THE MAIN REASON WHY I’VE COME TO HATE THE NEWS
With so much garbage to sift through online, it’s hard to find the info we need to know
I hate the news.
A weird thing for a columnist to cop to in a newspaper, to be sure, but since going back to work full-time after a year and a half of daddy day care and freelance writing, I’ve come to hate the news. It’s become ungovernable.
Every time I peek into my Twitter feed — still my default vein — there are now hundreds (if not thousands) of new posts, many of which appear wildly out of (chronological) sequence.
I don’t know what’s coming or going. My news feed — to paraphrase the philosopher Thom Yorke — buzzes like a fridge, it’s like a detuned radio.
Worst of all, it washes over without leaving a mark. This, I now know, is what it’s like to follow the news as a civilian.
When I worked in government, we were the news. I couldn’t avoid it. When I was a columnist, following the news every second wasn’t a luxury; it was mandatory if I wanted a gig. Now it’s hell.
Having popped myself somewhat out of the bubble, I have a new appreciation for people who shrug their shoulders at current events and write off all politicians and the people who cover them as irrelevant to their day.
But hating news is nuts, horrible and inimical to democracy.
A quick Google search fingers the internet as the culprit. Indeed, it’s becoming de rigueur to have a pop at the behemoths of the information age.
And for good reason — though maybe not the ones you think.
Forget the faux courage anonymity gives the trolls to say the things they’d never dare say in public or to someone’s face. Likewise ignore the metastitization of clickbait, or the faux-God of virality. These are symptoms of the disease, rather than the pathology.
The real culprit is real estate. The news gets gassy when it has to expand to fill every waking minute of the day. News was better when it had a defined hole.
In rushing to fill the internet’s gaping maw — or the equally corrosive 24-7 cable news stream — newsrooms regularly make meals out of scraps that would never make the paper or 22 minutes of a nightly newscast.
Sidebar items explode into features, which are then fussed over relentlessly by an army of professional pundits (hand up) and amateur social media snarks (and again) until everyone spins themselves into the kind of rage we used to reserve for things such as finance ministers being caught out about their financial arrangements.
In personal networks such as Facebook and Twitter, legit hard news (Mueller!) lives next to propaganda (the middle class and those hoping to join them!), fake news (Donald Trump’s feed), soft news (PM socks!), and the kind of celebrity twaddle symptomatic of a society a hair’s breadth away from a horse being made consul to the republic.
And that’s before the mystical algorithms whip the most torqued (read: popular) items into filter bubbles so tight they could screen out what’s left of Trump’s shame.
As a former editor of these august pages has argued, this environment is tailor-made for an application of Gresham’s Law, where an abundance of poor quality information drives out the good, until all we’re left with is garbage.
Now, it’s beyond the means or ability of the news industry to control this swamp, let alone drain it, which makes you wonder why they’re bothering to swim in it at all.
The answer, of course, is money, or at least the illusion of money, and for every New York Times that is making a go of it with online revenue, there are hundreds of others relying on the tender mercies of Google and Facebook to fund their futures.
But what if the news took a collective decision not to feed social media? What if they winnowed their distribution back to more discreet intervals? If not the nightly news and next day’s paper (most of which will be on life support as the boomers shuffle off this mortal coil), then defined online bursts?
What if journalists took the time to apply their true value — judgment — and not rush to apply copy to every shiny bouncing ball that pops into view? What are the three things we need to know about the Trump administration, instead of the trillion things we’re being told (he threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans!)?
Would this relative scarcity breed curiosity from readers who still want to feel like they’re in the know? Would knowing that no legit news is putting their stuff on social media make people seek out the material at the source?
It will never happen, least of all because news organizations couldn’t stop others from posting their information online. It would also take more self-belief in their value than news organizations have shown for a decade and a half.
But it would go a long way toward someone like me enjoying the news again.