November 24 2019
Some years ago the London Times, on an exceptionally dull day for news, carried a story which it headlined “Small earthquake in Chile: no damage, no injuries.” That headline won a competition for the most boring headline in newspapers that year, just beating into second place the headline “Cement production rises slightly in Ontario” in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Boring, it is the most hated word in journalism.
The good newspaper editor is almost by definition schizophrenic. He wants to produce a journal which is well-balanced, tries to report both the good and the bad of what is happening, editorializes judiciously, even-handedly dispenses blame and praise, and reflects the cultural best as well as the lower depths of the nation which it serves. Another part of him wants to attract popular attention, sell more newspapers, and appeal to the gut feelings of the man on the Kitty mini-bus and the love of sensation in all of us.
Who can blame the poor editor when his judicious self is roughly pushed aside by his circulation hungry alter ego? For the professional journalist, there can be nothing more galling than the realisation that his paper may be considered too anodyne, too high-brow, too dull and therefore runs an increasing risk of going unread. And there can be nothing more satisfying than evidence of people clamouring for his product and circulation zooming. Thus boredom is to be avoided at all costs.
The basic newspaper fact of life is that people much prefer reading about bad news, sensational events, mayhem, disaster and scandal than they do about assiduous good behaviour, quiet achievement, and happy outcomes. It is regrettable but we feel a certain schadenfreude (a German word for which there is no English equivalent but which means approximately “malicious delight in others’ misfortunes”) from time to time and we are certainly more interested in hearing about the terribly bad things that happen to people than in learning about the wonderful things people experience and do. For a newspaper a favourable trade balance can’t compare with a “good” murder. Saints aren’t half as much fun as sinners.
Every newspaper, however constructively public-minded it may be, has to cater for this fundamental human propensity to be fascinated by lurid tragedy and bored by quiet achievement. It sometimes distresses those who know very well that there is quite as much good news as bad, quite as many achievements as failures, quite as much honesty as scandal – probably more, else how would the world go on? – yet still see that newspapers have this bias towards the unworthy. But it is simply in the nature of the business.
If one looks around clearly there are any number of success stories – quite apart from the discovery of oil which by its suddenness and size and political and diplomatic implications attracts its own special sensationalism. There is, for instance the success story of rice production and exports where the steady and remarkable achievement of thousands of Guyanese go largely unsung in the headlines.
Such stories certainly don’t get, in newspaper terms, one tenth the coverage of the evil work of criminal gangs or the hack-work of the latest mad or jealous lover or the contemptible misdeeds of miscreants in the public service. Newspapers have to see the world not in sober and realistic tones but in the bright, not to say lurid, colours of impressionism.
I hope I will not be misunderstood. The last thing I myself wish to read in the newspapers is an interminable series of success stories, upbeat cheerleading pieces, and tales of the great and the good performing at the top of their form. I am as schadenfreudian as the next person. I enjoy juicy scandal, delicious gossip, sensation and disaster which don’t have anything to do with me. If on the same day the police cracked the notorious Monica Reece murder case and the nation’s all-time record trade surplus was announced, I think I know what story would lead the front page.
All that can be done is ruminate a little on journalism’s eternal dilemma and perhaps offer the gentlest possible hint that in their heady circulation wars our leading newspapers should not forget their other role, which is to raise reading standards, educate, enlighten, and intellectually satisfy.
At one point in Robert Skidelsky’s magnificent biography of John Maynard Keynes, Keynes writes to a friend about the necessity for “setting in motion those forces of instruction and imagination which change opinion.” He goes on to say, “The assertion of truth, the unveiling of illusion, the dissipation of hate, the enlargement and instruction of men’s hearts and minds must be the means”. Not bad words for any editor to glance at now and then.