The News Is Not Trying to Inform You

Watch an evening news broadcast with one question in mind: what would this segment look like if its purpose were to make me understand the subject? Then compare it to what is on the screen. The gap is the whole story of modern journalism, and it is worth spelling out, because the industry describes itself in terms that the product does not support.

The Personal Story Is a Tell

A report on housing opens with a family. A report on unemployment opens with a man who lost his job. A report on a war opens with a mother. This is the format, and it is so universal that it has stopped looking like a choice.

It is a choice, and it reveals the goal. A personal story does not teach you anything about housing, unemployment, or the war. It teaches you what one person feels, which you already knew how to imagine. If the aim were understanding, the segment would open with how many, how much, compared to when, and what changed. It does not, because that is not the aim.

The aim is catharsis. The segment is built to move you — to a tear, to indignation, to a warm sense that you have witnessed something — and then to release you. That is a legitimate thing for a medium to do. Theatre does it. Music does it. But theatre does not call itself the news, and it does not claim that you leave better informed than you came.

The Lie Told in a Good Cause

The format also forces a specific kind of falsehood, and the people committing it usually believe they are doing good.

When a broadcaster covers homelessness, the homeless person on screen is articulate, sympathetic, and recognisably like the viewer. The message is this could be you. It is chosen for that message. The choice is deliberate and the intention is kind: make the audience care, and perhaps something will be done.

But most homelessness does not look like that. Much of it involves addiction, mental illness, and behaviour that does not arouse sympathy, and any serious response to the problem has to start from what it actually is. The sympathetic case is a real person and a real story, and as a representation of the phenomenon it is a lie. In the effort to make the world better, the medium chooses to misdescribe it, and the misdescription then shapes the policy, which fails, because it was aimed at a population that mostly does not exist.

This is the same failure I have described in art: a story proves that something happens, never how much or how often. Journalism inherits it wholesale, with the added claim that it is telling you the truth.

We Are Not Innocent

It would be convenient to blame the broadcasters and stop there. It would also be dishonest.

We tune in for the feeling. We know, at some level, that the segment is constructed to produce it, and we want it produced. The ratings say so, and ratings are what the format is optimised against. A channel that opened every story with a chart and a base rate would lose to the one with the mother, and the people who switched would be us.

So the arrangement is a collaboration. The medium supplies the emotion, we consume it, and both sides agree to call the transaction "staying informed." That agreement is the part I object to. Not the emotion — I am not against millions of people feeling something together in the evening. The mislabelling.

What Honesty Would Look Like

Two things, neither of which will happen, both of which are worth stating.

First, the programmes that exist to move us should say so. Not as a disclaimer but as an identity: this is the hour in which we tell you stories about individuals so that you feel the weight of things. It would be a perfectly respectable hour. It would simply not be the news.

Second, the thing that calls itself the news should be held to the standard the name implies. Statistics, distributions, comparisons across time and place, and discussion of what the numbers can and cannot tell you. No opening family. No representative case, because there is no such thing. If a topic cannot be covered that way in the time available, it should be covered at greater length or not at all.

A medium that cannot do this is not a bad news medium. It is not a news medium. It is something else with a misleading name, and we should stop expecting it to do a job it was never built for — and stop congratulating ourselves for watching it.