THE NEWS AGENDA

We now live in such a media savvy world that it’s really difficult not to know what’s going on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week no matter how far out of the loop you’ve managed to get yourself, so when someone that most rational people might consider to be something of a maniac starts killing people on such a vast and unbelievable scale, you pretty much get to hear of it even if you’re in your own self-imposed bubble.

These days, it’s almost impossible not to, so even if your idyllic retreat happens not to have a TV set in it, you will probably get to hear about the more horrific details, perhaps only in the loosest and sketchiest of ways which can sometimes make things sound (if at all possible) far worse than they actually are, and in a manner designed to have you running off to find out more just so you feel that you know what the hell is going on. Even if you only find things out by chatting to a fellow guest over breakfast who happens to have internet access or just a radio in their car, you will be put in the picture fairly quickly and there is seldom anyone nowadays who can genuinely reappear and say, in all innocence “Why, what’s happened?”

It’s hard nowadays to have the excuse that you don’t know what’s happening because, even if you are sitting in a hospital waiting room waiting for an X-ray there is likely to be a TV set pouring out the only images that they had on an infinite loop of grief designed, I suppose, to raise the spirits of even the most troubled of souls and make those of us waiting for those endless hours to tick away realise that are own troubles are not so bad in comparison.

I suspect we’ve all had that strange kind of moment when we walk into a room quite cheerfully and notice someone looking a little upset. Sometimes our own mood is so good that it can take a few moments to process that anyone else could possibly be feeling sad on such a wonderful day, and the kind of exchange that goes “Who’s died?” “Her grandfather!” can tend to alter the feeling of high spirits fairly rapidly. I suppose it’s always wise to try and remember that every time that you are feeling “up” the need for the world to keep things in balance means that someone else is probably feeling “down” and it’s always wiser to bear that in mind as you go about your day feeling sickeningly cheerful, especially if you are the kind of person who feels that it is necessary to say “Cheer up!” to someone you think looks a bit sad.

But, when it comes to the bigger news stories that touch all of us in some way, even if we are not personally involved it’s difficult not to make it be about ourselves. I recently read an exchange where some people were discussing their memories of a major news event from fifteen years ago when a bomb went off in a major city. “I was only there a week before!” was one of the comments I saw which struck me as being a little strange. It was not a memory of the event itself, nor was the comment made by someone directly affected at the time, they had merely been in that spot, in no real danger to their own life and limb, a mere seven days away from harm. I worked with someone once who quite genuinely decided to get upset because of a plane crash. Now, I’ll grant you that plane crashes are terrible things, but their reasoning seemed to be that they had flown to the same place a year earlier and so the story was really all about them having a dreadfully narrow escape.

Over that same breakfast on Saturday morning I also found out how interconnected we all are. I mentioned our sudden discovery of the hospitalization of a relative and got the jolly reply that my breakfast companions hoped that she wasn’t in the hospital featuring so heavily on the news recently. As a matter of fact she was, but interestingly enough those fellow holidaymakers had a daughter who was in school with the girl who had been arrested and had been visiting the hospital themselves only the previous day and reported how “strangely quiet” it was.

Was this some kind of “I have a personal connection with the news” Top Trumps game we were playing? Or is there some fundamental need to make the story relevant to ourselves and put ourselves in the picture? I’ve always had little time for getting my picture in the paper, and it really is very seldom that anything major happens upon this planet that involves myself, but I’m beginning to realise that I may be unusual in this. Perhaps we all do feel the need to share. Perhaps bad events happening to others are the catalyst we all need to release our own inner torments that we would normally keep buttoned up. After all, the number of people who openly cried at Diana’s funeral and said that they hadn’t even done so at their own parent’s deaths, must mean that the shared “common experience” of grief has value to us, although I do rather baulk at the “Cult of ME!!!” so prevalent on the social networking sites when such things happen.

It does seem rather fascinating that our madman across the water seems to have been so immersed in this modern-day media-savviness that he took the time to prepare his media profile enough in advance to have professional portrait images photographed and have his pre-prepared sound bites carefully placed in Twitterworld. Now, even for a stone hard multiple murderer, that seems cold.

I wonder how many of us have ever taken just a moment to wonder which picture of us would get used if we were to suffer a high-profile unfortunate fate. Very few of the normal everyday folk you meet are likely to have a decent and recent picture of themselves, so you should really keep an eye on all those photos people take of you as you’re out enjoying yourself. That gurning snapshot taken after the twelfth tequila of the night, you know the one I mean, that’s right, the one with the redeye, could very possibly be the very image everyone remembers you by if the papers ever come knocking on your friends’ doors.

Meanwhile, when it comes to our own individual relationship with the news, I think that was probably quite a tough weekend for everyone because, as the horrors of Norway unfolded, a well known celebrity face also happened to die on the very same weekend, which led to the usual stomach-churning sense of disbelief that we all get when something so unexpected and yet (possibly) also so predictable happens. that same gut-wrenching moment also happened to the Jimi Hendrix generation, the Marilyn Monroe generation, the James Dean generation, and the Rudolph Valentino generation before us, and it remains a tragedy and a shock every single time. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, two stories occurred that on any other weekend would have been devouring the airtime and column inches themselves, but actually got barely a look in. The train collision in China that killed dozens would normally have drawn much of our attention if it hadn’t been for a Norwegian lunatic, and as for the other madman with a gun shooting five, including himself, on a Texan ice rink, well, we have been spared the usual ill-informed analysis and hand-wringing about that at least, although it troubles me to think that I can even think of that as being something “usual” these days.

These matters are really where we have to start to question the so-called “news agenda” when they have to start to qualify which of the tragic tales that they choose to tell is the most newsworthy. All unexpected deaths (and most of the “expected” ones too) are tragic and there shouldn’t be a “scale” of importance when it comes to selecting which of these stories should draw our attention, but when a weekend just spins away from us like that last one did, it’s rather difficult to know what to think any more.