As Easy as Able, Baker, Charlie

#07

   I am developing a severe aversion to rolling news. Not just for its content – although the very news itself is generally bad enough – but for the overall mind-numbing effect it produces. In the 1995 film ‘Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud’ (Director, Claude Sautet) a computer-literate young woman is employed by an irascible old man (sic) to assist with the drafting of his memoirs. His attitude to the word-processing capabilities of the PC is unwaveringly hostile; “Such perfect memory,” he complains, “so little worth remembering.” In its own way, Twenty-Four Hour Rolling News is not dissimilar, providing as it does a constant deluge of incomprehensible information. After watching for a few minutes, I begin to feel that it is possible to know everything but understand absolutely nothing. Such a perfect storm of facts, so little real knowledge.

   The problem is that the information is made additionally confusing by the disconnected manner in which it is presented. There is no narrative. It’s like receiving football results without awareness that the teams are competing for places in a league. Or, imagine trying to read a dozen novels simultaneously while only being permitted to read a single line at a time from each story in turn. That’s just about what you get with rolling news.

   Further barriers to comprehension are thrown-up by the format in which the “News” is presented. There is almost always a double act. A middle-aged man in a suit sits behind a hi-tec desk, alongside a visibly younger woman. He is spruced but she has perfect make-up and solid hair. He is there to be avuncular. She generally looks startled. They then proceed to bat news items to and fro like so many tennis balls. While one of them is speaking, the other is preparing a facial expression they imagine will be appropriate to the next item on their script.

   The background is an added distraction. Sometimes there will be a collage of enlarged fragments cropped from topical images. At other times we see a busy newsroom with multiple computer screens and subordinate ‘news-gatherers’ intent on sustaining the flow. Along the bottom of the screen there runs a strap line of continuous text offering what is called “Breaking News”. This conveyor belt changes all the time – the term they use is Up-dating. The content of this text is frequently at odds with the topic under discussion by the talking heads above. “Here’s some more information…splatter, splatter, splatter”. Is it all equally significant, or equally meaningless? And how the hell would we know anyway?  

   The format adopted by early morning (using the pre-fix ‘Breakfast’) news programmes is superficially different but amounts to the same thing. Here, they retain the older male / younger female double-act but place them in a casual ‘Living Room’ setting, permanently flooded by morning sunlight – even before sunrise. Presumably this is intended to idealise rather than mirror the rooms where the audience is located. Cheerful colour schemes and orange-juice predominate. Unreal. The presenters perch uneasily on the edge of their cushions – never allowed to lean back and shut their eyes, as the rest of us long to do at that time of day. In its patronising manner, this armchair environment is further confirmation of the Fall of Public Man*.  We are asked to identify with events only through the lens of our private realm. Politicians jostle for space on TV’s Breakfast sofa, desperate to be seen not as statesmen and women but as the authentic ‘folks next door’. The setting is illusionary and therefore so too is any feeling of understanding. Complexity is stifled by sound-bites. Simplicity is the objective of the staccato headlines, coming at you with all the clarity and charm of a burst from a machine-gun.

   And they make it tabloid-easy for us to know how to respond to the news. There is a calculated pause for a second or two at the end of each item. By this, whichever presenter has just finished speaking indicates “over to you, folks.” His or her expression suggests which of the limited selection of possible next moves we should, logically, now endorse. Clearly, we will want to demand the sacking of that bad guy, mobilise support for this victim, get the cops to round up those crooks, insist that they should parachute supplies of food/water/medicine to these suffering people and bomb to pieces those other heartless bastards…

   An endless procession of experts is required to condense their many years of accumulated wisdom and knowledge into glib, thirty-second, summaries. Having heard it, we have all surely become instant experts ourselves. Refinancing Irish Debt? Cracked that one. Predicting the movement of tectonic plates? Done that. Early warning of tsunamis? No problem. We have been equipped with an answer to everything. Preventing meltdown in the core of a nuclear reactor? We saw that coming years ago. Didn’t they watch ‘The China Syndrome’? Oh but hang-on, this is Japan. Its antipodes are not going to be China, they’re more likely to be somewhere like…Ireland! Bullseye! Now that should put their debt crisis in the shade…

   And then there’s all the current talk of a No Fly Zone being established over Libya. We are all up to speed on that one by now, aren’t we? NATO – if they ever agree – could get one going in a matter of weeks. Suddenly we are all holding forth about SAMs and surgical strikes. If you ask me, the much-bloated Egyptian air-force (beloved of their late, unlamented, President) could get a no fly zone off the ground (“Off the ground”? – are you sure?) by about next Christmas – always provided Gaddafi hasn’t run-out of Libyans by then. Alternatively, of course, there’s the Israeli air-force just around the corner – and top guns in the region by far. The Israelis could probably be running a pretty tight ‘no fly zone’ over Benghazi by tea-time tomorrow – if you want them to. The consequences of that may be unthinkable, but then thinking isn’t what rolling news is all about, is it? No, let’s keep it simple. As simple as A, B, C; Able, Baker, Charlie in NATO-speak…

So that’s sorted. Roger, over and, err, doubt?

* Richard Sennett ‘The Fall of Public Man’ 1974

Next week: Sic Transit Gloria.