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.

Column

Character

Comment

2 May 2024

4 min read

How to react in an era of social media outrage

Media executions and the quality of mercy.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A man in a suit stands on a gallery above a cavernous space in which are rows of desk

Huw Edwards stands above the BBC news room.

BBC.

The story of Huw Edwards presents challenges to anyone who wonders how to respond appropriately. The news anchor is back, on the news agenda rather than presenting it, having resigned from the BBC on “medical advice”. In news terms, it seems a long time ago – nearly a year – when stories emerged that he had paid a teenager for what are blushingly called “explicit images”.

His departure, rather belatedly said to have been inevitable, follows disclosures that he has continued to draw a very handsome BBC salary during his suspension from duty – and one that the corporation would rather not still be paying when it publishes its annual review of figures shortly.

The difficulties come when, putting aside prurience and distaste, one scrutinises why exactly the life and career of Edwards have been ruined. The police wasted little time last year in concluding that there was no evidence that a criminal offence had been committed. All that is left is a salacious whiff and the knowledge that Edwards has suffered a depressive breakdown of some sort

But that’s more than enough to make a major story in the era of peak social-media faux outrage. Think Philip Schofield, life ruined by stupidly lying about a fling with a much younger colleague (of consenting age). Think Caroline Flack, a reality actor with demonstrable mental health issues, hounded to her suicide. Think even the internet-sleuthing landslide that threatens to cover and suffocate comic Richard Gadd’s “true story” Netflix movie, Baby Reindeer.

While forgiveness liberates the forgiver (rather than necessarily the one being forgiven), Christians need to be wary of using forgiveness as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

So how to respond to the Edwards resignation? The question supposes that we must indeed respond and that might contain the principal point. A senior news anchor with the BBC is a public figure. As such, he (or she) needs to be trusted by the public. Consequently, Edwards is called to a higher standard of behaviour than that of his invisible viewers.

Serious people in serious jobs need to be taken seriously. And anyone caught with their pants down, literally or figuratively, cannot look serious.

Yet that still doesn’t supply us with a response (beyond “don’t be an idiot”). Actually, it rather complicates matters. It’s easier if a crime has been committed, because we can take refuge in justice, reparation for the victim and punishment for the perpetrator. None of this seems to be available in Edwards’ case.

Some will reach for forgiveness under these circumstances. But that’s insufficient, since for most of us Edwards has done nothing more than read the news off an autocue and speak for the nation during royal events.

We risk disempowering a real victim if we forgive on their behalf, so it’s inadequate to talk only of forgiveness in this circumstance. While forgiveness liberates the forgiver (rather than necessarily the one being forgiven), Christians need to be wary of using forgiveness as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

By contrast, “the quality of mercy is not strained” in this way through our mortal experience. It’s universal and unqualified.

In any event, forgiveness is a quality of compassion, the latter being the virtue to which we might most usefully aspire in response to the circumstances in which Edwards suffers. The root meaning of compassion is “to suffer with”, as in to share and, in doing so, profoundly to understand the suffering of another. In popular parlance, it might be to walk a mile in their boots.

To view the media execution of Edwards with compassion is to walk a mile in his boots and to accept, with humility, that we can be as fallible as him. Vitally, this is to show mercy rather than pity. The latter is filtered through human experience – Pieta is a Renaissance artistic meme, which invariably shows the Virgin Mary’s essential humanity at the deposition of her son from the cross.

By contrast, “the quality of mercy is not strained” in this way through our mortal experience. It’s universal and unqualified. Shakespeare’s famous line is given to Portia in The Merchant of Venice. One of the things it tells us is that to pity is human, but to be merciful is divine.

It’s from theological, cardinal virtues that mercy flows. But it’s born of compassion, which has its Christological source in the suffering (or Passion) of Christ, in which the human condition – sin, frailty, pain, death – is shared with the divine.

That’s a worldview that holds Huw Edwards in its gaze. It’s a wholly loving gaze that seeks to share his despair and failure, which is the ultimate act of compassion. Edith Cavell, the nurse who was shot as a spy in Flanders in the First Word War, came very close to it when she said before her execution: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”

Edwards doesn’t (literally) face a firing squad, so direct comparison is invidious. But our response might still be a compassionate one. We may not be able to walk a mile in his boots. But we can try.