Alain de Botton on The News

good evening welcome to Dallas rooks Hall and welcome to the 1976 Rockhurst edvard I'm your host Michael Williams I'm director of the wheeler center and the wheeler centers thrilled to be presenting this evening's event backstage I checked my Twitter stream just to keep abreast of the news that's been happening since we've come into this building and apparently 7:30 on the ABC led tonight with a story that said that beards are back which i think you'll all agree is very good news but that's the nature of news isn't it it rolls on and things are given the name news without perhaps necessarily deserving it and we have a guest tonight who is fascinated by these very questions and is going to speak to you all on exactly that the wheeler Center has many aims across a year and many things that we like to do but central to our mission for ourselves is the notion that we're keen to restore ideas and the discussion of ideas into the public realm to make sure that they're accessible that they shared that they're debated and discussed and disagreed about and that that becomes part of what defines us as a community and so we're thrilled to present tonight's guest because he's a man who's devoted his career at those very principles he's done so with a rare combination of accessibility and erudition of seriousness and yet at the same time a kind of pervasive optimism that is rare and refreshing he's done it through his books possibly too numerous to mention but most recently before the one he's touring for at the moment religion for atheists how priest can change your life the art of travel the consolations of philosophy which could be the title of his autobiography he's also founded the school of life and living architecture and he's a media Baron himself with his own news outlet in the Philosopher's mail as our Federal Communications Minister would have it that makes him a demented plutocrat here's all these things more besides please welcome Alain de Botton well such a pleasure to be back in Melbourne I think it's now my sixth time and it's one of my favourite cities on earth and it's just a delight to be here back with a wheeler centre as well thank you to all of you for coming and for the organizers for staging this now the thing about your grandmother is that she never complained that there was too much news she would never sit down but I had her hands but I'm just flooded by a new I'm addicted to news right this just doesn't you know it didn't happen whereas nowadays many of us do say precisely that we say we've got too much news you know probably the last thing you did last night after that was to check the news headlines and then this morning before that you also checked the news headlines so there is something about the news which is the topic of tonight that has become and it's strange to use that word but it's become strangely addictive used to be great you know addicted to methadone and heroin and cocaine but now I'm sorry I'm addicted to CNN it doesn't sound glamorous but it happens we do get addicted to this thing called the news now some of the problem is that we're never really trained to deal with this stuff called the news it comes at us on multiple platforms all the time and yet very rarely does anyone go systematically through ok this is what it is it does this to you certain after effects might be felt you know when you're at school people give a shot at telling you how to look at art you know you sit down a teacher takes you through the pictures they might tell you about how to deal with theatre and what's really going on in plays or novels etc but no one ever really tells you what you're supposed to think and feel and do when you come across the news I mean it's really weird stuff and yet what's happening to us when we see this sort of stuff we're not given very much warning and so one day you know we wake up we look at the paper and all sorts of odd things are happening inside now it's supposed to be very good for us I'm sorry shall we shall we just leave it on that one and then ok so it's supposed to be really good for us and news organisations tell us you need to keep be informed keep up with the latest events but if I asked any of you good folk here what happened today last week any memories of what happened in the news you know the news that you spend four or five hours a week nor ten hours listening do you remember anything that happened last week no you don't and I don't either we don't know we can't remember any of this stuff it just washes straight through us it's supposed to be so important yet it leaves no trace what on earth is going on if it's so important we should surely remember it in some way and yet somehow we can't quite you know when the age of news started which is really in the 18th century in Europe in the 18th century people started arguing you've got to have news it's got to be freely available and if you give people news society will improve because people will put pressure on politicians and then there'll be no Cabal corruption and information is gonna cleanse the stables of the state and things will go better it's a beautiful dream but is it really coming true it's almost as though nowadays if you want to keep a population passive worn-down confused about what to do unsure about how the political system works you've got two options the first kind is well practiced in North Korea no news at all just throttle the pipeline of news don't give people any news right then they just won't know what's