rence of themes in inform­a­tion is a famil­iar topic on this blog (my his­tory obses­sion). In case you think that obses­sion is itself just a lazy way of repeat­ing the line from Eccle­si­astes that there is noth­ing new under the sun, here are the head­lines of my thoughts.

Whilst in math­em­at­ics and the phys­ical sci­ences we’ve seen a grow­ing soph­ist­ic­a­tion over time, I think we long ago reached a devel­op­mental dead-end in spoken and writ­ten lan­guage as a tool for describ­ing the world in which we live. Iron­ic­ally, because lan­guage func­tions as a social tool.

The dis­cov­er­ies of sci­ence (atomic, multi-dimensionality, geo­lo­gical time) all chal­lenge our every­day sense of things being as they appear — the com­mon­sense, intu­it­ive under­stand­ing that we use so suc­cess­fully to nav­ig­ate the world of people and ‘nor­mal’ life. Sci­ence chal­lenges it, but can’t change it, because lan­guage sup­ports us emo­tion­ally and sus­tains us spir­itu­ally. Its rational and intel­lec­tual short­com­ings are secondary.

So lan­guage is the dead sea in which we com­fort­ably float. Just don’t expect to find any­thing excit­ing in it.

A little bit of money…

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“What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 mil­lion a year hir­ing all the best busi­ness journ­al­ists in the world? Say 200 of them. And spent some money on estab­lish­ing the brand but went global — a great, great news­pa­per with big, iconic names, out­stand­ing writers, report­ers, experts. And then you make it free, online only. No print­ing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advert­ising to come? It would be suc­cess­ful, it would work and you’d make … a little bit of money.”

Rupert Mur­doch

Facts and opinion

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The fam­ous line of C.P.Scott, editor and the pro­pri­etor of the Guard­ian — “com­ment is free, but facts are sac­red” — is immor­tal­ised not just in the Guard­ian’s op-ed, but also in Sac­red­Facts, Richard Sam­brook’s blog.

Scott was in his sev­en­ties when he wrote the essay from which the line is taken, back in 1921. But the divi­sion between fact and opin­ion wasn’t accep­ted by every­one at the Guard­ian.

George Dibblee was for many years the busi­ness man­ager of the Guard­ian, whilst Scott edited it. In 1905, on the death of its then pro­pri­etor Edward Taylor, Dibblee was appoin­ted one of the paper’s trust­ees. Taylor had recom­men­ded the Guard­ian be sold to Scott for £10,000. Dibblee and his fel­low trust­ees shif­ted that price to £242,000. Per­haps not sur­pris­ingly, Dibblee left the Guard­ian when Scott bought it. Per­haps more sur­pris­ingly, he took a fel­low­ship at All Souls.

Dibblee used his time as an aca­demic to write a book on the press called simply The News­pa­per (1913). He argued that news and opin­ion were all but insep­ar­able, because opin­ion shaped a newspaper’s edit­or­ial agenda and pri­or­it­ies:

As far as the pub­lic is con­cerned, there is very little dis­tinc­tion made between the func­tion of news­pa­pers as news­gather­ers and their duties as pur­vey­ors of opin­ion. This arises from a very simple case. While news is nom­in­ally an imper­sonal thing, as a mat­ter of prac­tice it is far from being so. In obtain­ing it the fac­ulty of selec­tion is required in the highest degree by the news­gatherer or ‘story writer.’ Selec­tion again is strenu­ously required in determ­in­ing the com­pet­i­tion between one item of news and another. Finally the present­a­tion of news in words and para­graphs leaves a wide open­ing for indi­vidual pref­er­ences and inclin­a­tions. Thus it comes about, nat­ur­ally enough, that the same series of habits, which gov­ern the con­duct of avowed opin­ion in a news­pa­per, habits summed up briefly in the term, the policy of a news­pa­per, express them­selves, not so con­sciously but even more effect­ively, in its news columns.

The decline of political reporting

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If you’re one of those people, like the former prime min­is­ter (how strange it is to write that) who wor­ries about the future of polit­ical report­ing and the qual­ity of debate in the House of Com­mons — fear not. You’re in good company.

If you want to see who shares your opin­ions, read on.

If a states­man now wants to impress the nation, the last place in the world where he will make his speech is in Par­lia­ment, because in no place will it be worse repor­ted. Epoch-making speeches are nowadays all delivered on the stump. The pub­lic only cares for what it hears. No one knows what goes on after twelve o’clock in Par­lia­ment, and no one cares. Why? Because the news­pa­pers do not report late sittings.

W.T. Stead, “Gov­ern­ment by Journ­al­ism” (1886)

For years it was the proud ‘boast’ of the great Lon­don dailies in com­pet­i­tion to give the longest, which means the fullest reports of the debates in Par­lia­ment. They main­tained large staff for the pur­pose. It was also a tri­umph of beauty to set the report in close type, so that the delighted reader looked upon a broad page of dead black lead, broke only by the spaces required for the names of the suc­cess­ive speak­ers. That is all now changed. Where we sat down to six or seven columns of polit­ical rhet­oric, we now sit down to two, and the story, moreover, is broken into para­graphs, head­lines and notes of exclamation…Readers of the busi­ness class or the loz­enge intel­li­gence prefer to take their legis­la­tion and polit­ics first in the homeo­pathic doses of a ten line summary.

Alfred Kin­near, “Par­lia­ment­ary Report­ing” (1905)

What has changed is the way Par­lia­ment is repor­ted or rather not repor­ted. Tell me how many maiden speeches are listened to; how many excel­lent second read­ing speeches or com­mit­tee speeches are covered. Except when they gen­er­ate major con­tro­versy, they aren’t.

If you are a back­bench MP today, you learn to give a press release first and a good Par­lia­ment­ary speech second.

Tony Blair, “On Pub­lic Life” (2007)

As you were saying…