3 minute read
Opinion
Breaking the News
Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars
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It came as an existential smack round the chops at the end of a long afternoon slog in the garden recently. I had packed away the tools, yelled a parting expletive at the moles and flopped down in the shade. In the kitchen my wife was preparing dinner, the iPod wafting “The Seal Lullaby”, an achingly beautiful choral work by Eric Whitacre. The music seemed to swathe everything: the sweltering stillness, the birds swooping in the dense evening air, my own fatigue. The alchemy of all these things caught me unaware, unfurling one of those perfect moments of tranquillity. Slumped beneath our absurdly large banana tree, I realised I had stopped breathing. Serenity enveloped me and whispered, “Enough already.” I understood. Transcendence like this is rare so it’s wise to listen. My sensory overload was signalling a different tiredness: the continual mental recoiling from the daily news. The past 18 months –I’m sure you’ve noticed - have seen a barrage of headlines which weren’t so much to be read as fought off. Coming on top of five years of the Brexit/Trump onslaught, (Spoiler Alert: I detest both), it has been, even for a lifelong news junkie like me, exhausting. In the majestic calm of the garden, my guard was down; news fatigue hit home and tipped me into a mental pitstop. I’m sure I’m not alone in being pummelled senseless by the daily roster of impenetrable graphs and heart-wrenching statistics. Desperate compassion for other human beings, fused with anger at the attendant political shenanigans, leaves you wrung out like a wet towel. I know whereof I speak. I’ve often ended the day squeezed in a corner, gibbering and clutching my teddy. Only Mrs W, with an enticing round of “Follow the Côtes du Rhône” has coaxed me back. I’ve been a pain in many a posterior over my news fixation, it goes way back. Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s murder when I was twelve probably set me off. With the zeal of the innocent, I joined the town library and set about the US Civil Rights movement. The chasm between ‘reading about’ and ‘understanding’ yawned wide before me, on this and countless other topics. I’ve spent much of the following half century trying to bridge it. Propelled by “I really should try to grasp this”, I always overdid things. I remember being on holiday with my brother and our two girlfriends when President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974. I’d been following the Watergate story and no way was Nixon’s lousy timing going to cheat me out of the blanket coverage of its final act. So naturally, I tore off to find a newspaper which, of course, didn’t endear me to anybody. A reminder: I was 18 and on holiday with a very attractive girl at the time. See? Yet today’s 24-hour rolling news coverage has flipped the equation. Where I once went off in pursuit of the day’s headlines, I now run for dear life with them snapping at my heels. The news media is ubiquitous in its battle for our attention. Nuance and perspective are lost when a story billed as ‘a dramatic development’ is soon jettisoned for a different one. Nothing is a headline if everything is a headline; the modern news cycle is insatiable at one end and incontinent at the other. For me, finally, it’s reached overload. So, enough already. I have turned away from the perpetual bunfight, I shun the indepth analysis. I’ve deleted all the ‘Breaking News’ apps and consigned my teddy to our local déchetterie, (he’s too winestained to be of use to anyone). True, I still skim the morning headlines with my first belt of caffeine, just to make sure the sky hasn’t fallen, but no longer do I delve into every single story. I might make light of it here but there is such a thing as being too well informed. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, too much is no picnic, either. The daily drumbeat of negativity will drown out all other voices unless we consciously push it to the background. I’ve come round to the realisation that the really serious stuff will find me anyway, there’s no necessity to seek it out. So, one day at a time, as they say. I’m not claiming I’m entirely free from my affliction but maybe the fever has broken. Hopefully ‘no news’ really is what they say it is.