going on but there's another Slayer cleverer kind of technique well practiced in Australia and in other parts so much news that you can't work out what on earth is going on anymore flood people with news so they can't make sense anymore of anything there's a constant overflow of news which destroys our capacity to pay attention to follow a story to develop and deepen our understanding while at the same time we're constantly told what it's a free country the informations all out there you can go and read it if you like well it's very hard when there's so much and the story keeps dropping and changing now the German philosopher Hegel said that a society becomes modern when it gives up going to church all the time and instead stays home and reads the newspaper and that's very much here it is again very much what we've become the sort of society that we've become we've done away with these guys more or less and what's replaced it is the news and think of the authority of the news you know it's the news and it speaks to us in a gravelly voice with gray-haired gentleman telling us important things and it's telling us you know that's the place to go to find out how life really works what's important what's good all bad the direction of our society that is where we go and you know the news is important because if you're trying to start a revolution where do you drive your tank okay you got your tank you want to change stuff do you drive your tanks to the home of the philosophers No do you go to the homes of the poets or the sociologists or the Anthropology no of course you do you go straight to the news HQ that's where you go because that is what controls the mentality of a nation the news is the teacher of the nation once we done do away with school and university the news becomes the foremost voice of authority now what I want to do tonight is just take you through some of the weird and troubling things that go with the news and I want to point you in a way towards a better kind of news we haven't cracked at all we can do better and one of the ways in which you can do better around the news is to work out how it works and quite what it does to us now one of the areas that interest me is how serious what the fate of serious news stories in a very distracted age in a way this is the most important story of our time okay but if you put this story on your front page your audience will collapse okay no one will come and see because people don't seem to find a way of making this story very interesting it's depressing it's got no beginning or end or an end so far away it's got no what so what we really like to do if you want to put audience figures up on your website on your news organization want to make some money use Taylor Swift Taylor Swift is fantastic if you put her particularly in shorts you will get a fantastic audience response okay now this really worries serious people particularly people in the news serious people in the news and they want to run for the hills I want to go what kind of a civilization are we living in where this stupid ridiculous woman who's got no import for anything to do with mankind's future you know why are we finding that this story is getting lost to this story okay it is a serious problem and I think it's a problem of our times a distinct problem of our times the temptation is to get despairing and to blame the audience for being a bunch of idiots I am NOT particularly inclined to do that because I think about the Renaissance now interesting things happened in the renee sauce the Catholic Church in the Renaissance in Europe had a really difficult and serious message to sell okay which is you have to start following the teachings of Jesus Christ because if you don't you're going to end up in hell so you've got to be good and you've got to do it now now how are they going to get this pretty arduous and weird message across well they turn to artists and ask them to paint giant advertising hoardings or as they call them altar pieces okay and and they they try to get the message across through making rather interesting and seductive images now the Catholic Church very wisely recognized it if you've got something important to say do not put it in the mouth or the hands of guys like this guy here then if you can see him but he is Saint Jerome and he's carrying a big book and he's got a huge beard and he looks pretty I don't know I mean if you if you've got an important message don't give it to guys with beards who look like that it's just it's not gonna go down well so giovanni bellini classic you know Venetian Renaissance artist knew that he had to turn to the Taylor Swift's of the day to honey coat sugarcoat the message so there they are there they are there's Taylor Swift ooh there's Taylor Swift and they're doing a really good job of selling you the redemption of Christ the message of Christ and we go oh how beautiful huh Bertie and we get the message right now what's this really talking about this is saying that the Catholic Church understood a word which highbrow people have a real problem with popularization okay popular sometimes people say to me you are a popular philosopher now that basically means you're an idiot but but really the task of popularization is about the most important you can have in a democratic society where some of the most important issues need to get traction with wide varieties of people because if you've got an important story and you cannot popularize it you're dead in the water okay and most serious news