Selling the antidote and the toxin
If so many news stories are poisonous, then why do we thirst for more of them?
There’s so much good stuff in “Vicious Cycles: Theses on a philosophy of news,” by Greg Jackson (Harper’s, January 2020) that I encourage you to read the whole thing.
To whet your appetite, here are a few excerpts which made my eyes go wide, mostly because they dovetail with ideas I continue to wrestle with here at Towers of Babel.
What a story. What a fucking story.
—Dean Baquet [executive editor of The New York Times], on the election of Donald Trump…
“Until the news can say, “We have no show (or paper) today because there is nothing of significance to concern you,” the news will build its monument to truth on a lie.
The formal message of the news is simultaneously the vital importance and utter triviality of everything that is happening.
A disturbing fiction at least comforts you that it is fiction. A needling friend may finally admit, “I’m just fucking with you.” The news is, on balance, just fucking with us, but it can never say so because it draws its stimulating power from the pretense that it isn’t entertainment, isn’t just “fun,” but is deeply consequential. It rigorously blurs the line between entertainment and public service, since its market share and prestige depend on this confusion. But when you ask yourself what you can do with what you have learned on the news, you see that it only permits you to consume subsequent news more conversantly.
The privatization of a public good has progressed to a far-gone place when market success and moral success are so confused that you congratulate yourself for selling both antidote and toxin.
The essayist Lauren Hough writes about being a “cable guy” and describes the clenched-teeth white-knuckling of a customer who hears he will have to forgo Fox News for a week. A junkie without a fix. What is this hunger, this addiction? An addiction is a hunger briefly satisfied, then redoubled, by its object. But hunger for what?
When we turn away from the news, we will confront a startling loneliness. It is the loneliness of life. The loneliness of thinking, of having no one to think for us, and of uncertainty. … We may, if we listen closely to the echo inside this loneliness, hear the expectant beating of our own hearts and understand that what we longed for, what we asked for, and what was given us was a story—a story of such grand metaphysical proportions that reality could never meet it. Reality could only meet it by inflaming itself, and this was the danger—the danger that made our hearts beat faster and the story grow stronger. Then we will see the news for what it was: the narrator of our national epic. “The news of the day” was the next chapter in an evaporating book….
We may never get to the quiet place where we can read a poem, because this will mean distinguishing happiness from pleasure and understanding that happiness means boredom, means loneliness. Means life among one another, in the world: a place where drama subsides and horizons of time stretch to months, to years. Are you not bored already? Who will narrate our epic now? Will we have one? What will bind us? No one knows. What we do know is that some part of us longs for our dreams to come true. Dream of monsters long enough and you bring them into being. We make what we imagine real. And who then reminds us—and what must happen before we remember—that the drama we want in our stories is not the drama we want in our lives?
Or as I keep saying: