/ 8 August 2011

Getting the bad news overload

They always say too much disaster has the effect of inoculating the audience, so that we do not care. But there is a level above that, of so many disasters that you go beyond the inoculation effect into the Armageddon effect — or, as satirical United Kingdom magazine Private Eye had it, when they captioned George Bush on September 11, “Armageddonouttahere”.

Whatever the news has been in 2011, one thing always strikes me: this story, say the imminent implosion of Greece or the famine in the Horn of Africa, would normally have been enough to hold the front pages for days, even weeks, were it not for that story — the Murdoch affair, the imminent collapse of Italy, the Norwegian massacre, the United States debt ceiling.

There is such an abundance of news that it has torpedoed the news agenda. How do you make an agenda when everything is as important as everything else? There is just too much news. It is the kind of news environment that makes conspiracy theorists say: “These things are all connected.”

There is also a sense of head spin, of being unable to digest one tragedy before another happens. It is compounded by Twitter: the modern business of half-knowing meant that the news of Amy Winehouse’s death was on Twitter before it was publicly announced. Stories are superseded so fast that you never get time for that half-knowledge to turn into full knowledge before the next thing happens. The effect is a news twilight, where you cannot even be sure what has been confirmed and what has not.

But to return to that urge to connect, the urge to understand — even for those who are not conspiracy theorists that is a legitimate aim: when huge events tumble upon one another, it is human to look for a link. This is easier with natural disasters than it is with sudden decapitations of the high command, so, to start in New Zealand: the Christchurch earthquake in February would, in a normal year, have taken up news coverage on a scale of the Australian fires of 2009. There would have been eyewitness accounts pouring out, the whole disaster would have been broken down to individual narratives, with either an especially tragic or ironic twist.

I can remember specific stories about those fires, families who died in cars, brave individuals who fought off flames with a spade.

I cannot remember anything at all about Christchurch, because less than three weeks later the Japanese suffered their greatest, costliest disaster since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The tornadoes that hit Arkansas and Ontario in April, having killed 45 people, would normally have been quite a big story but were obliterated by the destruction that had already happened.

In that ruminative period that usually follows a significant event, people were batting around the theory that one earthquake will predispose the Earth to suffer another.

Otherwise, the coincidence of New Zealand, then Japan, then Japan again a few days later (not to mention New Zealand again in June) just seemed too great. In fact, the intricacies of new tectonic theory were totally wiped out by the threat to the Japanese nuclear power plants, which themselves lost coverage to the Arab spring.

But even without knowing the answer to the earthquake question, there is still a sense with natural disasters that, if they look connected, they may well be. We are just waiting for the right climate change environmental scientist to come along and the links between the Brisbane floods and the drought in the Horn of Africa, the earthquakes in the Far East and the tornadoes in the West will all become clear.

Likewise with the financial meltdown: if Greece looks as if it is on the brink one minute, and the next thing you know Portugal is, if Italy suddenly starts to wobble, the links there are pretty evident. You do not need to understand who is in favour of the eurobond and who is not — you do not need the one, two, three of all this to understand that it is all the same currency, so naturally contagion was always a possibility.

It is true that the United States debt ceiling is a different matter and cannot be shrugged off with a nervous “I wonder if this shared currency was a good idea after all?” laugh. But it is also true that, if we understand anything at all about global finance, the shockwaves from the credit crunch were never going to restrict themselves to crashing on one bad decision; they will crash anywhere and continue to crash.

On the other hand, consider the worldwide disruption of powers that seemed inviolable: Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, whose regime fell in February after only 17 days of street protest; Osama bin Laden, killed by the US in May in a blow so sudden that everybody immediately assumed it had been made up to boost Obama’s poll ratings; President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali forced to flee Tunisia for Saudi Arabia; Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, as tenacious a tinpot dictator as has ever existed on the world stage, now apparently clinging on to power in Libya only because he has no alternative. There is, naturally, a connection between the events of the Arab spring, but what has the Bin Laden attack got to do with any of that? What were the chances that he would be knocked off the front pages by Dominique Strauss-Kahn and that his demise would be dwarfed, to the point of being almost erased, by the end of the era of Rupert Murdoch?

The tragedy in Norway distilled this last feature of the year’s news: how could you ever have seen that coming? An outside observer, asked to predict far-right terrorist atrocity, would say the US, some off-grid hyper-nationalist whipped into a homicidal frenzy by the Tea Party; or the Netherlands, just for the heat of its debates on Islamic fundamentalism versus nationalist extremism. But Norway?

Conspicuous by their absences are the good-news events. The British royal wedding in April, it is true, accounted for significant news acreage, being both photogenic and pleasant in conception. But by the time the couple got to their North American tour their blameless irrelevance became clear. You cannot pose in an ice-hockey shirt while people are starving to death in Somalia.

That was clear with the desperate, teeth-grinding frustration of the director of Unicef, David Bull, who took out full-page adverts in the UK press recently to say: “I am writing for your support in moving the news agenda on. The story about phone hacking does matter, but there is another, far bigger and vital story that is going unreported.” This is the first official famine to happen in 20 years. In 20 years’ time the priorities of the news of 2011 will probably seem unfortunate: Bull is right. As serious as it is when a media outlet corrupts a police force, it is not as bad as 10-million people being on the brink of death.

At the beginning of BBC radio, if the time rolled around for a news bulletin and there was no news, the newsreader would simply say “there is no news”. Sooner or later, the idea of a news agenda developed, and if there was no news, they would just find some news. But can you imagine today just waking up to hear that there was no news: what a comfort that would be. —