I’m not expecting sympathy. Really, I’m not. But there was a time, and really not so long ago, when you knew where you were with news. Day one, thing happens. Day two, thing gets in the papers. Then, on day three, the parasites like me weigh in.
That’s how it worked back in the distant time of, say, February. Since then, though, that tried and tested old model seems to have gone out the window. And it’s not simply that old media can’t cope, because new media copes even worse. BBC news hacks used to joke that their rivals at Sky ought to have the motto ‘never wrong for long’, but even that is an aspiration too far for the sprawling chaos of internet punditry. On Twitter, for example, you can be wrong for ever. Thoughts settle upon each other like the sediment of ages, with the earliest — the wrongest — fast buried and forgotten.
I’d like, you see, to be writing about these riots. Are there still riots? Maybe that’s a stupid question. Maybe you’re reading this sheltered in the burned-out husk of your local newsagent, while cannibalistic youths outside play an impromptu game of cricket with the shopkeeper’s head as a ball and the stiffened corpse of your neighbour’s dog as a bat. Or, maybe you’re reading it at home, thinking, ‘Yeah, I remember the riots. But wasn’t that ages ago?’
I don’t think I’m imagining it. News is happening differently. Each story comes with a thump, and then hangs around for ages. Before the riots there was phone hacking, which lingered on for a fortnight, delivering a new front-page-demanding kick to the belly every night at 5.45 p.m. That wasn’t even a month ago, and already I’m buggered if I can remember what they all were. Before that, an afternoon of royal wedding managed to last for ten days. Before that, the Arab Spring. Before that, WikiLeaks. And in brief moments of lull, there’s always the global economic meltdown to fall back upon.
Like huge and a roaring fires, each one sucks up news oxygen and, like smaller, nearby fires, all other news finds itself smothered and fluttering out. So much happens, and so quickly, that things stop being true even as you write them. Online, pretty much all newspapers now do that live-blogging trick pioneered by the Guardian where, instead of actually writing articles, one wide-eyed caffeine-crazed young hack is tasked with giving a minute-by-minute update of the way things are developing. It’s a tyranny, this ‘developing’ business. News didn’t used to have to ‘develop’ all the time. It just happened, and then it stopped happening, to give us time to write it down.
Now it never stops happening. The police are going to use rubber bullets, then they aren’t, then they are again. Armies of volunteers are going to clean up Camden, then they aren’t, then they’re going to clean up Clapham instead. More violence is expected in London Fields. There might be a fire in Camberwell, but there might not be, or it might be somewhere else. Get left behind with any of this stuff, and you’ll never catch up. You’ll be one of those mugs who only knows about stuff that has really happened.
Newspapers excel, these days, when they deliberately look like retrospective special issues, dominated by the big story of the day before. This used to happen sometimes (9/11, 7 July 2005, the death of Princess Diana) but lately it seems to happen every other day. And I can’t decide if it’s the world that keeps throwing these admittedly massive stories at us, or the media that determinedly and perhaps unwittingly ramps up quite massive stories into all-dominating ones, so that, like the drunk who screams ‘lalalalala’ with his fingers in his hears when his wife tells him she’s leaving, we don’t need to think about anything else.
•••
It’s summer, though, so columnist etiquette dictates that I ought to be telling you about my latest holiday, and the insights it gave me of home. Right? So here you go. I was on a train in Germany the other day, and a policeman with a gun demanded to see my papers.
He bloody did. And we’re not talking tickets here, either. He wanted me to produce my passport, so as to prove that I was who I said I was. Apropos of nothing at all. It was something to do with the Schengen agreement, I gather, and the fact that I was quite near the Swiss border, even though I had no intention of crossing it. This sort of thing just happens in Germany, and nobody thinks it’s weird. Nobody minds. Nobody says, ‘By what law? How very dare you!’ and all the other things that David Davis and Shami Chakrabarti have told us we ought to say over here.
What shocked me the most was how much it shocked me. I flew into Gatwick last year with a brace of Telegraph columnists, and both of them were appalled at passport control when I told them I’d registered for the iris scan. ‘Don’t you mind surrendering that information?’ they said, and I thought, well, no. It’s my eye. I really don’t mind people knowing I have it.
I understand all that civil liberties stuff, intellectually and emotionally, too, but I’ve always struggled to share it. Who really gives a damn, I always thought. Until now. This is my line in the sand. A man with a gun, on a train, insisting, without reason, that I prove I am who I am. Brrr. Not here.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
Comments