I’m hiding from something I used to love: the news. It’s a common tendency these days – Loyd Grossman noted it in his Spectator diary recently, calling himself a ‘nonewsnik… unable to deal with a daily diet of misery and despair’. I understand the need to escape the depressing effects of war and economic turmoil. That’s part of my own reasoning too. But my main point is slightly different: it’s not so much that the news is depressing, it’s that the news is boring.
We’ve been here before. Whatever the issue, we’ve faced the same old problems and run through the same old arguments. For my 50th birthday, a friend gave me a copy of the front page of the Times from the day I was born. Reading about those events in 1971, you shiver in a cold bath of déjà vu: job losses, industrial disputes, a rise in shoplifting, the US imposing trade tariffs. Politicians arguing in Northern Ireland, Israel arguing with the occupied territories, European governments arguing with themselves.
Then I think back to my childhood, all of which was spent under the threat of someone in Moscow wanting to start a war with the West. That threat went away for a bit, but it’s back now, joining its co-stars in the festival of doom. And so there comes a point in life when you think: ‘This isn’t going to change, is it? They haven’t solved any of these problems in the past 50 years, they’re not going to solve them in the next 50 either.’ It’s even a problem for news broadcasters themselves. I was recently talking to a BBC radio presenter, who admitted he found it harder and harder to think of new questions about the old topics.
True, we have had a particularly bad run in the past decade. The EU referendum led to four years of parliamentary shenanigans which would have had even Erskine May himself stifling a yawn. That was followed by two years in which the human race went mad, responding to a not particularly harmful virus with measures that destroyed everyday life and from which some people will never recover. The pandemic was when I really switched off the news, metaphorically and literally. Metaphorically because it showed how statistically illiterate most people are – how can I ever take a vox pop seriously again after that? And literally because the Today programme became too much to bear. I moved to Radio 3’s Breakfast and have never gone back. People are still making the same journey: presenter Petroc Trelawny recently welcomed new listeners who had got ‘fed up with the news’.
But it isn’t just the issues, it’s the way those issues are reported. When I was a kid, people read a newspaper in the morning, they watched a news programme in the evening, and that was that – for the rest of the time, you forgot that the news existed. Now, 24-hour TV and the internet have increased the supply, thereby decreasing the value. I used to really look forward to Newsnight: now I wouldn’t give you tuppence for it. Plus there’s social media, which means that everyone gets to pile on with their views. The quality of debate matches the Dog and Duck at half ten on a Friday night. You can only take so much of that.
For my 50th birthday, a friend gave me the front page of the Times from the day I was born. Reading about those events in 1971, you shiver in a cold bath of déjà vu
What’s worse, as well as changing the way news is reported, social media has changed the news itself. The speed at which things happen has increased. A tweet at breakfast time is a petition by lunchtime is a reversal of government policy by teatime. It’s hysteria, a substance which, although it might seem alarming, is in the end merely tedious.
Don’t get me wrong, I still know roughly what’s going on in the world. You need to, for basic conversational purposes and so you know what the mortgage might do. I still buy a newspaper, usually the Times, though not every day and mainly for the sudoku. Staying in touch with the news is also good for writing quizzes, like the one I do every year in the Spectator pocket diary. ‘Who has released fragrances,’ for instance, ‘called “Success”, “Empire” and “Victory”?’ (Answer below.) And I still enjoy news commentary. Rod Liddle makes me laugh, so I need to know who’s featuring in his column and what they’ve been up to, otherwise I wouldn’t get the jokes.
But the daily grind of the daily news? Those details in the 14th paragraph? No thank you very much. I’m with Billy Connolly, who once commented that he finds the news ‘incredibly boring. God knows I’ve tried. Especially with politics – you get two pages in and you say “oh bollocks, who cares?”’. In the end that Times from 1971 is the only newspaper I need. I find it comforting rather than depressing. True, the problems are still here half a century later. But then so are we. People are still having fun, getting together, having kids. In 50 years’ time some of those kids will look back at 2025, and feel the same reassurance I feel now. Who needs the news when you’ve got that?
ANSWER: Donald Trump.
Comments