Is daily journalism the best – or even an adequate – way of learning about the world?
I’m not at all sure it is – though it’s taken me the best part of 30 years, every day of which I’ve spent in daily journalism, to come to that conclusion.
Even if you set aside the many and obvious problems of journalism that is advocacy by other means; that is at root jingoistic; or that is simply poor and/or mendacious … even if you set all that aside, you’re still left with daily journalism’s perpetual limitations. Its:
“aversion to complexity; its centripetal tendency, dragging the apparent plurality of multiple outlets towards common framings; its inevitable preference for the striking event over the telling trend; and its eternal excuse – we’re just telling stories.”
That’s a description – mine, as it happens – of daily journalism’s failure to properly examine the longest war Britain has been involved in for 200 years: the war in Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, War and the Media: Deadlines and Frontlines - published on 13 September - a range of war correspondents, editors and academics consider the challenge of ensuring that the journalists’ account of that war is as ‘truthful’ as it can be.
But there’s a problem that goes beyond the obvious obstacles to producing 'truth' in war. Diligent journalists can do their utmost in bearing the most truthful witness possible. But daily journalism is ruthless with that witness – it may or may not make that day’s news for reasons that have nothing to do with its intrinsic worth.
Its value is determined by the caprice of daily taste, while its impact fades almost from the moment its headline is read.
Daily news is about the extraordinary and the extreme; it's rarely about long chains of consequential events or about the deeper, enduring consequences of one day’s news.
One of the first war reporters, Thucydides – who doubled as a general and historian – made his choice. And it wasn't for the ephemeral:
“The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest … I have written my work, not … to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”
‘The applause of the moment.' That thing all daily journalists crave.
Applause of a different, more enduring kind for this – a brilliant audio slideshow from the Sydney Morning Herald that interweaves the narratives of raped and rapist in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The work of Kimberley Porteous, Kate Geraghty and Jonathan Pearlman.
As it happens, this slideshow isn’t particularly new – it was produced back in July 2009 and I stumbled on it today via those nice people at duckrabbit. Its subject matter is, of course, even older.
But that's one of the things about the new news. If it’s new to me, it’s news. And this is news to me - not the events themselves but the understanding of them.
Like any other journalist who was working in the 1990s, I produced or included in the programmes I edited many pieces of excellent daily journalism from the best journalists in the business, all bearing witness to the events that formed the backdrop to this slideshow.
Did they – however assiduous, however outstanding each piece was as an example of the genre – bring me close to a real understanding of what was happening in that part of the world?
No. And I’m not sure they could. Hence the doubts.