organizations are just waking up to the fact because when you go to journalism school you get taught to report things accurately and to write in clear language and to go out and hunt the facts and be honest okay all of which is not going to tell you what you really need to do which is to grip your audience and make something convincing sometimes people say well that's not a very interesting story to which my responses because you're not very talented you've got to make it an interesting story cause it's an interesting story okay if you're a Tolstoy you can make an interesting story out of a particular look you know or take check off right check off managed to make gripping short stories out of a little look that a man gave a woman in a train carriage okay gripping story now if he managed to do that you can do something good with this okay but the problem is journalist a little bit lazy and they go well it's not dramatic enough there's just no the audience bit bored it's not interesting no we need this because you know that this you know that you know there's more exciting well of course that's more exciting but the thing to do is to try and find the exciting thread within the larger story and that's a skill that news journalism has not yet learned it's just waking up to at the moment we're in the moaning stage where journalists will go it's not fair the audience is stupid they not interested in the serious stories right and my response is no you've got to go out there and sell that story like the Catholic sold the redemption of Christ more or less okay now look moving on moving on I said I said a minute ago that there's too much news you know they're flooded by news now that the truth is actually there's not that much news this is the real secret of news organizations that keep telling us there's lots of news but there isn't actually there's actually just the same news that keeps going round and round it's the same story okay but it's dressed up to look completely different so there are archetypes in news and archetype is as it were a story which keeps being repeated in slightly different guises but in its heart it's the same in my book I suggest that there are 43 news stories in the world only 43 okay but they just keep going round and round and look slightly different but basically it's the same thing now news organizations will never tell you this because it's always got to be new because you've got to keep buying the newspaper and going to the website and all the rest of it so they'll never tell you that anything and everything is you know completely new it's new in the news but that's not true stories keep coming right so what we've got to do is the audience in order not to go crazy is get better at spotting archetypes and that's partly what my book tries to help you to do so look let me give you an example of three stories which are actually only one story and they're just pretending each of them to be new this is one bit of the story this is another bit of the story and this is another bit of the story that looks like three stories about lots of different things but it's the same story now what is it the story off is the story of a very high flown high born person okay doing something very ordinary okay and it has the same emotional impact it means the same to our deeper selves okay and it basically will he meets us oh wow great that's amazing that that high-flown person is doing that ordinary thing so it's emotional meaning is identical even if the facts around it are quite different so this is Prince William and look it's amazing he's playing with her he's putting his a child car seat in the car amazing he's gonna be the king and he knows how to operate a car seat Wow so touching so interesting okay similarly extraordinary thing Taylor Swift again and there she she's buying letters oh she's gone to the supermarket she's carrying a shopping thing it's just amazing and look at this he's the son of God he could have been born in a palace but no it's just it's a simple old it's a simple Aban it's just amazing how you know the son of concept is it's exactly the same story it's just being repeated in slightly different guises so what we need to do is become spotters of archetypes that is what being a good navigator of modern news needs you to do just spot the essential stored of 43 essential stories that are circulating in the news machine get better at spotting them now look something else let's go on to foreign news okay now foreign news world news as the Americans call it is is a category of news around which there's a lot of idealism the feeling is that we used to be very provincial and used to only care about our own kinds of people and then brave journalists went out with their satellites and their fiber-optic cables and they started telling us about the rest of the world and isn't that great because now we can care about people who are far away from us and that seems a huge extension of kind of human empathy and all the rest of it the thing is is one really big problem which is that last week 200 people died in the democratic republic of the congo and you guys didn't notice and nor did i because we didn't notice and we didn't notice because we don't care and why don't we care well we never he's been suspected these people existed so why does it matter if they died we don't you know we can watch a story about the death of 200 people in a faraway land and then go and make a cup of tea and we can be asleep within 20 minutes totally undisturbed by the death