Perpetual apocalypse: why journalists are addicted to disaster

Martyn Lewis. No, not the self-effacing financial evangelist. MartYn Lewis. Note the Y. Readers of a certain vintage will remember him as the baby-faced frontman of almost every major news slot for both ITN and the BBC although, sensibly, he eschewed the breakfast couch.

Baby-faced he was, though. An unfortunate confession that he had once been the Cow & Gate kid did little to enhance his newscaster authority, nor did the publication of a thrilling work called Cats in the News.

I mention these things rather unfairly, because during the time I worked at BBC News I remember him as a thoughtful and friendly man who pondered rather more than most the impact he had on his viewers.

His measured announcement of the car crash that killed Princess Diana was a masterclass in the sort of calm dignity that once characterised the BBC. He was, in fact, the consummate professional.

We summon him from the past, however, because among journos everywhere he is best remembered for having had the temerity to suggest that they should report more good news. This caused much sniggering at the time and public hostilities between BBC colleagues including the professionally misanthropic Jeremy Paxman.

It was, however, fellow ITN-turned-BBC floor-crosser Peter Sissons who dealt his reputation the mortal and telling blow, by pointing out something to the effect that increased production at Vauxhall is not good news at Ford.

Lewis left the BBC in 1997 to be replaced by lip-curling Welsh Elvis impersonator, Shakin’ Stevens. Sorry, Huw Edwards. Uh-huh, he who has not left the building since.

Lewis’s theme, though, is back, as we struggle with the ever-impending doom of – and here take your pick; Covid, Brexit, Islamism, China’s rise, the West’s decline, economic ruin, concussive injury, environmental catastrophe. ‘Crisis’; a tap left dripping permanently somewhere in the kitchen of our nightmares.

Meanwhile, various academic studies conclude that, au contraire, human history is largely an upward curve on which we continue, in broad terms, to live longer, wealthier, healthier lives, each year a little shorter on hunger, violence, war and ‘orrid endemic diseases.

Life in the past may have been as a child’s shirt, short and shitty, but one’s inner rational optimist must somewhere hold on to the fact that nowadays ‘you’ve never had it so good’.

That optimism shouldn’t be blind, of course. The world is well-stocked with problems, we know. Our forebears knew this. It was not if bad things would happen but when. They were preoccupied with ‘hierarchy of needs’ stuff, like food and shelter. The ping of social media notifications telling them of things only half-known but likely to scare was one thing, at least, that they didn’t have to worry about.

So here, perhaps, is an opportunity to develop the Lewis argument of old.

George Bernard Shaw once suggested that the essential flaw in the journalistic mind was that it can’t tell the difference between a bicycle crash and the end of civilisation. Journalists have no interest in doing so, of course, and the formulaic approach to the way the world turns dictates that ‘End Of The World Tomorrow. Again!’ traps them between their own need to haul in viewers and readers and the myriad interest groups whose very existence depends on apocalypse and their role in its prevention.

Meanwhile, people everywhere report a greater sense of well-being when they surrender the newspaper or industrial action strikes Today from our airwaves.

Journalism, of course, is not an extension of the self-help manuals. Its job is, in no small part, to make someone, somewhere feel uncomfortable, while PR – or at least its campaigning wing  – must take its share of responsibility for pump-priming news outlets everywhere with things we must worry about.

But nor is the media duly sceptical when it comes to experts. I vividly remember one Dr Richard Lacey, a microbiologist from Leeds, who, in 1996, assisted The Observer in creating a post-BSE vision of Britain in 2016. This, among other things, predicted stretched national euthanasia clinics seeing off 500 people a week to dignified deaths. The NHS would be broken by treating 2 million vCJD victims, the country would be quarantined, blocked in by five miles of French concrete and the entire fabric of the nation would be disintegrating. 28 Days Later extrapolated across 20-odd years.

Fast forward to MMR or, indeed, Covid.

Elsewhere, some might argue that the legions of economic doomsayers who cluster around Brexit all too willingly believe in much the same vein. Time will tell.

All of which overlooks the obvious fact that to view the world through the news is to view it through a necessarily distorted prism. It deals in the extraordinary by definition. Dog bites man is not a story. Man bites dog is – as the hoary old newshound aphorism goes.

Journalistic truth is also often elliptical. When your timescale is an evening deadline, not all the canvas gets painted, nor may what seems true today still hold good by tomorrow. And anyone who has fielded a call from a reporter with an appetite for destruction will be well aware that part of what happens next is to throw the facts in front of a good story and hope they survive the impact.

But perhaps with hindsight and the wisdom it brings, Lewis had a point. ‘Otter saved’ should weigh in the balance with ‘elephant threatened’. ‘Man does good’ should feature in the equation with the evil that men do. The duck should skateboard through our lives now and then. 

To suggest otherwise is to perpetrate a bleakness and despair that is not reflective of all of our world, all of the time, whatever saturation coverage and the ever-on smart phone alert might suggest. In all its forms, the media’s very and vital credibility hinges on remembering it.