The Story So Far

The Media Context of Personal Knowledge

This section briefly examines the promotion of more personal stories at the level of the media. The promotional strategies at these levels pose questions about in whose interests the move to more personal knowledge is being undertaken. There is after all an "opportunity cost" to the time being spent on personal stories — in a finite world of time, less time is thereby spent on other aspects, most notably on more wider ranging political and social analysis.

The move towards story-telling is becoming pronounced in the media. This can be seen most clearly in the media of those countries which have retained until recently, a strong tradition of political and cultural analysis. Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian working in Britain and one of the most elegant of cultural analysts recently wrote in The Observer, "Whatever we hacks may piously profess, the media is not in the information business. It is in the story-telling business (Ignatieff, 1992, p. 21)". He then details a range of new developments in the British media which evidence this trend. Story-telling and personal anecdotes are the powerful new fashion he writes.

As if to make this plain, ITN's News at Ten is reintroducing its `And finally' endpiece, `traditionally devoted to animals, children and royalty'. After footage from Sarajevo, we'll be treated, for example, to the sight of some lovable ducks on a surfboard. The ducks are there not just to cheer us up but to reach those subliminal zones of ourselves which long to believe that the horror of Sarajevo is just so much nasty make-believe.

The audience's longing for stories about ducks on surfboards is only one of the trends which is taking the media away from even notional attention to the real world. The other is the media's growing fascination with itself. The last few weeks have seen this obsession inflate to baroque extremes of narcissism. When Trevor McDonald gets the News at Ten job and Julia Somerville does not: when Sir David English vacates one editor's chair and Simon Jenkins vacates another; when Andrew Neil snarls at the `saintly' Andreas Whittam-Smith and the saint snarls back, I ask myself: does anybody care but us hacks? (p. 21)

0He notes that, "there's a price to pay when the media systematically concentrates on itself and ignores the world outside". The opportunity cost of story-telling is that personal minutiae and anecdote replace cultural analysis. Above all, the "story" is the other side of a closure on broad analysis, a failure for imagination. He writes:

In this failure and in the media's amazing self-absorption, I see a shrinking in journalism's social imagination. What I know about the 1980s I owe to a journalism which believed that the challenge was to report Britain as if it was an unknown country: Bea Campbell's Road to Wigan Pier, for example, or Ian Jack's Before the Oil Ran Out. In place of genuine social curiosity, we have the killer interview, the media profile, the latest stale gossip. It's so fashionable we can't even see what a capitulation it represents.(p. 21)