of these people are we monsters are we crazy are we racist is that why we don't cares I got different colors skin no of course not it all depends on how the story is told to you take King Lear right so Shakespeare tells us about King Lear and he's a guy who lived you know hundreds of years ago Fetty never lived he was made up he's made up 200 years ago and you want King Lear and you start crying and you're so sad and King Lear and his problems and you come home and you can't quite sleep and it's really great stricken and you know compare it with these guys who don't care at all so we're capable of feeling lots of things but what's the difference between this story and King Lear Shakespeare okay now I'm not saying that Shakespeare has to join the newsroom's though it would be nice but we need to learn something from this that our capacity to respond to stories depends crucially on how that story is told okay if the story is told badly we won't care okay now this is quite surprising because the whole premise of news okay is that news is all about facts news organizations of fact gathering machines and they believe that if you go out into the world and gather facts important facts like four hundred people have just died here too many people have been swept away in a landslide is it and you are justly go and get those facts very bravely then you return home and you print that story then people will care ok that's not true at all people don't care because people don't care about facts they need this thing called empathy and in order to empathize you need lots of things for a start you need to know what life is like before the landslides before the Cataclysm before the Civil War you need to know the steady state of a place before the disaster can start to touch you but the news is not interested in the normal thing I mean have we ever heard a story in the news about what it's like to go to the hairdresser in Peru no it's very important but no one knows what it's like to go to the hairdresser in in Peru we haven't heard any anyone reporting anything about what it's like to fall in love in Sierra Leone ok or what an ordinary day might be like in Bolivia or Paraguay we don't even have any images of what life is like in Paraguay we don't know the world we are globalized provincials oK we've got these satellites and fiber optic cables and we don't know what to do with them because when the information comes in because it's merely information merely data and it hasn't been processed through the Sun through the discipline of art we don't know what to do with it it doesn't touch as it leaves us cold ok it's not because we're monsters it's because the information is not being presented to us in the right way so news needs to learn stuff from art now the art form that is closest to journalism is photo journalism I get photo journalism the art of making photographs out of news scenarios is well it's fallen into really bad times you know I I know a lot of philosophers and philosophers are a sad bunch and they're always complaining that no one respects them and I'm going after money and all the rest of it but there's no professional group as disgruntled as photojournalists my god those guys are gloomy you know even the photo agency Magnum is on its knees no one is paying any more for photo journalism okay no one cares anymore about great photography or interesting good photography and don't get me wrong there are loads of images in the news nowadays but if you've been in a newsroom the news editor will say just get me a picture of Sierra Leone just just any picture I mean if you're a photojournalist that's like you know that's heresy right any picture they don't care wallpaper and the budgets are slim because the argument for good photography has been lost no one knows why photography might matter why you might need to pay for it well it matters a hell of a lot and the reason it matters so much is because it is a route to empathy and what we need is good photography now what is good photography I mean you could take a class on this and would last six weeks in which you know lots of discussions on what good photography is now I'm not interested in the kind of color balance or framing or all that kind of vision of photography what really makes a photograph good in this context is its ability to advance knowledge the fact that it carries within it information which goes beyond what language has already told you it's at it's in itself an information bearing medium that is what makes a photograph good and photograph is dead is sterile if all it does is merely corroborate levels of information that are already stated in text now this is a photograph by Stephanie Sinclair a Pulitzer Prize photographer who went out to the Yemen to do a photo essay wonderful photo essay on child marriage in the Yemen now you might say Oh child marriage I've never heard about that yeah that's you know whatever thing is once you've got looking at her photographs they're stunning they're fascinating that deeply interesting first art I learned lots of things I thought it was children little girls getting married to men but in fact when you look at her photographs you realize it's not little girls it's actually little old ladies what they go through is so traumatic that they seem to age decades in minutes it's it's absolutely poignant and heartbreaking and the men you know you've imagined them as brutes and it's all very kind of brutal and and vile but actually they're kind of lost boys I mean this is the