MEDIA STUDIES
Why I'd rather not switch off with this professor
STEPHEN GLOVER
M. state of mind this past week has been considerably disturbed by my having read The Silencing of Society by Kenneth Minogue. This 70-page pamphlet, just pub- lished by the Social Affairs Unit, is a devas- tating attack on journalists and their stan- dards, practices and values.
Most journalists believe that news is somehow pure. Papers may publish trashy features, or have lunatic opinions, but we can surely all agree that news is unsullied. Professor Minogue doesn't. For him, news plays on a 'human weakness for morbidity'. It draws us into 'an endless short-term empathy' so that we 'lose ourselves for the moment in the experience of others'. But the experience is essentially transient and meaningless. 'We flounder amid informa- tion which is of little use to us.' However, we do develop superficial opinions about every subject under the sun. 'Every demo- cratic, media-sensitive citizen is a kind of fantasy ruler of the country.'
For Professor Minogue news is inescapably superficial. He doesn't believe it can reflect objective reality. 'Being so much a selection of facts from an infinitely complex reality, [news] can never achieve objectivity or impartiality, and hence any accusation of bias can only be one partisan- ship attacking another.' News is delivered in palatable soundbites. One effect is to reduce political and religious leaders to the same level. Great men are forced to con- verse in the easily digestible argot of media culture rather than in the elitist language of their predecessors. This conscious 'dumb- ing down' (the phrase is not employed by Professor Minogue) becomes more than an act, and great men are themselves debased by the medium they serve.
And not just great men, according to Professor Minogue. He believes that the media has undermined the authority of the Church as well as morality. For one thing, it `erodes our inner life, the alert subjectivity which scans and adjusts our responses to the world'. For another, the media has set itself up as a rival religion. But where the essence of Christianity is gratitude thanks to God for His unfailing Grace the media, because it is by nature opposi- tional, invites us constantly to criticise our lot and to find fault everywhere, even though we are immeasurably better off than our forefathers. The media has also weakened national unity, the main reason being that its values and assumptions are global and not rooted in national culture.
I hope this summary has done justice to the complexity of Professor Minogue's arguments, though he might dismiss it as a typical journalistic attempt to simplify the unsimplifiable. It is, I repeat, a devastating onslaught which sweeps one along with the sheer force of its convictions. He is right about the dumbing down, of course. Great men are often made fools of by journalists, and not just church leaders. The novelist is asked to provide in a few seconds a synop- sis of the ideas in his novel when he has gone to the trouble of writing a book in order to explore them. Those not required to submit themselves to such treatment had better avoid it.
The trouble with Professor Minogue's polemic is that it mentions all the bad things and leaves out all the good ones, as polemics tend to. In a way his refusal to curry favour with journalists on so-called quality newspapers by exempting them from criticism is admirable. The News of the World and The Spectator are implicitly lumped together. But some of his argu- ments break down because they are not finely shaded. It would surely be nonsensi- cal to accuse the Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mail or even the Sun of undermining national unity when they seem to go to such lengths to uphold it. The Guardian or Channel 4 News may choose to denigrate beliefs about nationhood, but some papers positively celebrate them.
Professor Minogue seems to think we are all captives of the media, and that we come to it in a state of equal idiocy. In fact some of us can tell rubbishy journalism from the good stuff. We know that even the best sort is bound to be provisional. When we read a 1,000-word news article about French poli- tics we understand in advance the factors that may have constrained its author, and we read the article in that spirit. If we expect the last word about contemporary France in one dollop we are bound to be `Do you fancy coming out for a fag?' disappointed, but only a fool would approach such an article with these expec- tations.
So it is with objective truth. No more than Professor Minogue do I believe that such a thing is attainable, but I hardly think this should worry us. Are we to accept his statement that it is impossible to reflect objective reality as a reason for not trying to? The meaningful distinction is between an article whose author has no concern for truth and one whose author is doing his damnedest to tell the truth. For all the debasement of the media, there seem to be a lot of reporters who are still trying to do the latter.
What would Professor Minogue have us do? He hates the automatic refrain of `something must be done', which is what the oppositional and ever agitating media always says. So his solution is in effect to turn off the switch. As a working journalist, this is not a course of action open to me, but even if it were I think I would keep it at least at half volume for fear of being cut off from the world. I would rather have a superficial relationship with it than no rela- tionship at all.
The Times last Saturday announced that 'the gap between full-price sales of the Times and the Daily Telegraph has nar- rowed to fewer than 30,000'. On Sunday the Sunday Times carried the headline, `Sunday Telegraph all-time low'. According to the first paragraph, 'sales of the full- price Sunday Telegraph slumped last month to an all-time low of just over 429,000, leav- ing it trailing the cover-price sales of the Sunday Times by more than 800,000 copies a week'.
I write as a Daily Telegraph columnist, so beware. But this does seem rather naughty. By orthodox calculations the Daily Tele- graph is selling over 450,000 copies more than the Times, while the Sunday Telegraph trails the Sunday Times by the same margin. Both Telegraph titles have been subsidising copies to many of their habitual readers. Whether this was wise may be question- able. It certainly has been costly. But there is no reason to suppose that subsidised readers are not as good as any other. The Times does not write off the 250,000 extra readers who buy its Monday 10p issue, so I don't see why it should try to dismiss those who have come by the Telegraph cheaply.
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