137. NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS - On Our Obligation to Stay Informed
It was about six o’clock in the evening for the third day in a row when I realised I hadn’t, yet again, checked the news all day. Guilt flooded my body and I grabbed my phone, scrolling quickly to the various news apps I use. Russia had launched fresh missile attacks on Ukraine, a two-year-old child had died from prolonged exposure to black mould in a Rochdale flat, we discovered Gavin Williamson had said even more threatening and unprofessional things to colleagues in Parliament, Matt Hancock was still exploiting his ill-gotten fame on I’m A Celebrity, the counting of votes still continued in the US midterms, COP27 continued to drag on with a lot of talk but little meaningful action, people were worrying about the cost of beer at the upcoming World Cup in Qatar (as well as about whether or not they should support the tournament in such an oppressive and human rights abusing location), the nominees for the 2023 Grammys were announced, an inquest confirmed Neal Saunders to be yet another victim of police violence, and Rupert Murdoch was reported as telling Donald Trump he would not be backing him for re-election in 2024.
I put down the phone and turned to this other screen, my computer, where I sat trying to write this week’s Philosophy Unleashed early, in anticipation of a busy weekend ahead.
Was any of that ‘news’ important? Why had I felt so guilty about not checking it sooner? Why did the fact it had been several days of the news not being my top priority feel so wrong?
Being aware of what’s going on in the world - the news - seems to be symbolically important as a sign of a responsible adult in a functioning democracy. You are supposed to know what is going on. If democracy relies on the will of the people, the people need to be well-informed to ensure their ‘will’ is making good decisions. We read the news each day so we can make informed decisions about what we want and so we can understand the complexities of our shared world.
But such a view relies on several assumptions.
The first is that we are actually living in a democracy, which I have questioned more deeply elsewhere. Yes, we get to participate in elections and choose our leaders, etc., but I am not convinced this is the authentic democracy actually justified by the ethical arguments we use to establish it.
For today though, I shall give our current democratic structures a pass and allow for sake of argument that we do, in fact, live in real and functioning democracies. The second assumption is still problematic, even without the critique of democracy. This is the assumption that the news we read is actually keeping us ‘well-informed’.
There is a distinction between knowing what we need to know for democracy to function, and knowing what we need to know to keep abreast of the current news cycle and its trending talking points. To consider knowing what the news tells me to be sufficient to be ‘informed’ we run the risk of a potentially circular argument. If we define ‘informed’ as knowing what everyone else is talking about in order to engage sensibly with important national and local conversations, but what everyone is talking about is whatever is in the news, then I am essentially reading the news so I can talk about the news.
This still might be worthwhile if the content of the news really does tell me everything I need to know to be an informed citizen, but this idea troubles me when we acknowledge the obvious: that what we read is never ‘the’ news. It is always ‘a’ news.
I am not talking about conspiracy theory paranoia that the news is ‘lying’ to us and that ‘alternative facts’ exist elsewhere. I am not denying the veracity of the news. But I am stating the truism that whichever news service we read, even if we accept that its stories are fact and accurately reflect the real-world (yes, yes, yes…I know we might be giving in the Matrix - yawn - but let’s assume we’re not), it will always only ever, at best, reflect a particular set of editors or curators of timelines’ take on what they feel is important right now. Often this is, itself, a reaction to, or response to, the similarly arbitrary decisions of other editors and curators elsewhere given similar powers. Their response to an issue only made into an issue by other news providers.
Which is not to deny that often there may be agreement on some important and essential stories and that some of what we see really might be essential to keeping informed within a democracy. But it is difficult to spot that amidst the noise of daily - or even hourly - headlines. The war with Ukraine, for example, definitely feels important and is having global impact on many people’s lives, not least of all in Ukraine. But at the same time other wars and conflicts in the world continue under-reported. Our news has ignored wars before, between countries we are less interested in, or even when the invasions and atrocities are our own ‘routine’ bombings and we prefer to re-describe reality and point the other way. You may have differing views on the standard whataboutism that took place after Russia invaded Ukraine, regarding the way coverage of the Russian invasion differed from responses seen to yet another Israeli attack on Palestinians a few months before, but wherever you stand on that argument there is, in its being raised, an example that not all conflicts are equal on the news agenda. Israel/Palestine, too, has had global consequences for decades.