whole situation is a lot more poignant and subtle then you might think if you're just merely reading a description so great photography and absolutely essential tool in breaking us out of our globalized provincialism it's not just pictures from abroad or from developing nations to which this is this holds true you know take the US president okay we've seen loads of pictures of Obama that look like this this is a dead picture it doesn't teach you anything there's no information in this picture which you don't know about already this is a good photograph of President Obama it's taken by the White House photographer Pete Souza who every week posts his photographs to the White House blog and we lo lots of things about Obama we know that he's a fake in many areas like most politicians and he fakes things in order to get elected what we didn't know is that he also fakes things to please a child in this case the child of a White House staffer by pretending that he's been shot by spider-man that's quite touching so there's this kind of new data here it's an interesting photograph that we can spend time looking at but news organizations are not investing in it because they don't believe in photography as an information bearing medium and they don't believe in art in the discipline of art this seems absolutely crucial to a proper appreciation of world events now look something else in the world of news you guys all seem really nice and if we knew each other better you know you just seem really lovely and on a good day aren't quite nice to most people are quite nice right on on a good day but but when you go to the news something surprising happens when you read a new story particularly online okay you read the story and then you go what's called below the line and you're in for a really extraordinary surprise okay what you realize when you go below the line is that everybody is crazy they're all completely crazy they are violent they are vindictive they are nasty you just think is this possible can we live in this society this is a an average story I pulled off for The Guardian it's a story about George Osborne the UK Chancellor is unbelievable that one guy wants to wonder was to take off his socks and stuff him in his mouth and another guy it's discussed it I mean it's just unbelievable what's going on here are we crazy well I I don't think so i I think that these comments on behind you sorts a little bit like keeping a journal you know how it is when you're keeping a journal and so you had a bad day and you got your bedroom you pull out the journal and you got I hate everybody I'm going to commit suicide and I can't bear anyone it's all gone wrong it's only you writing this down your tears are flowing I'm gonna be a little autobiographical but you get the picture and you're rising this thing and then you know in the mood passes you put the diary away the journal away and you go and rejoin group life but it's really important that you don't tell anyone about this and that they don't know about that because well they wouldn't be able to think of you in the same way again if they knew that about you so it's very very important look I think that these comments are a little bit like those journal entries they are effusions of feelings which are not fundamental to the people who do them but they come out nevertheless in moments of private weakness and that's why it's extremely important because we've got to go out there in the world and love and trust and do business and get on with people we can't afford the morale from which these comments whose comments point us to and that's why ladies general I really urge you'd never ever ever to go below the line its information which makes it impossible to be member of the community so very very important it's a new problem our grandmother's never had it now something else this is a little disturbing now this is a guy who was in the British Army highly decorated won every kind of medal going and here he is with his seven-year-old son and shortly after this picture was taken this man took his seven-year-old son and his nine-year-old daughter and took them to a lay-by in Hampshire and stabbed them in his car and then stabbed himself and the car was found a few days later with the blood-soaked bodies by somebody walking their dog now the reason I mentioned this story is that this story was the most visited story in the English language's most popular news outlet the mail online two years ago it was that it went off the scale in terms of visitors people were utterly fascinated by this story of this ex-soldier murdering his children are we sick what's going on why do we have such an appetite for this sort of story why is the news full of this sort of story are we sick we'll look I don't think we are and the reason why not is well I like to go back to Aristotle in this case now Aristotle in the fourth century BC in Athens made a fascinating observation he observe that there is an art form which he called tragedy where people go and sit in the auditorium and watch stories that put this one to shame in terms of levels of bloodthirstiness okay they'll go and see stories of incest and cannibalism and murder and eyes being gouged out and all the rest of it okay and they watch these stories known as tragedies written by people like Sophocles and Euripides and they watch these stories and these stories do not make them into barbarians they are in fact Aristotle believed civilizing experiences that there is something sometimes potentially about