News
On the air and in print and through the wires and wireless, someone chirps. Someone bays, almost hysterical. Someone drones—endless syllables making endless words. Someone barks and yips. Someone’s voice is dark as death. Someone hectors. Someone coos. Someone lilts. Someone’s voice is stern as seven displeased fathers. Someone tries not to bray but brays anyway. Someone practices being an automaton. Someone is bored but puts a good face on it. Someone cheerleads—rah, rah, rah!
There seemed no end to these voices or to what they said. No one could remember what all the voices said. No one would want to remember beyond “Did you hear?” Some ages have honored the connection to which Blake attested when he wrote that “eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Modern times adored an eventfulness emphatically divorced from eternity, as the photojournalism magazine of the mid-twentieth-century forthrightly put it—Life. The nature of the events was up to the reporter to a degree and up to the editor to a degree but also up to what appealed to some figment of imagination, such as “the common man” or “the man in the street” or, in another society, where a line was being laid down from the very top (not that a line was not always being laid down everywhere from the very top), “the comrade” or “member of the party.” These notions were frightfully hardy and made for a sort of mental pabulum.
Remarkable events did occur, times when a reporter could speak with utter gravity. “I’m standing here just on the steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. A searchlight just burst into action off in the distance, one single beam . . . .” For many, Edward R. Murrow’s voice was the London Blitz. He and countless others in modern times put their lives at hazard to tell their audience not only what their audience needed to know, because it deeply concerned them, but to bring events to life. A reporter such as Murrow was, at once, witnessing and participating while creating the experience in words—a heady, visceral, honorable charge. Many journalists and reporters, besieged by the welter of mundane affairs, kept Murrow’s voice with them: one steady voice could matter enormously.
The need for there to be a torrent of news each day rather than an intermittent sense of something important—“The king died”—or local gossip—“John’s wife is fooling around”—determined for many the contours of daily life. This need for news was news in its own right since it spoke to something insatiable and uneasy, something driven by the feeling of insubstantiality that shadowed modern times, by the equation that substituted the diurnal doings of “the world” for a longer perspective. The framing of what constituted news and how the news might be delivered became endeavors rife with power, money, and influence. Careers rose and fell according to how this or that event was purveyed. Scandal always lurked nearby. So did lies—misinformation—presented as truth.
And yet the news was made to be consumed and forgotten: discontinuous and disconnected, news was a head without a torso, a day without a past. Urgency ruled—the raw feeling of being somehow alive. The claim to interest lay in the sense of Something Important Happening Now; adjudicating the importance was beside the point. (In the twenty-first century, Donald Trump seized on Twitter to make his every statement seem newsworthy, regardless of how inane.) Politics sat side by side with murder, sport, car crashes, prominent divorce cases, and what came to be known as “human interest,” separated sisters who found one another after decades or someone whirled in a tornado and set down without a scratch. The formula was not elaborate—something serious at the top of the page or screen or beginning of the broadcast such as the President making a decision or a summit conference or an election or the run-up to a decision or conference or election. Then something sensational or ghastly—sudden death in one form or another. Then financial news—how much was made or lost on the stock market that day. Then, at the rear of the newspaper or bottom of the screen or end of the broadcast, sports scores, weather, and some tidbit to warm the audience’s distracted hearts. Day in, day out, this surf pounded the human shore. Nothing seemed to be lost and nothing seemed to be gained. Aside from an occasional catastrophe, the sound lulled many a distracted mind. “Life” fit into a very tight frame.
Much of this news occurred far beyond an individual’s daily purview. That distance made matters more attractive rather than less. Other people had trouble, too. Other people won and lost. Other people said and did foolish things. The news was a cornucopia of foibles allowing curious listeners or readers to feel superior or, if the mood suited them, sympathetic. That the consumer of the news could do nothing about the events made the news weirdly immemorial. “Here,” the news said,” Take it or leave it but tomorrow there will be more.”
The talk and reportage spawned talk and reportage about the talk and reportage. A speech was given and then a response to the speech and then counter-responses and endless commentary. Punditry may have always bedeviled the human race but modern times saw an explosion of tendentious expertise. Typically such voices did not have anything of lasting worth to say. To read a collection of such voices was to realize how narrow any moment of the so-called news was and how attempts to explicate that moment often only made it more inconsequential. Out of chaff came more chaff; out of partisanship came more partisanship.
To pay no attention to the news was to invite contempt. “Who do you think you are?” and “Don’t you care about what is happening?” and “If everybody did that then anything could happen.” To be indifferent to the news, to show a blank face about an election or what movie won an award or what team won which championship, to not be up on current events and lack responses, savored of radical nonconformity. Why live if you don’t partake second-hand of events? There are—and have been—plenty of reasons to live and none of them have to do with the news. Whether I was well-informed or not, the current of wars, money, crimes, and duplicities (venal and otherwise) flowed along, busily turning lives into debris. The larger news, such as the man-made changes the planet was experiencing, was barely news—too slow, too incremental, not urgent enough. The human factor stubbornly insisted on the importance of each day’s political and social shenanigans. Pity the news-ridden day.