Shock news: good not always bad

By Magnus Linklater (THE TIMES, 31/05/06):

THE DUKE of Edinburgh took second place last weekend in a carriage-driving competition — a sport that requires a combination of strength, skill and a certain amount of quick thinking. Not bad for an 85-year-old trying to keep arthritis at bay. Most newspapers who ran the story commented on the royal resilience, with headlines like “Battling Prince beats age barrier”. Not all, however. “Fears for frail Prince” was how The Scotsman saw it. “The Duke of Edinburgh looked distinctly unwell as he competed . . .” The report preferred to see age gaining the upper hand rather than being held at bay.

The media generally prefer their glass to be half-empty rather than half-full. “Good news is no news” is a newspaper cliché, and silver linings are always carefully examined in search of the black cloud behind it. Most politicians, and indeed most members of the Royal Family, assume this to be a permanent condition of the press. Most editors regard it as a badge of honour. There are times, however, and this was one, where the search for the negative swamps the better story.

Sometimes, that instinct to seek out the bleaker aspects of life defines our attitude, not only to other people but to other countries.

Africa, for instance, we assume to be a place of famine, Aids, grinding poverty and widespread corruption. Most stories fit that preconception, and we hear little to contradict them. I was struck, however, in the course of an intense debate at the International Press Institute world congress in Edinburgh, by a single statistic that slipped out of a speech by the Deputy President of South Africa. The average rate of growth in Africa — that well-known “basket-case economy” — is, she said, 4.9 per cent, compared with 2.25 per cent in Europe; the continent is experiencing its fastest growth for 30 years. No doubt the figures start from an appallingly low base, and expansion is patchy at best, but it strikes me as a fact that might have been worth transferring from the business pages to the front of the paper.

African journalists at the conference complained that their countries were too often reduced to caricature by the Western prejudices that favoured conflict and disease over the prosaic but telling investigation of a more accurate picture. Even their own reporters, they said, had begun to be infected by this “Afro-pessimism” — the notion that for a story to be real it had to be negative. If Africa was to advance, they argued, the West must start treating it as a grown-up rather than a permanent adolescent.

It is hard to plead not guilty to the charge, and few of the Western speakers at the conference attempted to do so, though Lindsey Hilsum, international editor of Channel 4, argued that in the end there was no such thing as good news or bad news, only news, and that journalists had to strike a balance between national interests and reporting the facts. Robert Thomson, the Editor of The Times, accepted that on occasion there was “over-dramatisation of the problem, and over-simplification of the solution”, and that the last decade in Africa had not been as dire as sometimes portrayed. He argued for “as much coverage as we can afford to muster”.

But would a more benign approach to Africa’s problems have been in the best interests of a continent that has to confront its demons if it is to defeat them? It would be difficult to argue that the victims of South Africa’s Aids pandemic would have been helped if the Western media had endorsed President Mbeki’s initial approach and played down the dimensions of the crisis; no one would argue that the corruption and repression of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe should have been brushed aside in favour of some distorted statistics about its tobacco crops; or that war and famine from Darfur to Mogadishu should not be part of Africa’s story; arguably, the media should have been far quicker off the mark and far more persistent in revealing the early signs of genocide in Rwanda rather than ignoring them as they did. As Sir Harold Evans, the former Editor of The Sunday Times, said, detecting the warning signs of trouble ahead is a fundamental duty of journalism. In the run-up to 9/11, US newspapers had been guilty of a collective failure to alert the public to the rise of militant radicalism in America, and most bear some responsibility for looking the other way as the terrorist attacks were being planned.

Reporting on what is going wrong with our world remains the media’s basic responsibility, and it can never be right to shirk it. But every bit as important is the need to stand back and assess whether the bleakest of views is necessarily the most accurate. What seems too often to be lacking is a simple journalistic truth: that the best stories are the unexpected ones; that after a monotonous diet of malfunction, breakdown and incompetence, the report that bucks the trend and suggests that something new is happening may well be closer to the mark, and will certainly make better reading, than the easy stereotype.

This is not easy to achieve. Some newspapers have a fairly fixed view about the world, and expect the world to conform to it. The innovative correspondent who challenges convention may not, therefore, always be accorded an immediate welcome. It is also an unpalatable reality that uncovering the real facts about a country is far harder work than recycling its clichés.

As George Orwell said: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” It is, nevertheless, a struggle worth making if we are to understand what is happening in the world rather than what we imagine is happening.