witnessing the horror of others that has a civilizing effect so when you're seeing this is bida past the king Sophocles Oedipus the King these tragedies have a power to educate an Aristotle thought they hate us in two areas in particular they enhance our capacities for pity and fear pity for the tragic hero based on an awareness of how easily all of us are always on the edge of disaster however saying we may seem all of us can be pushed to an extreme where we would do something so-called mad right our sanity and good health is something we cannot take for granted where all of us on the edge of doing crazy things sometimes and then fear fear for us fear for ourselves because all of us are potentially exposed to horrific dangers and the story of the you know the tragic tales of people who've messed up who broken their lives who fundamentally destroyed everything they love and for whom there can be no redemption these stories are educative they make us human and more importantly humane so it's very important if you want a humane citizenry to look at these sort of stories and become well look I mean you know think of how the problem with the newspapers and news organizations is that they present us with this sort of information about deaths and murders etc but they don't tie it up they don't do what Aristotle thought that a good tragedy always does which is to provoke catharsis what we might call a working through a Redemption right all of this needs to happen when you're exposed to these stories but news organizations don't do that they just put the ingredients in front of us and let us get on with it you know if there was a headline in the you know mail online for this kind of story it might be you know sex with mum was blinding something like that you know a kind of aggressive tough cynical kind of thing sex with mum was mine so very far from the sophistication of Sophocles very far from arousing fear and pity and this so happens with the news often happens with the news the news takes us to the edge of a very important set of emotions and then doesn't tie them up for us leaving us with a low level of anxiety dissatisfaction feeling of kind of sickness so we're reading these stories we're compelled by them and yet we're not doing anything with them in the way that a you know Aristotle and the great Rhodesians thought we could so there's a real opportunity there to tie things up slightly better in the news another very popular category of news is car crashes people love a good car crash particular on one of the main commuter lines fog lots of people dead people love that off the scale but the thing that really as we know in the last few weeks people really love most of all is a good plane crash my god people love a good plane crash off the scale levels of interest particular if it's a wide body and if the accident happens out of the blue and there are children on board it just goes off the a we mad kind of people what are we doing going again and again to the story of airliners that have crashed and cars that are crashing dead bodies everywhere are we sick no we're looking for the meaning of life now in the Middle Ages a very standard piece of interior decoration to put on your table was a skull either an actual skull or a painting of a skull right you put this in the in in your eyesight every day and the reason was to keep in mind that you are mortal that at any time death may come and the thought of death was held to be very wisely an incredibly important catalyst for working out what's important in your life and what's not to weed out the superfluous to weed out the cruelty that we don't feel proud of the you know obsessions that we don't want to you know remit be remembered by the the ways in which our lives have gone out of focus and death is an agent of the thought of death is an agent of refocusing now I believe now this we don't on to put skulls on our tables we no longer like to think about death too much except for in one area the news I think the news this was called a memento mori in in those days ability of remember a reminder of death I think that news has become our new memento mori that's what this story is that's what this story is it's a reminder that however calm and safe and ordinary things look any time something may happen to you so keep that in mind but again the news is not helping us to know that it's giving us a purely factual description you know in today north of Perth a life vessel was found at this you know the three cars crash is a it's not doing the digestion it's merely presenting us with the facts and that leaves us without what Aristotle called catharsis so we're constantly being taken to the edge of really traumatic and important material and the ends are not tied up for us no wonder we left a little anxious by the news of course we are nothing's tied up there's no catharsis with permanently scared the news loves to scare us it loves to scare us because when you're a bit scared you'll keep checking the news again you know the news terrifies you've got everything you know there's swine flu and bird flu and chicken flu and UFOs and Martians and I don't know what there's always something that is about to end humanity as we know it the news loves - terrifies it also loves to terrify us about human nature and you know that about the news because when your car breaks down on a windy dark night and it's time to talk to a stranger you know what's going to happen you're going to knock at the door of an isolated farmhouse guys gonna come out and he's gonna kill you and then after he's and he's got sex with you then he's gonna kill you and there's gonna chop you up into very very small pieces and either put you in the river features crocodiles put you in the trunk of the car and you know this because you're an assiduous watcher of the news and you know that everybody's a murderer or pedophile or madmen etcetera because the news is an organization that wants to respond to permanently show us what's new and strange and different and you know actually hardly anyone ever gets murdered you'd really have to try hard to get murdered but but there are a few murders every now and then and they always end up on the paper in the papers and that's why when we keep reading the papers we think that everybody's a murderer the anomalous becomes the normal when we keep following the news so the news likes to keep us wounded and terrified the lot one thing it doesn't do is teach us you know we'll get through it it's okay we'll survive therefore those floods those fires humanity will survive as it has done so many other crises the mess of resilience is about the least likely thing you're ever gonna hear from a news organization there's one area though where the news is very very optimistic and that is around an area called health news if you listen to the news a lot of what it is telling us is that death is on its way out okay because there's something there's some guys at MIT or maybe Stanford often in America they got white coat and they're about to invent something amazing okay some cancer busting drug or they're giving you advice new advice like have some aspirin and then you won't get Alzheimer's or eat walnuts and you won't get arthritis so have a glass of wine for this or no glass of life a little extra chocolate or I'll lie down more or lie down less constantly advice on how the fantasy is you're not gonna die okay that's the what really what they're gonna really want every headline of that kind of news is death been abolished okay the bad news is bad news is guys death has not been abolished it's not going away anytime soon okay maybe we'll delay the onset of Alzheimer's a little bit by swallowing that aspirin but basically we're all on the way out now the guys that the news replaced knew about that and one of the things that they did which was very nice was to just accept that as a fact we're all gonna go life is dark and suffering and you think it's cheerful but no it's headed for you know the gloomiest end it's just written into the code of life okay that's a really useful message because it's quite striking taking when you're young you know Wow are you sure but then they go yeah yeah we're sure just gonna end so you know get ready for that's much better than being told and MIT they may then it may solve you know no they're not gonna solve they're not gonna solve we're all gonna die so let's just stop you know rejoicing about health news no it's gonna it's gonna happen to neglect health news it's just you know it's not going to be ready in time maybe in five hundred maybe in five hundred years it all solved but you know if it's not one thing it's going to be another you know the ordinariness of death is something the news organization has a hard time accepting death is either something cataclysmic you know the airplane blows up and you know it was you know tragic and extraordinary or it's on its way out what it refuses refuses to do is to cover the stories of an ordinary octogenarian heart giving out in a you know Melbourne hospital that's not used it's just normal but of course it's what we need to hear the normality of the inevitable is what we need to hear and what the news keeps us away from look something else that's important in the news this is something that really saddens serious news people people in serious news organizations and that is the fact that humanity is obsessed by celebrities right we live apparently in a celebrity culture and this makes clever people really despair and they say you know what's wrong with the world people are obsessed by celebrities now look my own feeling is there's nothing wrong with celebrities okay every society that ever existed has had celebrities you need celebrities you need what guy called role models right because you know whether it's ancient Athens or it's you know medieval France or whatever you need people who other people look up to and learn about their own lives by looking at their lives etc you need you need celebrities you're not going to do away with them okay so the problem is not having celebrities is that we've got the wrong ones we've got the wrong ones we've got people like this lady okay she's not the right kind of celebrity now why haven't got this lady okay why have we got this lady the reason is that serious people in serious news organizes organizations go no I'm sorry I don't like celebrity news so what they've done by dismissing celebrity news is to abandon the task of making celebrities to news organizations of the lowest common denominator let's remember Kim Kardashian was not made by God she was made by news organizations many of them owned by Rupert Murdoch and she was a manufactured product okay this lady too was manufactured by the news okay that's why we think of her as famous the news has helped to do that now what serious news organizations need to do is to get on with the task of making their own celebrities what celebrity really is about should be about is to put before our eyes role models that can tell us about how