I was sad to hear about Awaab Ishak’s death from black mould, as were high-profile celebrities like Stormzy, but, as awful as it sounds, there will be other children killed through similar structural injustices that we didn’t hear about that day, and unless the story leads to better standards of housing and greater awareness of language barriers in offering official advice (a contributing factor to the child’s death), then what does knowledge of this latest preventable incident bring us but sadness? I think of Grenfell and how little was done in its aftermath. Awaab Ishak’s death is more Grenfell. More leaving people trapped in dangerous housing situations because of poverty and neglect from a state that doesn’t care. we already know these problems - have known about them for generations - yet continually fail to care enough to do anything about them. Is it really knowledge or lack of being informed which is preventing us from transforming the way we protect people from preventable deaths in this country? I’m not convinced. Likewise, learning that Gavin Williamson and Matt Hancock are awful people, as elected MPs, might seem important, but we already knew this long ago from their respective actions and words during the pandemic and their time in the Johnson government. We knew it then and yet they were still given further opportunities as politicians. What did knowing about their awfulness do? We were already informed. COP27, the Qatar World Cup, and the Grammys are all parties I am not invited to. I am not a politician, a football player, or a mainstream musician, so these gatherings are not for me. We have seen climate conferences fail repeatedly, encouraging us to sit passively at home and do nothing while our leaders claim to solve the climate crisis while leaving either without a deal, or with a useless one, and we have witnessed endless high profile sporting events take place in human rights abusing countries over the year on the empty sports-washing pretence that doing so might ‘bring change’. The last world cup took place in Russia in 2018 - the same guys now firing missiles on Ukraine. A football tournament, it turned out, did not transform Putin’s agenda, and is unlikely to transform Qatar. Did the Beijing Olympics bring democracy and human rights to China? For that matter, did London 2012 teach us in the UK how to look after the poorest and most disadvantaged in our country? I think I remember the very same NHS that is now being dismantled and overwhelmed by austerity and neglect being lauded and praised in the opening ceremony? These events make corporate profits, not political and social transformations. Meanwhile whether my favourite artists of the year get given a Grammy has literally zero bearing on whether I liked their music and changes my own circumstances as a fan not a jot.
While it remains important to recognise the prevalence of police brutality in the UK (Prison monitoring group, Inquest, report that the death of Neal Saunders is far from an isolated incident: since 1990 there have been 1,839 deaths in police custody, or following contact with the police in England and Wales, and since 2012, 3,118 people have died in prison) as with Williamson and Hancock, this has already been long known about and little has changed. We are already informed that the police routinely kill people with impunity and seem to do little to change that. Rupert Murdoch, Trump, the 2024 US elections is a story of gossip and speculation; it isn’t news, and it was ultimately meaningless. The very next morning Trump - a guy who inspired a deadly insurrection and encouraged far-right hate - still declared that he was running. While the 2022 midterm results are news, their informative value for citizens of each state affected is buried beneath the sensationalism of the Democrat vs Republican horserace though which the results are framed. It isn’t about informed democracy, it is about the narrative of competition and drama. And, again, we do not seem to feel the need to know about every intentional election here in the UK as we do the elections in the USA. Other elections happen elsewhere, even in allied countries, and we do not give them the same level of scrutiny and attention. Again - it is ‘a’ news, not ‘the’ news.
I am not saying that the stories are not important or worth knowing, but what I am saying is that they are not as important and worth knowing as we are made to feel precisely because they are not actually aligned to some sort of democratic goal to consciously inform our democracy. They are designed for commercial purposes, to draw traffic to websites or gain viewers, listeners or readers. To grab attention and tell stories. To entertain and lure rather than educate.
