Much to report, not much reporting

LRB · John Lanchester: Riots, Terrorism etc
John Lanchester writes, engagingly as ever, of Nick Davies's Flat Earth News in the latest LRB. Having returned from a recent trip to Australia via long-ish stopovers in Tokyo and Singapore, I can say that I'm now jet-laggingly familiar with news stations like CNN and BBC World and would add that television news is no longer news, but seems to fall into two broad, overlapping categories: 1) how people feel or are meant to feel, and 2) speculation about what is actually happening or might happen. For an example of news in the first category, you've got introductions to stories that begin, "There was anger today to the announcement of [insert story here]..." What gets privileged in these stories is the emotion over the fact; so much so that we seem to be entering a world in which we primarily emote, searching for the flotsam of alleged fact that will support these anxieties or pleasures. By contrast, the second category, that of speculation over reporting, is everpresent. We hear of speeches "about" to be made; of bodies that "are yet to be found"; of representatives of sports teams telling reporters what their teams will do on the pitch come Saturday. Strangely enough, the most speculation related to news appears to come with not the weather, but with crime. A child disappears, a reporter is sent "to the scene" of the disappearance, from which she or he reports "live" on the lack of information she or he has obtained and relates the rumours about what "might have happened here" and "what police say they will do tomorrow". The backdrop of a "real" neighbourhood or park tricks us into assuming the report is of reality. The reporting, however, seems to put us into a holding pattern, waiting for clearance from the truth. The reporting becomes the holding pattern; the unacknowledged objective of reporting may now be to keep us from knowledge. As soon as we know, we may need to switch off in order to reflect. Or properly assess the importance of what we know in relation to everything else.

Anyway. I'm back in London. Australia felt very different (see - I do it, too), thanks to the Apology given by the Parliament to the Stolen Generations and other indigenous communities. It was a good day to be there.