Fatal news fatigue

I have a confession to make. I’m ashamed of it. Really. I was once a news addict, but now I’m suffering from news fatigue – and I’m not sure which is worse.

Once when there was a big news story breaking I would follow it assiduously. And I’d regularly listen to Radio 4’s Today programme, hearing the news every thirty minutes. However, now I’m fed up with it, even though I much prefer the new guns presenting it (like the penetrating but polite Mishal Husain) to the old blunderbuses (like unsubtle and pompous John Humphrys). So my news-listening and watching tends to be restricted to local news and Channel 4 News (and occasionally for a different perspective foreign stations such as Al-Jazeera or Russia Today). Sometimes I’ll send myself to sleep the BBC’s World Tonight or its World Service. Mostly I tend to follow the news on-line on the Deutsche Welle and the Independent’s websites.

What is regrettable about news fatigue is that I am convinced of the importance of political understanding and engagement. Too often do I witness people airing half-baked sound-bite headlines and revealing their ignorance. What used to be pub prejudice is of course now largely replaced by social media reinforcement, as we, the gullible public, have no idea of the source or veracity of what appears to be news and informed opinion. I am sure the BBC have very authoritative people commenting on news stories including their own staff, but I doubt whether the people they use from various “think tanks” are at all objective. In my view their political backers ought to be declared. And as for their vox pop interviews they seem no better than the repeating of uninformed prejudice.

And that is the danger of news fatigue, that we get fed up with hearing the same things about issues which really matter. It’s of course largely a result of the 24-hour news cycle. I’m old enough to recall the days of a morning and evening news broadcast, which seemed to be sufficient. Do we really need to hear hour after hour, day after day, week after week, more about the latest sanctions and bellicose threats of Donald Trump's aims to make the rest of the world conform to his America-first agenda? Do we have to hear repeatedly all the twists and turns, and all the ifs and if-nots of Brexit? The requirement of “news” 24 hours a day means either you hear the same reports and opinions reinforced every hour or even half-hour, or you switch off literally or mentally. And such political disengagement is unhealthy for a society, because, when demagogues such as Trump or Orban, LePen or Farage seize on an issue like dogs with a bone, they are able to play on people’s ignorance and prejudices and create discontent until society itself is divided and eventually broken. In our western world’s case it is arguable that the 2008 financial crash provided the hammer for destroying society’s fabric. What is odd and disturbing is that the rich élite wolves who parade themselves as “ordinary” common-or-garden sheep, those most reponsible for causing our trouble, rather than choking, seem to float to the top.

And now here in the UK the spectre of the ultimate shape-shifting tousle-haired self-styled ram as our next unelected Prime Minister has been raised like a mad spirit of Britain Future. Preserve us! Begone, foul fiend!

Lessons from swapping schools

Jane and I have just finished catching up with Channel 4’s The Great British School Swap. If you’ve not seen it, the series is definitely worth a watch. You’ve just over a fortnight on catch-up. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-great-british-school-swap. Clearly there’s some artificiality about the whole project. You sense the film-makers wanting to find (or create) storylines. You realise that a fortnight’s schooling being condensed into three 45-minute programmes leaves a lot of room for creative editing. However one senses that two school headteachers involved are genuinely invested in the scheme.

Having acknowledged that, I still believe there are lessons to be learned from these stimulating programmes. I gather that the show was commissioned after a 2017 report revealed more than a quarter of primary and four in ten secondary schools are ethnically divided. The show was filmed in two Midlands schools which are just 15 miles apart: Tamworth Enterprise Academy in Staffordshire and Saltley Academy in Birmingham, the one almost exclusively white, the other equally Muslim. We saw 12 students from Tamworth being bused to spend a week in Saltley and the reverse happening a week later. It was clear that all the parents had agreed and all the students had volunteered to take part in the swap.

The programmes began with their preconceptions of the other community. For many of the Saltley Academy pupils, they view their white peers as "bacon-loving, lazy, fat poshos", who enjoyed nudist beaches. The Tamworth view was that their Muslim peers were burqa-wearing “Pakis” who were not nice, or even terrorists, and they’d be afraid to walk in an immigrant area for fear of being set upon.

Photo from Birmingham Mail

Many of the prejudices of course are inherited from parents. And the schools go out of their way to involve the parents in the process, and so we see four families exchanging meals – with touching results. The final programme sees the final celebration of the swap, a sort of graduation, and then a carefully planned party, negotiated between the liberal laissez-faire modern style and the stricter traditional Muslim code. The tensions have been honestly faced and a solution which satisfies all found. The final comments of both students and parents about the whole experiment are all positive. Some lasting friendships across the barriers seem to have been forged – in a fortnight!

As the head of Tamworth, Simon Turvey, says at the start, “Now is not the time to be building fences; now is the time for knocking them down.” In our country some popular politicians are the cheerleading fence-builders. They should be ashamed, and resisted. The Great British School Swap demonstrates that not only is this divisive, it is also counter-productive. One of the most telling incidents is when the students have a shared careers lesson. The aspirations of the conventionally poorly achieving white working-class boys are raised to a higher level by their immigrant counterparts. Not only is integration possible, it is enriching for all the community. It is a pernicious myth that immigration and integration harm a country; in fact they enhance it. One thing is needed: and that is inspiring leaders (or teachers in the programme) who believe in the benefits and will hold their nerve when things don’t go smoothly. Nothing worthwhile is achieved without difficulties. The series is, for once, aptly titled The Great British School Swap.

(By the way, a long time ago I taught in an ethnically mixed school, and I think nothing but good came from the mutual understanding which that brought.)

When technology fails

I guess everyone with a neurological condition such as MND is familiar with the frustration when one of the technology aids we depend on gives up on us. It happened for me on Good Friday, when I couldn’t get into my lift to take me upstairs as the door wouldn’t open. In fact that evening, for no obvious reason, it relented and so I got to bed. Just one of those glitches, we thought. But no, on Easter Day, when I’d parked my wheelchair in it after church, it wouldn’t open, and we were going out for what would be a special lunch. There I was trapped in it… In desperation I pushed it with my foot and escaped.

 

That evening, the lift would do nothing. Perhaps I’d kicked it to death. So began a series of visits from engineers and three nights in my riser-recliner, two in a hospital bed and three away for my son’s wedding. I have to say the week was redeemed by our local social services who grasped my predicament and, of course, the wedding. My son married a senior hospital doctor in Bristol. It was a fabulous couple of days. At the end of the reception I had completely lost what voice I have, but I could still smile.

On returning home our joy was completed by finding a message from the maintenance contractors saying their senior engineer had a slot that afternoon: would we like him? We did like him, and even more so when he had tracked down the fault to an erratic loose wire. That night I was able to sleep in our own bed. Bliss! How much trouble a small faulty connection can cause – like faulty neurones, I suppose!