There’s tedium in returning to variations of the question “why read?”, but I spend a lot of my time reading and would like to think that it’s time well-spent. The variation I’m considering today is: Why read the news?

This has been a difficult question for me to try and answer. In attempting to do so I have discovered that I have some political and ethical intuitions that are inconsistent with one another. I haven’t really managed to answer the question satisfactorily, but I think I might be on my way towards a solution that gets the best of my intuitions to stick together in a mostly coherent way.

The basic answer that I have given in the past, when asked to explain why I read the news, is this: “As citizens in a nominally democratic state, our political decisions affect the lives of other people. We have a duty to ensure that we make those decisions with an understanding of: (1) the lives of those other people, and (2) the effect that our decisions will have on those lives”. There’s a good chance that you have heard an argument similar to this, or thought of it yourself. Let’s call it the Democratic Citizenship Argument (DCA)¹. The DCA has some immediate problems. It’s not clear why we ought to pay particular attention to citizens in democratic states or to political decisions. I’d like to bracket these questions for a moment, because I think my intuition that these categories are important to understanding why we read the news reveals some tensions in the relationship all these things bear to one another and our way of life.

One point that we can’t bracket, though, is the question of understanding and how far it ought to reach. The DCA as I frame it does require us to understand both the current context of other lives, and the potential future impacts that our decisions will have. There are metaphysical and epistemic problems here², but we can bracket those temporarily. What we can’t shy away from is how detailed our understanding ought to be. The DCA clearly recognises that the relevant understanding needs to be fairly robust, the argument wouldn’t get off the ground at all otherwise, but it’s unclear how far into the past or future we need to look, or how many perspectives we need to consider. I think, though, that the type of person inclined to give or accept the DCA as an argument for reading the news would accept a working definition of understanding something like this: We can claim understanding when we can provide a narrative that explains how an event came about, and how that event may play out following our decisions, that would be accepted as plausible by an expert in the field. My aim here is to provide a notion of understanding that can be used for pragmatic purposes, rather than one that aims at expert or technical understanding. I believe that the narrativisation and the reliance on public, expert sources can allow a working definition that is demanding, but not impossible to achieve.

So, one question we ought to ask is: Does reading the news actually provide a path for understanding in this way? I think that this question actually has two sides to it, or generates two difficulties of a different sort. The first difficulty, which I will discuss first, deals with whether the news can provide the information required by this understanding. The second difficulty deals with the way that the news asks us to relate to other people, and whether this has a deleterious effect on understanding those people as people (or ethical agents, etc.).

The news has an uneven track record when it comes to helping us construct plausible narrative accounts of how the world came to be the way that it is. This is particularly clear when it comes to reporting on foreign affairs. One of the standard left-liberal critiques of most foreign affairs reporting is that it can isolate overseas events from their political and economic context at local, regional, and international levels. A pattern of reporting emerges where conflicts, for example, are reported upon as either aberrations (who could have seen this coming?) or explained with what are essentially racial narratives. This isn’t always the case, and there are of course journalists who do incredible work in trying to understand and contextualise the lives of others, but the timbre of most mainstream reporting and the repetition of simplified chunks of information often gravitates towards this. One way that this is sometimes challenged is through the provision of ‘explainer’ articles that typically accompany ongoing reporting in the days following the initial event(s). These articles seem to fall into two categories (or serve two general purposes): explaining and introducing vocabulary (acting as glossaries), and providing limited historical contextualisation of the event. These explainer articles, in conjunction with the initial reporting, probably serve to provide the understanding demanded above. If you follow all this reporting, then you can probably provide a plausible (if short term and one sided) account of how the initial event came to pass. But this account, while plausible, is usually limited, has restricted explanatory use, and tends to favour a single institutional perspective. News organisations need to make difficult decisions to operate in a hostile commercial and political environment, they make trade-offs, and some of these trade-offs involve privileging political perspectives that benefit the state that they operate under in return for political access. So, the sorts of accounts that we get from foreign affairs reporting can be systematically misleading with respect to their portrayal of the relevant actors, etc. The role of our ‘own’ state can be amplified, or minimised, depending upon what is flattering to the current government. Moreover, the limited nature of these accounts make it unclear to me whether they do provide the sort of information required to make decisions that affect others. Even a single introductory history book is likely to introduce the reader to a more thoroughly researched account of an area, conflict, or event. It also does so without tending towards the same sort of simplification and provides, I think, much stronger claims to empirical verifiability and trustworthiness. And these are the introductory books, which are much maligned for oversimplification! If the external judges of the plausibility of a narrative would make that judgement about a source much stronger than a news article, then I am left with little hope in our ability to rely upon journalism as a source of information for ethical decision-making.

The second difficulty relates to incomplete understanding as well, but in a less straightforward³ sense. I will try and deal with it in another post.