The News: A User's Manual

246 Pages·2014·2.64 MB·English

by  Alain De Botton

Copyright © 2014 by Alain de Botton All rights reserved. Published in the United States by
Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by McClelland &
Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House
companies. Originally published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of the Penguin
Group, London.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press
Limited for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” by William
Carlos Williams from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962, copyright © 1944 by William
Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press
Limited.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Botton, Alain.
The news : a user’s manual / Alain de Botton.
Pages cm
HC ISBN 978-0-307-37912-2. EBK ISBN 978-0-307-91172-8.
1. Journalism—Social aspects. 2. Journalism—Political aspects. 3. Mass media—Social aspects. 4.
Mass media—Political aspects. 5. News audiences. I. Title.
PN4749.D43 2014 302.23—dc23 2013031206
www.pantheonbooks.com
Jacket design by Matt Dorfman
v3.1
For my mother
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
I. PREFACE
II. POLITICS
Boredom & Confusion
A Little Hope
Fear & Anger
Baddies & the Bad
Received Ideas
III. WORLD NEWS
Information/Imagination
The Details
Photography
IV. ECONOMICS
M2 and Utopia
Investor News
V. CELEBRITY
Admiration
Envy
The Will to Fame
The Injuries of Fame
VI. DISASTER
Tragedy
Accident
Nature
Health News
VII. CONSUMPTION
Dining, Travel, Technology …
Culture
VIII. CONCLUSION
Personalization
News from Inside
Picture Credits
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
.
I
Preface
1.
IT DOESN’T COME with any instructions, because it’s meant to be the most
normal, easy, obvious and unremarkable activity in the world, like
breathing or blinking.
After an interval, usually no longer than a night (and often far less; if
we’re feeling particularly restless, we might only manage ten or fifteen
minutes), we interrupt whatever we are doing in order to check the news.
We put our lives on hold in the expectation of receiving yet another dose
of critical information about all the most significant achievements,
catastrophes, crimes, epidemics and romantic complications to have
befallen mankind anywhere around the planet since we last had a look.
What follows is an exercise in trying to make this ubiquitous and
familiar habit seem a lot weirder and rather more hazardous than it does
at present.
2.
THE NEWS IS committed to laying before us whatever is supposed to be
most unusual and important in the world: a snowfall in the tropics; a
love child for the president; a set of conjoined twins. Yet for all its
determined pursuit of the anomalous, the one thing the news skilfully
avoids training its eye on is itself, and the predominant position it has
achieved in our lives. ‘Half of Humanity Daily Spellbound by the News’
is a headline we are never likely to see from organizations otherwise
devoted to the remarkable and the noteworthy, the corrupt and the
shocking.
Societies become modern, the philosopher Hegel suggested, when
news replaces religion as our central source of guidance and our
touchstone of authority. In the developed economies, the news now
occupies a position of power at least equal to that formerly enjoyed by
the faiths. Dispatches track the canonical hours with uncanny precision:
matins have been transubstantiated into the breakfast bulletin, vespers
into the evening report. But the news doesn’t just follow a quasi-
religious timetable. It also demands that we approach it with some of the
same deferential expectations we would once have harboured of the
faiths. Here, too, we hope to receive revelations, learn who is good and
bad, fathom suffering and understand the unfolding logic of existence.
And here, too, if we refuse to take part in the rituals, there could be
imputations of heresy.
The news knows how to render its own mechanics almost invisible and
therefore hard to question. It speaks to us in a natural unaccented voice,
without reference to its own assumption-laden perspective. It fails to
disclose that it does not merely report on the world, but is instead
constantly at work crafting a new planet in our minds in line with its
own often highly distinctive priorities.
3.
FROM AN EARLY age, we are educated to appreciate the power of images
and words. We are led to museums and solemnly informed that certain
pictures by long-dead artists could transform our perspectives. We are
introduced to poems and stories that might change our lives.
Yet, oddly, people seldom attempt to educate us about the words and
images proffered to us every hour by the news. It is deemed more
important for us to know how to make sense of the plot of Othello than
how to decode the front page of the New York Post. We are more likely
to hear about the significance of Matisse’s use of colour than to be taken
through the effects of the celebrity photo section of the Daily Mail. We
aren’t encouraged to consider what might happen to our outlooks after
immersion in Bild or OK! magazine, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or
the Hokkaido Shimbun, the Tehran Times or the Sun. We are never
systematically inducted into the extraordinary capacity of news outlets
to influence our sense of reality and to mould the state of what we might
as well – with no supernatural associations – call our souls.
For all their talk of education, modern societies neglect to examine by
far the most influential means by which their populations are educated.
Whatever happens in our classrooms, the more potent and ongoing kind
of education takes place on the airwaves and on our screens. Cocooned
in classrooms for only our first eighteen years or so, we effectively spend
the rest of our lives under the tutelage of news entities which wield
infinitely greater influence over us than any academic institution can.
Once our formal education has finished, the news is the teacher. It is the
single most significant force setting the tone of public life and shaping
our impressions of the community beyond our own walls. It is the prime
creator of political and social reality. As revolutionaries well know, if
you want to change the mentality of a country, you don’t head to the art
gallery, the department of education or the homes of famous novelists;
you drive the tanks straight to the nerve centre of the body politic, the
news HQ.