The way in which the media report news makes the world worse, because it contributes to pessimism, envy and distrust among the population. This is argued by journalist Rob Wijnberg in a thought-provoking book about how truth is created in society. Wijnberg is a philosopher and founder of De Correspondent.
According to Wijnberg, news is “an alarm system that maintains the two most damaging fictions of our time”. They are that most people cannot be trusted and that most things will end badly. News constantly shows that the world is in decline. “Combine these characteristics with a business model that thrives on as much attention as possible, on getting as many clicks as possible and selling as many advertisements as possible, and the result can rightly be called disastrous.” This means that the media are not only reporters, but also instigators of the zeitgeist that they portray.
News is an extremely simplified representation of reality, according to Wijnberg. Reporting is almost always about the incidental, rarely about the structural. More about events than about developments. More about the visible (people, emotions) than the invisible (systems, dynamics). More about moral contradictions (for/against, good/bad) than about a moral spectrum. Almost everything is presented as causal or intentional. “News shows the world as a long series of unrelated, but intentional, mostly negative events, produced by malicious actors, who try to conceal their being perpetrators in the mists of PR talk, half-truths and denial.” News has attention as its goal, outrage as its fuel, commotion as its product. News is permanently outraged, but has no substantive starting point to test that outrage against. It sounds the alarm every day, but then quickly forgets why – and therefore often fails to appreciate the effect of its own alarm bells.
I share Wijnberg’s analysis regarding the majority of Dutch TV journalism (with Buitenhof as a favorable exception) and some of the newspapers. Quality newspapers such as NRC and De Volkskrant do, however, occasionally attempt to go beyond the incidental and to portray structures and systems. This applies even more to my favorite newspaper, The Economist, which always keeps an eye on the big picture and where indignation rarely, if ever, plays a role.
According to Wijnberg, interviewers are more cynical than critical. Their basic attitude is one of suspicion and distrust regarding authorities. Criticism is doubt based on substantive grounds; cynicism, on the other hand, is doubt based on suspicion of motives. Those who are critical ask open questions and test the answers against a substantive starting point; those who are cynical ask questions to which there is no answer, because they simply do not trust the interviewee or their motives. Wijnberg rightly demolishes the much-praised interviews of the TV program Nieuwsuur. The interviewers are not interested in the answers they get, but mainly try to trap the interviewee and are then very satisfied when they succeed. “The problem with this kind of cynical journalism is that it completely pushes the content into the background, while it does constantly give rise to anger or suspicion.” Unfortunately, the news machine has no interest in making the world understandable. Because the more understandable, the less indignation and therefore less attention.
The irony is that news media have thus become the unintended breeding ground for the populism that some of them fight against every day. The daily news shows the world as the populist likes to see it: in decline, with a power that cannot be trusted. Populists and media help each other, even though they do not have the same intentions.
However, the world is not as simple as the media suggest. “Problems and abuses are rarely the product of bad actors with bad intentions, but often a complex interplay of chance, coincidence, group dynamics, unforeseen consequences, wrong incentives, differences of perspective or lack of knowledge and information.”
According to Wijnberg, the way in which modern media work is related to the economization of society and to the postmodern concept of truth. In premodern times, truth came from above, in modern times truth was objective and could be investigated, in postmodern times truth is an individual construction. Wijnberg quotes Nietzsche, who said that there are no facts, only interpretations. Truth then becomes a construction with which we stick our own meanings on the meaningless world around us. “Thus we look through the largest window on the world that man has ever invented, we can look further into the world than ever before, and we see: ourselves.” Media are both binoculars and mirrors. They adjust the picture of the world to our interests and the world to the picture we have of it.
Rob Wijnberg. Voor ieder wat waars. Hoe waarheid ons verdeelt en weer kan samenbrengen. De Correspondent, 2023