(Photo by Jane Barlow - WPA Pool/Getty Images)
The Times, this morning: “Boris Johnson will attempt to wrest back control of the coronavirus crisis today after No 10 was stung by criticism of its performance and the death toll rose to 35.” One small sentence, of the sort your eye glides over daily by the bucketload in our wonderful British press. Let’s take it apart.
The writers have no idea what is in the Prime Minister’s mind, or whether he indeed woke up this morning and mumbled “I’ve gotta try and wrest back control of this virus, Carrie” (to which “From whom?” would be the only reasonable response), but tell us his entire government (“No 10”) has been “stung by criticism” anyway. If I claimed to know what was in your mind and wrote it down as fact, how would you describe my behaviour?
That’s not the worst offence against decency in those 30 words. Look at the sentence’s end: the conjunction to link this intangible “criticism” with “the death toll rose to 35.” As though the death toll might have not increased, might been zero, had No.10 not been occupied by a man who drives a too-large proportion of the media into paroxysms of hatred.
When I gave up writing about politics and resumed my career as a statistician, lots of people asked me if I was sure what I was doing. The subtext: “If you just went for it harder, you could make it as a pundit. Why would you bury yourself in some faceless company doing that geeky stuff?”
It hit a nerve, because in 2017, at the end of a sabbatical year writing speeches for a cabinet minister, I did look at The Rest Of My Life, and asked myself the same question. Yet I made a deliberate choice to return to the pharmaceutical R&D outfit that had been my home since 1998. I’ve done well, becoming one of the company’s VPs for research-orientated statistics, and a large number of people depend on my strategic ability. So why was the media such an obvious wrong choice?
In 2011, I won an Orwell prize for my political writing. I never knew I could write, never had the desire, yet somehow I have a facility with words that sufficient people enjoy that makes the endeavour worthwhile. After the Orwell ceremony — the next day — I was offered a gig at the Daily Telegraph that lasted three years. Even when that ended (thanks for sacking me while I was on holiday!), I’ve never lacked offers for paid writing.
It was always obvious to me that the pay you get for a writing gig wouldn’t cover the mortgage. I asked my editor back at the Telegraph how anyone could possibly make a living from political writing. “You write a book,” he said – one of those books no-one reads, but which your friends in the Sundays review — “And you get a media profile.” The two are not unlinked.
So I tried that for a bit. I stopped ignoring the calls and texts from the BBC and so on, and turned up on Today and PM and tried to offer what I thought about issues like the licence fee and Scottish nationalism.
It was awful. I was awful, unremittingly so. I remember getting up in Brighton at 4am to do a BBC Radio spot about Scottish nationalism. It turned out that the BBC had also invited a former pop star who proceeded to shout whenever I spoke. I was furious, but because I’m a lower middle-class Tory I sat politely in the booth, listening to the pop guy screeching down the line from Glasgow. I picked my way back to our flat afterwards, avoiding the zombie-torpor of the early morning drunks and thinking “This is no way to live your life”.
But it is a way, a way of life for anyone who wants to make it as pundit. All those talking heads on TV, opining on this or that: a pop star screeching at them wouldn’t be a debasement of intellectual rigour: it would be an opportunity! He’s got a profile! Think what a Twitter-spat would do for your Likes! The singer himself tried to “reach out” to me on social media later on the day of our “interview”, fake-pretending to wish that our intercourse had been of more value. If he were less of an onanist he might note the irony; perhaps even write four rhyming lines about it to chunter over in some out-of-season caravan park on his next “tour”.
So don’t ever believe those talking heads are speaking for you. They prioritise themselves, always. Another Telegraph memory: I got off the Brighton train at Victoria, it was pouring, I saw a young intern from the paper. I offered to pay for a cab to a political meeting that I knew we were both attending. Ten years later, that intern, now a successful pundit, used my Toryism as an example of partisan stupidity in a blog. The kindness I showed counted for this much: it provided a name to use for political point-scoring.
If this were just a time of Brexit, or the last election, my disdain for the British media might matter, but not that much. It matters now, because a virus is trying to kill us.
There is one useful group of people to talk to about coronavirus. They’re epidemiologists, cousins of statisticians. They’re careful and thoughtful and combine medical insight with statistical modelling to make predictions upon which policy-makers — such as the Prime Mininster — have to rely.
No epidemiological model is trivial and not one is obviously “right”. Uncertainty persists (the statistician’s maxim), and good modellers — of the sort I’m sure are advising Sir Patrick and Dr Witty — will make politicians aware of that. Those politicians then have to work out how to share that complex, dynamic message with us.
How much of that simple fact has been made apparent to you in the columns you’ve read this last week? How many epidemiologists have been given space to write columns, or front pieces on the BBC, or Sky?
In contrast: how many un-science columnists have written anything useful about anything? To what extent has their evident immunological ignorance modulated the authoritative tone in which they tell you what to think? “Who’s up? Who’s down? We decide!” At the best of times I find this reduction of politics to soap operatic cod-psychology irritating. At the dawn of this virological hinge-event, it should be unacceptable.
For shame on the media class of this country, incapable of raising its game, unwilling to change its politics-as-sport behaviour, more interested in rehashing its Boris-hatred than educating its readers about epidemiology and immunology: for shame. It’s true we get the government we deserve. But surely we don’t deserve this wretched media class, the blue-tick conspiracists who prefer paranoia to fact, factionalism to evidence, hot-takes to science. Coronavirus is a terrible threat to our health, but it’s the daily output of the British media that sickens me right now.
