When standards fail, what next?

Media’s fragmentation reflects our own shattered attention.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Seat on an underground train carraige, a passenger holds and reads a newspaper.

Evening Standard headline 2013.

Derek Key, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

News about newspapers is never good news. So, the not wholly unsurprising announcement that London's daily Evening Standard will only be printed weekly comes with sadness. There are fewer commuters and those who are on the tube or overground are making use of the Wi-Fi. Even the paper's editor, Dylan Jones, recently admitted he never reads a print newspaper. These shifts are hardly breaking news anymore, but they do need us to take out our earphones and pay attention.

Earlier this year, as if predicting the newspaper’s daily demise, Lord Hague wrote, 'Even a few years ago you would see, on the London Tube, a high proportion of people reading the Evening Standard, cheek by jowl sharing the commentary on the fortunes of the capital. Today, they sit with headphones on in their fragmented worlds.'

Most of us haven't noticed, because our heads are down staring at our screens, but he's right. Hague argues that we should fight against the plight of local newspapers, but even a recent ‘editorial pivot’ to local London news couldn’t save its daily edition. It's a newspaper known for pivoting a lot over the decades, but this is a step change.

Losing the daily printing of a two-century-old institution is more than the end of an era. Even for someone like me who has lived in London recently, the change in our reading habits that Hague describes is one that is unmistakable. I'm sure I will look wistfully at the empty trays of newspapers, without the obstacle of a newspaper in my face as I descend the steps to the tube.

The people are what makes these institutions: whether it’s the bellowing by the tube at rush hour, or those who write the articles. Journalist Tom Leonard's sepia-toned reflection is that the Standard was 'the closest you could get in the real world to a newspaper in a classic Hollywood film, with reporters and photographers actually rushing out together on stories… and editors actually occasionally saying dramatic things like “hold the front page”.’ But we're losing more than nostalgia, and even more than the life-altering job losses.

At the heart of that liberation wasn't agony-aunt good advice, but the heralding of good news for all people.

We are going through the largest shift in information dissemination since the arrival of the printing press five hundred years ago. They called that the Reformation. What will they call this? The Fragmentation? Or the Liberation? Information is not always illumination, and the new world we are creating is indeed an increasingly fragmented one. There's the threat to democracy, as Hague soberly warns. Never before have we felt the need to hold power to account, yet without the focused resources to do so.

And it's focus itself we're also losing. My scattered senses fling me to the urgent, rather than the important. They take me to ephemera rather than what really matters. Our attention spans drive us to snippets rather than stories, bitesize over background. It could be argued that rather than the power residing in the newspaper editor, the power is now in the hands of the person holding their phone, but let's not be naive about the quality and the neutrality of what we consume, and the echo chambers we're locking ourselves in. The power of the daily habit of reading what we will and won't agree with is the power of the printed press. Holding the Bible in your hands, in your own language for the first time was challenging, confronting, but also liberating. At the heart of that liberation wasn't agony-aunt good advice, but the heralding of good news for all people. This good news included repairing of the fragments that broke people apart from each other. It became the must-read.

As we adapt to a new standard in news, perhaps some old news might reveal a new standard.

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Film & TV

18 May 2024

5 min read

Théoden and breaking the spell

Bernard Hill’s most famous role sheds light on where humanity needs to be.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

A movie scene of a king and prince walking confidently.

Bernard Hill, middle, in The Lord of the Rings.

New Line Cinema.

Recently we saw the sad passing of Bernard Hill, one of the great British actors of his generation, whose career enjoyed many high points. Hill came to prominence, in Britain at least, in the 1980s with his role as an unemployed tarmac-layer in the BBC series Boys From the Blackstuff. Through the 1990s, he went on to star in a number of big budget Hollywood feature films, such as The Ghost and The Darkness, Titanic, and The Scorpion King. But his best-known role, the one which won him global recognition, was as King Théoden in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In both Tolkien’s book and Jackson’s adaptation, the character of King Théoden plays a pivotal role in making a stand against the forces of evil advancing under the banners of first the wizard Saruman the White in The Two Towers, and then the Dark Lord Sauron himself in The Return of the King, the trilogy’s climax.