And entertainment is fine. I enjoy a lot of it. But I never feel shame if I have yet to look at that day’s wrestling show or latest episode of a favourite sitcom. Even a serious and thought-provoking drama isn’t worthy enough to worry about. If I missed live sports - news of another kind - I might feel frustrated that I missed it, but I wouldn’t feel guilt, or a sense of failed responsibility. I have no obligation to be entertained in any particular way and am free to spend my time however I please. If I told a colleague or friend that I have never watched Breaking Bad or watched The Godfather, they might be surprised, even incredulous, but they could not call me irresponsible. If I told them I didn’t watch the news, however, it would be a different order of outrage. Even if I said I only checked the news every couple of days, and some days passed by without me knowing what was going on, there would be some sense that I was doing something wrong. The perception that the news is doing something fundamentally different from these other forms of entertainment holds strong.
And perhaps that is right. Certainly my earlier allusion to conspiracy theories reminds us that not every avenue of possible information is equally valid. The news may be imperfect and problematic, but at least through its curation and editorial selection we get fact-checking and some important gate-keeping that insures, although it is a limited selection of stories, what we see at least has some value. Between the two extremes of not knowing anything at all and knowing absolutely everything that is happening, perhaps the news offers us a decent compromise?
I don’t have an obligation to do the impossible - know everything - but I do have an obligation, surely, in a democracy, to know at least the bare minimum available to be able to speak intelligently and vote, demonstrate, and advocate for improvements. The national conversation might be somewhat arbitrary, but being part of it is important, and knowing the terms of debate even more important if you’d like to change them. Yes, tragically, other people have died from inadequate or dangerous housing, or in police custody, the climate continues to be in peril, US elections remain ideologically terrifying, the war in Ukraine continues, Williamson and Hancock will continue to be employed, and the World Cup in Qatar will still go ahead…but we can’t change those things if we are not part of the conversation, and being able to point to familiar stories are a foot-in-the-door towards having them. A piece of common ground to springboard from.
If all of us do our bit to learn the best slice we can of what is going on then, collectively, we can bring the fragments together and make sense of them.
But those last bits are important. Checking your newsfeed frantically every five seconds and being a ‘news junkie’, watching the news the way other people watch soap operas is not keeping yourself informed and has no value to democracy if you are not using that knowledge to actively make changes and have those wider conversations with other actual people. Knowing a bunch of stuff becomes trivia when it isn’t meaningfully applied.
I should feel guilty for not knowing what is going on in the world, but not for not knowing the latest trends and talking points. The news shouldn’t be the totality of our knowledge, and it shouldn’t set the agenda. It should be the information building blocks from which citizens both build their society and smash it down. It should, itself, be part of a conversation. In its current form, I fear the news keeps us passive more than informed, watching what is going on in the world and framing it like entertainment so that it keeps going on while we sit staring at our phones feeling like we have no agency to change it.
And when that lack of agency grows too much, and we feel despair about the state of the world, it makes us switch off and turn away. Leave the news alone for a few days and do something else instead.
It remains possible, however, that what we do in those interim days might be informing us in different ways and making us citizens who are better able to engage with, and critique, the narratives presented on ‘the’ news when we return. Stepping outside a bubble of babble and hearing other voices, thinking different thoughts, like Plato’s prisoner escaping the cave, might sometimes be the only way we can return to the cave ready to change the world.
In Plato’s version, this makes people want to kill us, but that’s because Plato limited those able to escape the cave only to a single isolated ‘philosopher king’. The job once we return to the cave is not to tell everyone what we know, but to show them, bring them up out of the cave too. And if they want to stay, listen to them about why. Somewhere between their news, our news, and the news, we might just find enough information to inform us properly how to construct a better future for all.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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