AS I WAS SAYING
The trouble with the media is not dumbing down, but its opposite
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
The better the writer, the worse the reporter? I fear so, because the journalist as writer has no concern with mere facts, if they get in the way of some more important truth that he is trying to make, either in his stories, if he is a reporter, or in his ideas or arguments, if he is a columnist. For the journalist as writer fancies himself as an artist, and an artist, by definition, is some- one who has a skill which enables him to improve on nature, as much in words as in paint, clay or music. There is an element of trickery in art — sublime trickery, at best, but trickery nevertheless.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the journalist as artist is not content to report a train acci- dent straight — so many dead and injured; so many carriages wrecked, etc. — but must perforce fill out the picture with a lot of speculation and colour, most of which tells us more about the author — what a good writer he is — than about the train crash. No, that is not quite fair. In the journalism of a great writer, such as Rudyard Kipling, the reader, as it happens, will learn a great deal about train crashes in general — the essential truth about train crashes. But that is not the same as learning all the nitty-grit- ty, boring details of a minor derailment, say, on the 10.20 from Burnley to Accring- ton. It is precisely that order of nitty-gritty details that the newspaper reporter, as against the writer, used to be expected to obtain.
In my early days on the Glasgow Herald shortly after the war, for example, a reporter covering a fire was expected to find out the names and ages of all the fire- men involved, which were all duly given at the end of the story; likewise with the names and ages of all the policemen involved in the detection of a crime. Even to this day, that extent of detail fills the columns of the New York Times, but never any longer those of the London Times — or any other broadsheet — whose reporters nowadays regard bothering with such pedestrian details as well below their level of attention. Nor would any contemporary newspaper editor allow his reporters to go into such detail for fear of boring readers into cancelling their subscriptions. In the old days, however, readers of quality news- papers did not feel they were getting their money's worth unless they were bored, rather as patients do not feel a medicine is doing them any good unless it tastes nasty. One reason for this change, I believe, is that a much more educated kind of person now goes into journalism; someone, very often, with an arts degree who feels it infra dig to be a mere reporter concerned with relating the facts dead-pan, and aspires instead, as an investigative reporter, to find the facts behind the facts; as a feature writ- er to add a bit of colour to the facts; as a columnist to explain the facts; or as a leader writer to say what readers should make of the facts. Insofar as the contemporary jour- nalist is willing to deal with the facts at all, they have to be exclusives or scoops — i.e. ones which only he is privy to, or ones which he is the first to reveal. Ordinary, humdrum facts, speeches in the House of Commons or communiqués or official state- ments, are of little interest, except as a scaf- folding on which the reporter can build a verbal structure of his own designing. When did you last read a speech — Clinton before the Grand Jury does not count — reported verbatim or in full? Nowadays reporters are too busy reading between the lines ever to bother with the lines themselves.
Heaven knows, I ought to know about all this, having been one of the earliest offend- ers. I remember in the 1960s being despatched by the Daily Telegraph to report on some coup d'etat in an African capital. Instead of keeping my eyes open in the bus on the way from the airport to the city cen- tre, I had mine buried in some learned tome about the country's history with a view to showing off my new-found know- ledge in the next day's paper. As a result, unlike the tabloid reporters on the bus few if any of whom in those days had a degree — I failed to notice the decapitated corpses lying by the roadside. Doubtless my learned despatch reached depths about the causes of the crisis lacking in those of my tabloid rivals, but in overlooking the corpses it wholly failed to give the readers the essential here-and-now facts which it was a reporter's duty to include.
The Daily Telegraph was not pleased. In those days, under Lord Hartwell, it was a paper which had no time for viewy reporters, or indeed viewy leader or feature writers, who were more interested in play- ing with ideas or expressing their own opin- ions than giving the facts. Any 'fine writing' was instantly spiked, much to the outrage of the new generation of university-educat- ed would-be columnists, like Colin Welch and myself, who were then seeking to make names for ourselves. Hence the amount we drank. Denied the opportunity to get high on words, we had resource to alcohol. On the Manchester Guardian, as it then was, it was quite otherwise. Indulged with masses of space for literary frills, sociological theo- ries and historical analogies, their writers used up their bon mots in print rather than in pubs. So what is my point? Quite simply that increasingly in the media today truth is being sacrificed to art (or at least artful- ness), reporting to literature. No, this is not a matter of dumbing down, rather its oppo- site. Broadsheet newspapers, at any rate, are far more sophisticated, far cleverer, far better written than they ever were before, incomparably more rewarding and read- able. One of the Times' columnists, Matthew Parris, has even deservedly earned a place in the New Oxford Book of English Prose, the first hack ever to do so; and it is only a matter of time before a news story in the Times wins a place in the next Oxford Book of English Fiction. But therein lies the danger: the picture of the world presented by the media is both much more beautiful and much more ugly' both much more eye-catching and much more dramatic, both much more simple and much more complicated, than in actu- ality it ever is. For instead of getting the worm's-eye — the reporter's — view, we are getting the artist's view, which is by def- inition artificial, in a word unrealistic, owing more to aesthetics than to ethics, more to the corruptions of style than to the virtues of truth.
As we all know, when the ancient Chi- nese wished to lay a curse on an enemy, they said, 'May you live in interesting times.' Given today's media, nobody can any longer escape falling victim to that malediction. This is not out of base reasons of political bias or anything as humdrum. It is out of a kind of artistic integrity, a purist's desire to produce as grippinglY interesting a piece of writing as his word- processor can compose. If the facts are stranger than fiction, they will be included, but if they are dull — i.e. telling things as they really are — out they will go, for aes- thetic reasons. Journalism for journalism s sake, that is the new rule, the highest imperative, under cover of which every- thing can be excused and justified.
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