Albert Camus, philosopher, novelist, critic and hobbyist journalist (he edited an underground paper called Combat in Paris under Nazi occupation when most of those qualified in shorthand were “just doing their job” and reporting how charming and well behaved those young German chaps in the neat uniforms were) once had an idea for establishing a “control newspaper” that would come out one hour after the others with estimates of the percentage of truth in each of their stories, and with interpretations of how these stories were slanted. The way he explained it, it sounded possible.
We’d have complete dossiers on the interests, policies, and idiosyncrasies of the owners. Then we’d have a dossier on every individual journalist in the world. The interests, prejudices, and quirks of the owner would equal Z. The prejudices quirks and private interests of the journalist, Y. Z times Y would give you X, the probable amount of truth in the story.
(Comma’s are Camus’)
He was going to make up dossiers on reporters by getting journalists he trusted to appraise “men” they had worked with. (Sexism is entirely Camus’)
I would have a card system. Very simple. We would keep the dossiers up to date as best we could, of course. But do people really want to know how much truth there is in what they read? Would they buy the control paper? That’s the most difficult question.
Camus died without ever learning the answer to this question (oh hell, I’ve just realised he was younger than I am now when he hitched a lift in that fatal Facel Vega.) He frittered away the last few years of his life writing Nobel Prize winning fiction, a massive loss to the journalists club potentially.
Last week’s minor scandal involving a local MP and the editor of a national broadcast nightly news programme would have amused and saddened my news-skeptic hero, Camus.
Most initial reportage on the affair accurately related the events and repeated identical quotes from a limited number of sources. The coverage from the Yorkshire Post, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and the Independent appeared indistinguishable and could have been written by the same person (it could have been compiled by an algorithm to be brutal). But does an objective retelling of events equal “the truth”? And if it does, why do we need more than one journalist per story? I’m not sure any of the journalists who wrote the stories above added anything of value after the first was published (I’ve just read George Brock’s excellent book, Out of Print, where he raises this point – something I’ve never thought of before but reading the coverage of this one story it did make me wonder.)
Later that week more opinionated pieces were published, loaded with a surplus of interpretation – they either slapped away merrily with a tarbrush or sploshed the whitewash bucket with indiscriminate abandon, depending on the settled political slant of the publication. Take this snarky piece from Damian Thompson in the Telegraph or, on the other hand, this gushing, breathless, reverential interview in the Guardian. Personally I enjoy the rollicking rhetoric of the first and wished the latter – closer to my own liberal lefty political stand – wasn’t so feeble and saccharine, but I find both of them deeply implausible. I don’t really need Camus’ dossiers to work out on which side the political axe is being ground.
Anyhow, I doubt the “truth” is closest to one side rather than the other. And it’s hardly likely that the truth about the affair is distributed somewhere in the middle and could be deduced if only we had the right arithmetic procedure – for one thing there were far more negative stories than positive (Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature, not statistical science.)
Neither side answered or even could bring themselves to face the crucial questions that were posed by the story. For Rachel Reeves MP, competence in the details and difficulties of the job should be a given (why the hell would she be in that post if she wasn’t good at the sums!) But politics is not the same as administration. Politics is performance, and public spectacle, and a bit of a scrap, there’s no point kidding ourselves. Politicians have to be part street fighter, part pusher. One of the reasons why so many people are disaffected from mainstream politics is the fact that you get more kicks from a worn out Hush Puppy.
And I’m not sure what the point was in the Labour Party extracting an apology from the editor for his errant tweet. He has a right to his private opinion, no matter how foolish, dimwitted and juvenile. Of course, he ought to say sorry for being a clumsy oaf with the manners of Beavis and Butthead and the morals of the Inbetweeners (without being anywhere near as amusing), but that is completely irrelevant to his public performance as editor of a state subsidised flagship news programme. If he has anything to apologise for it should be measured against that performance not his Twitter #fail.
A little before the broadcast in question the editor tweeted
Last time I experienced something “dangerously interesting” was in the Hacienda, late 80’s, and it made me go crazy and lock myself in a lavatory for weeks. I’m not sure it’s such a good business model for a news programme.
But the editor gives the game away. He’s more or less saying here – to go back to Camus – that people don’t really care how much truth there is in the news, so why should a journalist even bother? Why not mix a bit of Oprah (that interview with the odious lying cheat Chris Huhne) with a dollop of The Tube (yeah, Arctic Monkeys, let’s dance like a robot from 1984) and a dash of Eurotrash (Cheryl Coles bum tattoos, great to see Paxman squirm about that), Which is fine if you like that sort of thing, but not so good if you like a bit of actual news in your news programme.
And I found the jokey hashtag at the end of the recent Newsnight smirking, trite and deeply repellent.
Rachel Reeves has vowed to go back on Newsnight – “that’s my job” she said.
Ian Katz will be editing.
The safest place is the pub.
Anyone for last orders?
It’s where Albert Camus and me will be. Avoiding the news.
There really are some people bad people on the right – tell the truth it really helped you etc http://open.spotify.com/track/4Lb88O1yJ4A2B2uCTJL7oM
It would be easier to list the non-boring MP’s. As you say, MP’s should be more than just administrators, Katz has a right to his opinion (and shouldn’t have apologised for it), and New Labour shouldn’t being demanding an apology. Also, rather than moaning in the Guardian that she feels ‘humiliated’ by being correctly referred to as ‘boring’, Reeves, and her party of illiberal technocrats, could try developing some political ideas – that aren’t around banning, censoring, taxing, regulating and social engineering. Although, in reality, I realise that’s beyond them.
What was the point of asking for an apology? Just bringing attention to the silly insult.
I was more interested in the insult he delivered to his own previous profession (he only left the Guardian weeks ago.) Not that many print journos seemed to want to contradict him. And no journalist asked for an apology.