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SubscribeWise words. Unfortunately, the whole ‘global warming, climate change’ industry has muddied the waters with some of those ostensibly capable of recognising the uncertainty inherent in scientific models attributing to them a false degree of certainty. The media do not have the critical mass of scientists necessary to maintain balance and a culture has developed where journalists think they can nag and hector until some soundbite is elicited which suits their black&white mentality. They behave as if genuine experts are being coy or dishonest and that the journalists, as heroic seekers of truth, will bully the “truth” out of the scientists. Many years ago the dreadful example of Trofim Lysenko was cited frquently; how he made up data and, with Stalin’s help, silenced his scientist critics. Western media were supposedly protecting us from this sort of thing but instead they have become its agents.
An excellent article that expounds all the reasons I have gradually given up on the MSM over the last 20 years. I threw the TV out 20 years ago, stopped buying newspapers around 17 years ago, and stopped listening to almost all radio (especially the BBC) around two years ago, outside of the football commentaries.
it has been obvious for years that they are all dumb as ****. They have read nothing, traveled little, and know nothing of history or science. And, of course, they are increasingly and blatantly biased, usually in favour of the globalising left.
But now it’s getting serious. Nobody buys their garbage any more so they look to China and Saudi Arabia et al for funding. And this distorts their ‘reporting’ even further. Just look at the New York Times referring to ‘the Trump virus’ when they should be writing excoriating pieces against China’s leaderships, lies and wet markets etc.
Fortunately YouTube is full of excellent podcasters, and there are sites like Unherd which carry interesting articles, and sites like Breitbart where we can find the facts that the MSM suppresses.
All that said, it is very sad and very serious. I once considered the media – or at least the more serious newspapers – to be perhaps the sole purveyors of truth in our society. And when you can’t trust those outlets anymore, you can’t trust anyone.
My first comment! I wanted to thank everyone who’s sent me comments on this piece via Twitter. Nothing that has been broadcast by the BBC since UnHerd kindly published the piece has changed my opinion. In particular, the behaviour of the political lobby at the daily science and medical briefings is a disgrace, an utter disgrace: after the Chancellor spoke yesterday, as Douglas Carswell has pointed out, if you were a business owner looking for more insight into the package then you’d have got precisely *nothing* from the questions the lobby asked – and the behaviour of various blue-ticks who are telling their millions and millions of readers that the PM is engaged in a deliberate act of genocide … I don’t have words, actually, for how angry that makes me.
Terrific article Graeme. Beautifully articulating what so many of us are thinking.
I find myself becoming more like Billy Connolly every year. Like him I shout at the television and the radio: “RUBBISH!” “NONSENSE!” “LIAR!” I can’t abide the Today programme anymore. Any Questions and Question Time are just no-go areas. The inherent left/liberal bias in every interview or discussion nauseates me. I want to listen to some of it because some of it makes sense, but I crave balance and that has long gone from the mass media. I subscribe to The Times but my daily reading tends to stop at the comment section. I see the name and picture of the commentator and know exactly what anti-Boris, anti-Government whine is coming so I skip it. The Government’s alleged antipathy towards the BBC, and the forthcoming changes to its senior leadership and funding, are a golden opportunity to force it back to reporting facts and not opinion. Oh for the golden days of limited TV news bulletins. So much of what is wrong with our broadcast media dates back to the advent of 24-hour news channels having to fill their hours with talking head nonentities spouting bilge. I am so pleased to have found Unherd and, in particular, Graham Archer’s common sense.
The BBC, in particular but others too, seems locked into a gotcha method of interview. Maitliss is a good case in point but most are like her; she’ll lock into a particular point and then interrupt and dismiss from there. Any attempt to explain the wider context receives the same treatment. Her MO seems to be to snipe rather than to intelligently open up the conversation in order to inform and educate the viewer. The same with stupid questions from reporters throwing shouted questions at an individual leaving a meeting or climbing into a car. The intent is not to elicit an answer nor to educate anyone, just to set a seed in the mind of a viewer that, in the opinion of the reporter and his/her/they/it’s colleagues, failure is afoot. So, questions like: “Why didn’t you order gezillions of these months ago?”, which really doesn’t hold any intellectual capital because a smidgen of rational thought will provide much of the answer. I suspect that the ‘people-like-us’ recruitment of journalists – who then dare not indicate that they are anything other than trendy, Grauniad reading, Islingtonites means that nothing is going to change soon.
I find myself mostly irritated by the stance of BBC in all this. It has made ‘diversity’ its watchword of late, in gender, skin colour, physical ability, choice of sexuality etc… but if all of these people fundamentally share exactly the same ‘progressive’ ideological outlook where exactly is the diversity? It is bizarre how this interpretation of diversity is accepted as the holy grail. Diversity must surely be about different ideas, opinions and viewpoints rather than something so superficial as how you look, or who you choose to have sex with.
TV in UK proves incapable of presenting politically balanced news programmes or even fictional works. Newspapers and magazines favouring Left/Liberal and pro–EU, ant-Trump opinion vastly outnumber the few with an alternate viewpoint.
There seems to be no chance to bring about change in the media. The Democratic will of the UK Citizens is ignored, but Democracy is proving that biasing the news no longer works. There is therefore hope. The Soviet Union collapsed even though it had almost total control of the media. The BBC is doomed to ultimate failure, for they are unable to change. That will be just the start – but let’s get it done.
Excellent comment, Juilan! The superficiality and triviality of the criteria on which the media’s concept of ‘diversity’ is based point to the vacuity of the concept. BBCkind cannot bear very much true diversity!