ANOTHER VOICE
All the news you want to read
AUBERON WAUGH
In the course of 1970 I was writing weekly or fortnightly columns in six places — The Spectator, the Sun, the News of the World, the Times, the Evening Standard and Private Eye — and I cannot remember, after such a gap of time, in which of them it was that I wrote a short paragraph drawing attention to some disastrous flooding which had been reported in East Pakistan, as Bangladesh was then called. A report suggested that 150,000 Bengalis might have drowned — the number was later increased to 500,000 in some accounts — but what interested me was how little importance was attached to the announcement. It appeared on an inside page of the Daily Telegraph, down-column, under a single- line heading over two paragraphs. Many other newspapers did not bother to report it at all, and those that did took agency copy, from Reuters or Associated Press. Were we not being a little parochial in our outlook, I asked? Never mind Aberfan, it only required a baby to fall through a coal-hole in Bootle for the whole nation to be reduced to a state of hysterical sobbing, with old age pensioners renouncing their peppermint humbugs for a week.
Perhaps there was a feeling at the time that having retreated from empire, we could now regard these Third World catas- trophes with some equanimity, even grati- tude that we were no longer involved in the pageant. These things are going on all the time somewhere in the world, no doubt. But Aberfan — there was a real disaster!
Last week's cyclone in Bangladesh was obviously a smaller affair, although last Friday it was thought to have claimed 47,000 lives (the number may increase to 200,000 or even more). The Government has promised £2.5 million, and there is some debate about whether £12.50 a head is a reasonable amount per drowned Ben- gali, or whether it should be rather more. But there seems greater interest than there was 21 years ago. Perhaps this is the result of improved communications. Newspapers can carry quite reasonable photographs of drowned buffaloes next day. I prefer to think that increased interest in ecology, the environment and conservation generally has rubbed off on the Bengalis, so that they, too, are now seen as picturesque survivals, worthy of being protected almost as much as elephants and whales.
In fact, last Tuesday's cyclone featured quite prominently in the news. Many see news as something that is deliberately managed, and there is bound to be an element of truth in this. Our attention is drawn to selected events by the news managers. A hundred thousand Bengalis can drown unnoticed, just as well as a hundred thousand flowers can be born to blush unseen and waste their sweetness on the desert air. But my theory is that news spontaneously evolves — one year Benga- lis die unnoticed, the next drowning Ben- galis are all the rage — in response to changing fashion. It is only after fashion has established the subjects which are of interest that the news managers move in and decide which aspects of the subject we should be encouraged to study.
Thus, to take an extreme example, David Icke, the former TV presenter and Green spokesman who appears, unhappi- ly, to have gone round the twist and decided he is God, announced that the cyclone confirmed all his predictions of approaching doom. 'The tidal wave and flooding is [sic] one of the events I fore- cast,' he explained. 'My book says when the changes begin, we should look East.'
I do not know whether or not Icke prophesied the floods in Bangladesh, as he claims. It was a safe bet, in any case. Whether he did nor not, this is plainly news manipulation of the crudest sort. This has happened, ergo all my ludicrous prophe- cies must be right, ergo I am God. But the question we should ask ourselves about Icke is why the news managers allow him so much space. Their motive could be no more sinister than the genial urge to keep us entertained. In the last century, parents would take their children to laugh at the lunatics mouthing and capering in their cages at the Bethlehem Hospital. But there are plenty of such people around. We meet them at every cocktail party, and on the whole the press ignores them. The reason why Icke's fulminations and crazy prophe- cies are printed is quite different: in the first place, they are not so very unlike the psychobabble produced by many apparent- ly respectable Green spokesmen, merely a caricature of them; in the second place, emanating from a former Green spokes- man, they help to discredit the Green movement. The news managers, it would seem, have lost patience with our Green brethren.
It is only when one grasps the principles of news management that one begins to understand how almost every single item in the day's news is a product of the system. We learn things only if someone wants us to learn them, whether the pressure comes from a government department or an employees' association, a group of Protes- tant activists or a whisky firm. This may explain why so much of the news seems to contradict itself.
Thus, on the one hand from government sources we learn that the cost of the National Health Service has trebled in real terms since 1979; that in 30 years the number of hospital staff has trebled while patients treated have risen by just a third. From the BMA we learn that the NHS is in crisis, wards and whole hospitals are hav- ing to close down for lack of staff or the money to pay them; doctors (who have just had a 40 per cent pay increase) are fleeing the country like migrating swallows . . . .
You pays your money and you takes your choice. At least we still have a choice. Although the BBC and Independent Tele- vision News are often frighteningly similar, treating us to the same subjects in the same order, newspapers still offer us such variety that it is hard to believe they describe the same day, the same world. In every case, we should ask ourselves why we are being given this piece of information. Why are we told that Charles Saatchi is selling $10 million worth of modern painting or 'art'? Only because the trade wishes to reassure itself that he is going to reinvest it in even more modern painting or `art'. Why did the Telegraph splash a hugh photograph of the Oxford undergraduate Rachel McLean all over its front page last Friday, while the Sun, in my edition, neglected to mention even that her body had been found under the floorboards of her lodgings? Is there to be a new class division in the selection of news, with the lower-class newspapers reporting only what happens to the lower classes, television stars and royalty, while the middle-class papers report only those matters which are of middle-class interest? My Sun on Friday did not mention Bang- ladesh at all, but then one would hardly expect it to do so. Its refusal to mention poor Rachel McLean struck me as more sinister.
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