I’ve been wondering recently: when it comes to news, is ignorance bliss? A strange thought for a part-time editor of a newspaper, I grant you, but the longer I live, the more I feel that I’m being told much more than I need to know in the news. I mean, for example, that I really don’t care whether the stock market is up or down on a daily basis. But everyone, from the CBC to the national papers keep telling me about the S&P, Nasdaq, FTSE 100, and an endless list of alphabet soup names from all over the world. I can remember a time when this information was not deemed to be urgent and essential knowledge that I had to know.
It’s not as if there’s anything I can do to influence numbers and prices and indexes (indices?) in Japan or London or New York, is there? Yes, my mortgage may change because of something a banker or number cruncher does in government or some building in Toronto, but explain it to me when it happens. Don’t keep me updated on data I find neither wanted nor, to be honest, even understood. I mean, what is a DAX, and why is a German financial thing relevant to me?
But it’s not only these financial entities that are being thrown at me as being important and newsworthy. It’s everything! The rise of the 24-hour news channel, such as CNN, has meant that those 24 hours have to be filled with stuff. Why does there have to be 24-hour coverage? Because there’s always something happening somewhere in the world that, apparently, I really need to know about. It’s all so important, urgent and newsworthy that almost every story is declared to be Breaking News, even if it often doesn’t seem to be either.
Historically, people didn’t know immediately, or for many months, what was happening abroad. Unlike today, news did not travel fast, and there was nothing wrong about that. Today, we know about every crisis taking place in every part of the globe, whether it concerns us or not. Perhaps we should be concerned? Maybe we should be aware of these things. Or have we just been conditioned to think we should know all about it? Should we feel guilty for not keeping up with the news?
In the Nineteenth Century, local news sheets became newspapers when the telegraph linked the world, and editors were able to cut and paste stories from other papers (no copyright to worry about then). People were informed of world events, but at a more leisurely pace because it took so long for news to percolate through from other countries. But by the 1960’s, satellites allowed us to view events around the world as they were happening, and everything changed.
I’m not saying that we should ignore news, or become isolationist, unconcerned about things that shape the world in which we live. There are so many issues that require attention, such as climate change, for example, that we might not otherwise be aware of until it was too late. There are certainly real news stories that we should be hearing about, whether it’s the threat posed by war in Europe and the growing rise of fascism, or some other development that can affect us directly or indirectly.
The problem is that those stories are almost drowned out in the never-ending clamour that washes over us 24-7 through media of all kinds. Social media, in particular, has transformed what was a flood of information into a veritable tsunami of stories and opinions with no real filter or way of discriminating between the important and the trivial. But, for some reason, we feel that we have an obligation to take it all in, that to ration ourselves is to be irresponsible. Even worse: we might miss something!
We are able to watch an event repeatedly, seeing the same dramatic (or boring) images over and over again, while a group of talking heads discuss the ins and outs, the trivia and the details ad nauseam, just filling in those 24 hours of non-stop news coverage with loud, colourful graphics, excited voices, or critical and cynical mutterings. And when the competition is so fierce for viewers, readers, and therefore advertisers, you can end with something like Fox News, where people lie, knowingly and deliberately, to gain an audience regardless of truth, accuracy, or the well being of the people taking it all in.
Hannah Arendt gave some insight into this kind of “journalism”: “This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”
No, we can’t be ignorant of news, like it or not, we hardly have a choice anymore. So, let’s choose wisely and pick out the important bits from the mass of trivia we are being fed. Wishful thinking?
