{"id":736,"date":"2007-12-07T11:58:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-07T17:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=736"},"modified":"2007-12-07T11:58:00","modified_gmt":"2007-12-07T17:58:00","slug":"journalism-on-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/12\/journalism-on-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalism on journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

F<\/span>eel like you\u2019re living in Daniel Defoe<\/span>\u2019s Journal of the Plague Year<\/span> or Don DeLillo<\/span>\u2019s Libra<\/span>? On the back of reviewing Gordon Burns<\/span>\u2019 novel<\/a> that, according to the blurb:<\/p>\n

has taken the events from this bleak summer and turned them into an utterly unique novel about the way news is made, and how the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Guardian<\/span> critic Mark Lawson<\/span><\/a> riffs in a way that tells you just how low arts journalism can go.<\/p>\n

The news has become a kind of super-fiction, in which one unlikely and inexplicable yarn after another – The Portugal Child, The Perugia Murder, The Deadly Teddy Bear, The Secret Donor, The Panamanian Canoeist – play out across newspaper pages.

The suggestion that journalism has become more like fiction is a pretty ancient insult but, in the past, was used to accuse reporters of fabrication. Now, though, something deeper and weirder frequently occurs in which, even when facts are accurately reported, they seem, in the proper sense of the word, fabulous. Whereas most news stories follow a grimly recognisable narrative – the sex murder, the drive-by shooting, the inflated expenses claim – recent real-life plots are dense, messy and seemingly insoluble in a way that usually requires the manipulations of a novelist.<\/p>\n

This sense of events feeling invented is not entirely new. For several decades, writers have toyed with the idea that, whether or not truth is stranger than fiction, it is sometimes indistinguishable from it.<\/p>\n

Norman Mailer alluded to this blurring in a 1960s phrase about \u201cthe novel as history, history as a novel,\u201d while the French thinker Jean Baudrillard, with his theory of \u201chyper-reality,\u201d argued that humans, unable to make sense of the complexities of the modern world, experienced real events as if they were fantasy. Yet such ideas – as the concept of Burn\u2019s novel acknowledges – have now truly found their time.<\/p>\n

The obvious temptation is to blame journalism, and it\u2019s certainly true that these blockbuster news stories are partly shaped by the fact that today\u2019s journalists (in print and television) have much more space and much less fear of legal censure than did their predecessors. But I think the news increasingly feels like a novel or screenplay because so many people now live like figures in fiction, defining themselves as \u201ccharacters\u201d within what artistic criticism calls a \u201cstructured narrative.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Compare this review from the 1994 New York Times<\/a>. Read it and weep.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Feel like you\u2019re living in Daniel Defoe\u2019s Journal of the Plague Year or Don DeLillo\u2019s Libra? On the back of reviewing Gordon Burns\u2019 novel that, according to the blurb: has taken the events from this bleak summer and turned them into an utterly unique novel about the way news is made, and how the media […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}