When you are watching something like the migration crisis unfolding on the news—when turning on the TV at six p.m., or seven p.m., or ten p.m., becomes a nightly event that leaves you crushed, dispirited, blank, and despairing—you are apt to think, after a while: Maybe the news—the actual program—needs to change. Maybe we need a new news. Maybe that is part of the problem.
I love Yoko Ono. I remember reading an interview with her—possibly in Smash Hits—where she did that thing of pointing out something, with a very tiny question, that demands a big answer.
Why, she mused, is the news like it is? Twenty-five minutes of news—awful, visceral news of war, and fear—rounded off with five minutes of sport.
Why sport? Why does our most “important” television program of the day include updates on, quite randomly, sport? What makes sport worthy of being included in the daily news about our world—when, say, art, or fashion, isn’t?
Yes, sport is a massive business—£20 billion in the UK—with millions of passionate fans. But that is exactly the same description you could use for art (an industry worth, without being on the news every day, £71 billion) and fashion (likewise, £26 billion).
Could it be, Ono suggested, that it’s because fashion and pop are seen as for girls—and sport is for men?
In the twenty years since I’ve read it, I haven’t decided if it is sexism—but it’s a thought I keep coming back to. How do we decide what “The News” is—and, subsequently, how does that decision affect us? In that half hour, what are we telling ourselves about ourselves?
Would we be a different culture if, instead of rounding off our bulletins of death and war with sport, we had arts news, instead? After all, sport is an odd echo to the preceding news: another male-dominated world of physical power, centered only on winners and losers.
Imagine if we ended news bulletins by entering the intellectual and emotional world, instead: a dazzling paragraph on love from Donna Tartt’s latest book, a new poem on grief, the huge new pop single that makes people dance when they hear it. No winners, no losers. Just a joyous celebration of revelation, insights, skill, genius. Would that change us? If we changed the news to a new news? Why did we ever choose sport, anyway?
It needn’t be art, of course: tech news would be just as different—what’s been invented, what’s spectacularly failing, what’s coming over the horizon. Or we could have ecology news: the latest panda born, the bleaching corals, the comeback of the bees. Really, those five minutes could be anything we wanted. With no winners or losers at all.
And, of course, once you question the last five minutes of the news, you start to question the first twenty-five minutes, too.
I had always thought, until recently, that those twenty-five minutes show you everything that’s going on in the world.
And they don’t, of course. They’re just showing you everything that’s going on in the world that has reached a crisis point.
And that’s a different thing—being shown what has basically gone beyond the ability of any agency to resolve it. Wars, famines, terrorism. Continents of melting ice, archipelagos of plastic. The collapse of markets, of economies, of industries. The collapse of—in so many awful valleys, or on mountaintops, or in burning cities—humanity itself.
Of course, the news can’t help being the news—it can’t help showing you every black, smoking hole that has become some unstoppable hell on earth. It can’t stop showing you the end of hope. But, in turn, it is becoming, I think, the end of hope itself. Because the news is, essentially, screwing us up. Crushing us.
The remorseless delivery of each new crisis by twenty-four-hour news channels, and social media, leaves us exhausted, and bleak—battered and out of love with our own species. We have no perspective on how lucky we are—how things are improving, how things might be prevented.
Twenty-first-century technology allows us to sit in this panopticon, and the pounding bleakness of what we see has made us fall back into an almost medieval analysis of what is going on. We are as resigned to our inevitable climate crisis as we were to God’s inevitable apocalypse; our world leaders use the word “evil” to describe their enemies—as if evil were something that roamed the world in a miasma, rather than grew out of a dully predictable and age-old recipe: famines, corrupt leaders, prejudice, poverty, instability, disputed borders, fear.
That’s why I want a sister program to the news—that might be thought of, if not called, “The Perspective.” Every study states we are living in the period of greatest stability, illumination, tolerance, longevity, and progress mankind has ever seen. So let some kind of news show that.
We need a new kind of news program to show us the news five years before it becomes “The News”: when it’s still a manageable, budding problem that can be solved with technology, aid, diplomacy. Where someone watching the news could, feasibly, be the very person to solve it. When there is still some kind of hope that love, insight, skill, or genius could provide—rather than just another dispiriting, numbing reporting of the winners and losers.
First on the battlefields, and then, mysteriously, in all that sport.