Breaking the 24-hour news cycle
This must be a strange time for the purveyors of 24-hour rolling news.
On the one hand, we are all acutely interested in the Coronavirus pandemic - it has profound and significant effects on our lives, on the economy, on our wellbeing - and we want to stay informed, even if it's only out of morbid curiosity.
On the other hand, hardly anything at all is happening. Everything is cancelled; most people are at home all day; there isn't even any sport to divert us. In the UK, practically the only newsworthy item is the daily government press briefing, which lasts about 45 minutes (but could be trimmed down to 7, tops).
Yet despite this, the news keeps rolling. There's about an hour of speculation before the briefing on what the government minister might announce; then about three hours of discussion afterwards on what it all means. Earlier in the day we hear from expert epidemiologists explain why the lockdown must continue, followed by expert epidemiologists explaining why it's now the time to lift the restrictions. We get our daily update (repeated 40 times in the next 6 hours) about how many people have died and how that compares to other countries; we get the feel-good story about the little boy raising money for the NHS; and then (horror of horrors) we hear what the general public think of it all.
We all know, deep down, that we don't need to watch any of this stuff. We all know that it's about an hour of actual content spun out over a day, and we all get frustrated when people repeat themselves or earnestly speculate about something that we'll know the answer to in about 5 minutes' time. We all hate hearing the dreaded words "we talked to ordinary members of the public." More than that, we know - because countless studies have told us - that the 24-hour news cycle makes us miserable, anxious, and depressed.
Yet we watch it anyway. Why? Why do we succumb to it, apart from the addictive nature of intermittent variable rewards (for more on this, see this article on digital detox by Tony Reinke). Let Oliver O'Donovan be your guide. In the last few pages of his book Finding and Seeking, he takes on the news media and teaches us that it provides the illusion of three things - mastery, identity, and meaning. (All quotes from Finding and Seeking, pp235-237.)
Mastery: give me all the facts!
What is striking about the speedy and wide-ranging communications of modern news is how on edge we are about them, as though we were constantly afraid that the world would mutate behind our backs if we were not au courant with a thousand dissociated new pieces of information. This is a measure of our metaphysical insecurity, which is the engine of our modern urge for mastery.
We've already talked a little on this blog about FOMO (and FOBI, the related phobia for introverts). O'Donovan says that news stresses us out because of the fear of missing out on some crucial piece of information. If we don't know everything, we reason, how can we know what to do?
This reveals two assumptions we have about ourselves. The first is that we must know everything in order to live well. Partial knowledge is not enough - we must have it all; otherwise we might make the wrong decision. We desire omniscience - we have to know it all.
The second is that we must know everything in order to live well. It's not enough to be told something is true, or given advice or instructions to follow; we must know it for ourselves, and know all the reasons for it. (This has reached a new low in recent years with the rise of mainstream conspiracy theories, such as the anti-vaxxer movement. It is a common mistake to say "these people just don't believe in science." Rather, they don't trust the people who are telling them to believe the science. Loudly repeating the scientific findings with a patronising roll of the eyes is therefore a particularly counter-productive strategy for changing people's minds.) We desire autonomy - we want to have the final say.
But omniscience and autonomy are neither possible nor desirable for us as human beings. It is what our first parents sinfully reached for as they believe the serpent's lie that they could be "like God, knowing [that is, determining for oneself] good and evil" (Gen 3:5). Their desire for mastery led only to slavery and despair.
As Christians we do not need to give into this desire for mastery. As we've discussed on the blog in previous days, we cannot know it all because we are finite and created beings; but we don't need to know it all because we can be secure in the knowledge we're given. Omniscience and autonomy belong properly to God alone; and if we know that he has mastery over his world, we don't need to have it ourselves. Rather, we can be freed from worry and anxiety about what is going on in our world: "Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all" (Matt 6:31-32).
Identity: tell me who I am!
I have occasionally had the dubious pleasure of seeing clips from Japanese TV shows. To my mind (undoubtedly narrow and shaped by Western assumptions) they seem jolly peculiar. Particularly odd is the custom of having little picture-in-picture shots of celebrities reacting to what's going on - apparently to help viewers at home know how to react themselves.
But we in the West are not immune to this kind of spoon-feeding. Think of the intrusive music cues in TV dramas which insult our intelligence by telling us how we should feel in every scene ("This is the sad bit! You can tell because all the weepy strings are playing in a minor key! Pay no attention to the bad writing and terrible acting - just start crying!"). Or, says O'Donovan, consider the way news is packaged to conform to certain pre-set narratives:
Frightening new horrors are written of in a consciously bland and traditional way full of mythic recognition-factors. Interpretative techniques call on a small range of typical phenomena. You and I, if we emerge for a brief moment from our customary obscurity into the public eye, will quickly be classified as devious politicians, predatory capitalists, irrelevant academics or cutting-edge boffins, heartbroken mums and so forth. The stereotype, the pre-determined classification, this is the technique that "digests" what is happening, and digests it "safely" - that is, without our having to question our view of the world.
News - which, by definition, purports to show us something new - actually tends to present stories in a digested, stereotyped form. The underdog taking on the big bully company; the tragic innocent who dies too young; the unprecedented catastrophe that is presented with the same tropes and cliches as the last unprecedented catastrophe 18 months previously. These stories are all, if we took the time over them, intriguing and nuanced and unique. They could be chewed over slowly and provide us with the opportunity for deep moral reflection. Yet they are presented like a packaged ready-meal, familiar to the taste, easy to swallow, eminently forgettable.
And the worst of this is that this shapes our self-conception:
Instead, it touches the deep politics of identity. This is what interprets us to ourselves, makes us feel at home with ourselves, represents the deeds and words we read as those of friends or enemies, moulds us into a common identity, teaches us to see ourselves as part of a shared struggle, all quite independently of what we are, what we do, what we suffer, who we share our lives with.
The news teaches us to tell a certain story about ourselves, to squeeze ourselves into the mould that conforms most closely to the tropes we have seen repeated ad nauseam, 24 hours a day. This is why it is so crucial for children in particular to read widely - books can shape our moral imagination and give us new stories to tell about ourselves. And most importantly of all, it drives us to Scripture, which gives us God's authoritative interpretation of who we are, the true story he tells about his creation - always surprising, never trite or predictable, searching and true, challenging and beautiful.
Meaning: interpret the world for me!
Devoting their full attention to the breaking wave, [the news media] echo its roar to us; we call upon them to show us the world new every morning, as though there never was a yesterday.
Yesterday's news is today's fish'n'chip paper.
The 24 hour news cycle keeps the attention relentlessly on the now - here's the very latest update! Forget everything that came before! And in the moment we don't just want the facts. Despite various news outlets laying claim to neutrality, it is neither possible nor desirable - we want to know what's going on and what it all means and how we should feel about it. The facts, indeed, can be secondary to that concern:
If getting the story right is the reporter's aim, the editorial staff have their own priorities; the "comment" column or staged interview is better suited to the purposes of routinising, while even the headlines, those sacred pillars of "shock," may be confected of press-officers' and PR hand-outs... What we look to the media for is the construction of the world of the moment, and reporting on realities may have only tangential relevance to that.
So the laser-focus of the news media on the "now" interprets the present moment to us. But not only that, it keeps that present moment fixed in our minds as the be-all and end-all. Here is what's going on; here's what it means - and that's all that matters. Don't think about the past - that's old news. Don't think about the future either - that's scary. Think about now:
If "new every morning" is the tempo of divine grace and the tempo of our personal responsibilities, it is because the morning is a time when one can look back intelligently and look forward hopefully. It is the tempo of practical reason. The media's "new every morning" (quickly becoming "new every moment") is, one may dare to say, in flat contradiction to that daily offer of grace. It serves rather to fix our perception upon the momentary now, preventing retrospection, discouraging deliberation, holding us spellbound in a suppositious world of the present which, like hell itself, has lost its future and its past.
But again, the Christian does not need to be be trapped in this temporal myopia. We must always look to the past, because there the great good news has been revealed, once for all. Jesus Christ has done the thing which has defined history; his cross stands at the centrepoint of time, teaching us how to think rightly about this world, about ourselves, about God. And it lifts our gaze to the future, which we can face with confidence because we need no longer fear death; and which puts into perspective the sufferings and horrors of this world. We do not need the news media to stereotype the sinful realities of the world into soft banalities, nor to distract us with what Tony Reinke calls Competing Spectacles. Instead, we can read and rejoice:
For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:17-18)
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (Colossians 3:1-4)