Théoden’s character arc is as heroic as any in Tolkien’s epic. But perhaps the most memorable moment within it comes when he is first introduced. Gandalf comes to Théoden’s hall of Edoras to rally support against Saruman’s rampaging armies of orcs. But instead of a redoubtable king and ally in the fight against their common enemy, he finds a weak man buckled under the weight of old age and infirmity, cowed by fear and indecision, and enthralled to the counsel of Grima Wormtongue - whom Gandalf reveals to be an agent of Saruman.

In Jackson’s version, Gandalf ‘delivers’ Théoden from his enthrallment, in effect breaking the spell of inertia and inaction which Saruman, through his minion Wormtongue, has cast over him. Théoden awakes from his bondage, is physically rejuvenated, and is now able to rise and take his proper place in the battleline against Sauron’s evil power. In Tolkien’s version, Théoden has more agency. He chooses, at last, to throw off the counsel of Wormtongue and cling to the slim thread of hope which Gandalf represents, however desperate it may seem.

It is a powerful image, and one from which we can and must learn today.

Our ears are open to so many voices through both mainstream and social media that it becomes a matter of extreme importance to be able to discern who is Gandalf and who is Grima Wormtongue?

Few would deny that recent times have revealed new and determined manifestations of evil in our culture and our world. And yet, both inside and outside the church, these latter years have also been characterised by a feeling of helplessness and inaction in the face of such evil. It’s common to hear both men and women complain that they feel unable to speak up in opposition to what they perceive as wrong. They have been silenced. Either those who dare to speak up find themselves cancelled. Or else those who don't self-censor, keeping their mouths shut and their heads well below the parapet. Like Théoden, they lock themselves away in their hall. In this latter case, the battle is ceded without ever having drawn a sword.

As the famous Edmund Burke quote goes: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ Much of the church, some might dare to say most of it, resides in this place of cowed inaction. Enthralled and confused by the Wormtongue whisperings of the media as mouthpieces for agendas diametrically opposed to the good, we have willingly subjected ourselves to this spell. And the consequence? Like the Westfold of Rohan, the land is burning.

It is not controversial to say anyone who cares about our culture and its future needs to awaken from their slumber. Needs to cast off - or else have cast out - the gag of silence. But what is more troubling perhaps is that, even having done that, we cannot agree on what is evil and what is good.

In the Bible, the devil is portrayed as often masquerading as an angel of light. And it warns against the descent of some cultures into a state of such moral confusion that God’s ordinances are inverted: good is called evil, and evil is called good.

So how are we to navigate our way through this mire of uncertainty? Warnings against misinformation and disinformation abound. And yet, those in positions of power who proclaim them may equally be charged with propagating untruths and dissembling realities, all for the sake of shoring up their own power structures.

All this is to say - our ears are open to so many voices through both mainstream and social media that it becomes a matter of extreme importance to be able to discern who is Gandalf and who is Grima Wormtongue?

Tolkien’s choice of the name Grima Wormtongue is significant. ‘Grima’ derives from the Old Norse word, grímr which means ‘mask’. ‘Worm’ similarly derives from another Old Norse word: ormr which means ‘snake’ or ‘serpent’.

As such, it throws us right back into the Garden of Eden and the honeyed words of the serpent which led humanity into such disaster, offering some purported good up front, while concealing the calamity (and shame) which comes hard on its heels. If we are to stand up and contest the modern manifestations of evil, we must be able to recognise the side of the field of battle on which to take our stand.

Who is Gandalf? In Tolkien’s world, though he hated the idea of his work being interpreted as allegory, Gandalf does represent the Christ figure. And Sauron in turn suggests the Anti-Christ - a nebulous figure arising from scripture, poorly understood at the best of times. But somehow the fountainhead from which, humanity is told, all evil must flow.

But if humanity thinks of Christ on the side of good, and Christ as the most human of us all, perhaps this provides a yardstick by which we can discern the lines of battle.

Is it human or anti-human to stand up for life at its most vulnerable? Is it human or anti-human to stand up for the family unit? Is it human or anti-human to honour and celebrate each and every Imago Dei as they were created to be? Is it human or anti-human to safeguard a parent’s right to speak good into their children’s life? Is it human or anti-human to preserve the innocence of our young? Is it human or anti-human to challenge systems of power which enable all kinds of exploitation and other self-evident evils?

First we must awaken. Then we must choose our side. And finally, like Théoden, we must ride to the fight.

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