PERSONAL COLUMN

The stuff of dreams and nightmares

PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE

Journalists have a rather contemptuous at- titude to advertisements..They recognise, of course, that these large blocks are essential to newspapers, since they bring in so much cash. Without them a newspaper would have to sell at a price which would disastrously affect circulation. But this does not stop the editorial staff from regarding the hand that feeds them with marked distaste.

If pressed for a reason the journalist would answer that whereas his activity is real and earnest, the advertising man's is artificial and frivolous. Copywriters are felt to be pedlars of dreams, whereas the reporter is concerned to purvey the truth. Journalists may not al- ways discover the truth, but to do so is their aim. That, at least, is the ideal. Not so the advertising man whose whole purpose is to take the public for a ride. The bigger the spoof the more professionally pleased he is.

The journalist, in short, feels himself to be engaged in a morally superior activity. He sees advertisements as a necessary evil. When an editor is told that some particular edition of his paper is to be packed with advertise- ments he is at once relieved and annoyed: relieved because he knows that this will help to keep the paper afloat, but annoyed be- cause this will mean that the pages are filled with a lot of nonsense, leaving so much less space for news and comments—that is to say, for the real stuff.

As a journalist, I should naturally like to share this conviction of superiority. But I am beginning to have doubts. Is it really the case that a newspaper without advertise- ments would be a worthier product, in the sense of giving a truer picture of the world? Could it not be that advertisements fulfil a positively virtuous role: that they are not only economically necessary but profession. ally desirable? What I would like to suggest is that advertiseMents actually improve a newspaper, play a pivotal journalistic role. Far from distorting, trivialising or vulgaris- ing the editorial content, they give it a balance and depth which it would otherwise deplorably lack.

Let us consider the impression of the human condition which a reader would re- ceive from a newspaper only carrying the words which journalists write or the pictures which press photographers take. It would be a world very largely made up of death, disaster, dispute, divorce, of crisis, calamity, crashes, and of wars, want and worry. It could not, of course, be otherwise. News is bound to be bad news more often than it is good news, and comment is bound to be more to do with controversy than with con- cord. A train or aircraft that arrives safely obviously is not news. A cabinet meeting that results in agreement is not news. A bank that is not robbed and can meet the demands of its creditors is not news. A peaceful demonstration is not news. A piece of earth that does not quake is not news, and so on and so on. No reporter is going to waste his time by reporting things that go right, for the good reason that no reader wants to read about them.

Nor will the leader writer—for the same good reason—want to rack his brain by

writing about matters on whkh there is general agreement. If everybody wanted the third airport, for example, to be at x, that would be the end of the affair so far as press comment is concerned.5This is not be- cause the journalist is perverse. It is because the reader, being human, is more interested in the untoward and in the dramatic, than in the commonplace and the predictable. An aircraft or train that crashes is more inter-

esting than one that arrives on time. No wonder, therefore, that an editor's face lights up with joy when told of some awful hap- pening. This is what sells newspapers.

So much is obvious and incontrovertible. Journalists, therefore, have a vested interest in purveying nightmares. That is where their professional and commercial interests lie. But it is precisely for this very reason that it is so important that side by side with the editorial news and comment should march the material produced by people who have a vested interest in peddling dreams.

For what has to be realised is that the journalist is engaged in an activity that is bound to distort reality, bound to be a travesty of truth, since the world portrayed through his eyes cannot be anything else but a place guaranteed. to seem worse than it is.

A newspaper would be false to its function if it were other than a catalogue of calamity.

Of course they do not exclude good news.

But it is very much more difficult for good news to make a front page splash than for bad news. One baby burnt to death is news.

But for a piece of good news to make the front page it has to be incomparably more sensational. The boiling point of public curiosity for good news is much higher than it is for bad news. People will respond to the tiniest tadpole of tragedy, while only a whale of a bonanza will tickle their fancy.

This being the case—and it is the case and is always likely to remain so—the editorial columns of newspapers cannot fail, however responsibly they are administered, to create a general aura of alarm and despondency.

This has always been a potential danger. But as we move into the era of mass communica- tion. with all that is happening everywhere in the world made available instantly for con- sumption with our breakfast marmalade. it is becoming an actual danger of growing proportions.

Instead of the catchment area for calamity being our own backyard, as it used to be, today it is worldwide. Each day it is possible for us to read of all the appal- ling horrors that take place everywhere. As a result there has been an escalation in the scale of horror with which our imaginations are regularly bombarded. Whereas the news editor of old only had a trickle of tragedy to choose from, and had to make do for the most part with domestic disaster, he now has a nightly flood of the stuff, a wealth and welter of woeful tidings flowing in from all corners of the earth, from which he can choose only the most peculiarly dreadful.

This surely is why today the advertise- ments are such a crucial corrective. For whereas the journalist's copy is compelled to make the world seem a much more danger- ous place than it actually is, the advertising copy has an equally compelling incentive to make it seem much safer. Let us consider, for the sake of comparison, the impression a newspaper reader would receive if he only looked at the advertisements. The day, as portrayed by the copywriter, always begins happily with handsome mum and dad and two charming kids enjoying a family break- fast of crisp, life-enhancing cereal and frag- rant coffee, slides smoothly officewards—so far as hubbie is concerned—in a car that never breaks down. (Mum stays at home en- joying all those wonderful washing etc machines.) At the office the perfect secretary has arranged a perfect lunch at a perfect restaurant. which ends in time for him to catch the perfect flight to New York, in the course of which he reflects contentedly on the peace of mind he enjoys because of his perfect life assurance, a reverie interrupted by nothing more startling than the clink of ice in the perfect dry martini which leads to a slumber made all the more pleasurable by the thought of wifie tucked up on the per- fect mattress cosily lulling herself to sleep with a cup of some perfect beverage.

Of course this is the stuff of dreams. But is the picture it portrays of happy family life, of safe travel, of avoidance of calamity and catastrophe, of smiling bank managers, of all the ordinary cheerful things of life—is this picture so much less true than the nightmare one portrayed in the adjacent news columns? From the reader's point of view, is it not a useful accident that there should he two vested interests involved in a newspaper's production: one that puts the myriad skills of modern communication towards exposing to the glare of publicity all the maggots that lie under the stones of modern life, and another equally skilled in the same tech- niques as resolutely determined to push them under cover again?

' A newspaper without advertisements would, in my view, be dangerously unbal- anced. For a long time I used to wonder why I always preferred to listen to the news on the commercial channel rather than on the Bic. The answer, I think, is that on the com- mercial channel the shots of the war in Viet- nam, of the latest plane disaster, or earth- quake. or the studio discussion on industrial strife, are interspersed by the commercials which show the other, ordinary, common- place side of life, idealised certainly, but scarcely more false to reality than the so- called news. Taken together they seem to get the balance just about right, the exaggerated message of good tidings of the former can- celling out the exaggerated message of bad tidings of the latter.

Many of my colleagues wince at the ad- vertisements which flank their columnar wisdom, finding it infra dig that the reader's eye which can feast itself on the ripe fruit of their knowledge should also be subjected to the vulgar impact of a copywriter's cliché about constipation. f do not take this view. As week after week I inform my readers of all the disasters that are about to befall them, of how the world is inevitably going to wrack and ruin, of how bankruptcy stares us in the face, I am relieved to know that as an antidote to my gloom there are adver- tisements above and below assuring the reader with equal, if not greater conviction —although in far fewer words—that all will be well if they eat Allbran in the morning and drink Ovaltine at night. Neither message is true, but at least in combination they are a good deal less false than they would be separately.