to live in certain areas of life there are sources of virtue and interest okay this is what the mission the highest mission of celebrity news is really about you get hints of it occasionally in the news recently the actress Natalie Portman went to the park with her child now in a few days you've got children it's really boring taking your child to the park isn't it so you really struggle do I have to do and you know in your heart of hearts that it's good and you know it's important to go to the part they like it but very very boring now it's really nice when you think that the spotlight of glamour has moved on to this business of taking your child to the park Natalie put into the parking Portman was in the park too so that's quite an important thing to do it's quite nice if st. Natalie let's call as st. Natalie the patron saint of taking your child to the park it's quite nice if she's giving us a kind of role model from what we might do in this important area now I think these guys the guys who came before the news these guys always understood it you need some Saints you need some Saints because you need role models okay a functioning society needs role models and the problem with the modern use is that it's abandoned that task in its most serious outlets to the lowest common denominator and that's why we're in trouble so better celebrity not no celebrity it's my suggestion now look something else that happens in the news you know it is on the weekend right you're supposed to looking at the news is supposed to be a kind of relaxing activity and you know the people who make Saturday and Sunday newspapers and supplement etc they they present it as a really kind of relaxing occasion you know you'll sit on the Stouffer and you'll pick up a supplement a colour supplement etcetera now I don't know if it's just me but sometimes you read these supplements and it's a cheerful day and by the end of the supplement you aren't going mad inside your tossing the supplement aside and you're in a kind of angry mood and when your partner says anything wrong you're not and what's good what's going on well if the problem is that you have suffered from one of the chief dangers of the news today which is envy okay envy is one of that you know you know as long as they say on the news things like a turn away now there is strobe lighting or there is a scenes of nudity so turn away where do what it should be telling us is turn away there's a moment of envy okay this is gonna make you seriously envious we have in societies which basically tell us that if you work hard you got energy etc you could do anything you could be anyone okay and it rest of us don't become anyone in particular but the news keeps telling us good news there's this restaurateur he came from nothing he's got 32 restaurants across Australia he's worth you know eight billion dollars you know let's celebrate his success and let's find out about him and his wife and why do we want to hear this stuff this stuff destroys us the other day I was looking at a newspaper and I came across this man my goodness okay first first problem okay this man is called Elan musk first problem is he's 46 now the problem with this is that I'm 44 and for a long time when you're younger you can tell yourself look it hasn't happened but you know I've got a bit of time ahead of me and it's gonna work but I'm not going to get there this man Elon Musk he helped to found eBay he was a major investor in PayPal he's worth eighteen billion dollars he's sending men to Mars in a few years this is his lovely wife he's got five children and there was a supplement saying that in all that is it vented electric cars and also he's learned how to cook Italian food and on a weekend he lost it all stop something very light some tortellini and mushrooms and it's just like why do I want to know this I'm going mad inside because he's 46 and he's worth 16 billion dollars and he cooks food like this I'm going mad but of course we're not allowed to do that because there's no warning this could make you envies this is like an odd private worry of mine was now look we need to be aware of this as consumers of the news we are going to be made envious on a regular basis and the news isn't going to warn us we still live with a judeo-christian background that tells you envy is bad only bad people feel in free will look I think we need to be charitable towards Envy Envy is in many ways a signal that your life's gone a bit wrong and that you should take an effort to go in a certain direction the problem is it's a really unclear signal it's sort of saying something's wrong but it's not necessarily quite giving you you know what to do next but I think we should study Envy I am actually a great fan of keeping a diary of envious attacks most of us at least you know at least five times a day something will make us envious my advice to use jot it down and then if you've got some time in the weekend would just look through the diary and try and trace the themes through it because there will be themes and envious attacks point us to our better self that hasn't yet come into fruition but it's a hint about where we might be going so it is a very important thing to do but the news doesn't really help us with envy for a start it doesn't say this guy might make you envious and this is why actually if you start to take a story like this apart I'm not envious of a cooking Italian food I haven't care and and this guy's wife I don't not really envious of her and actually I don't want to start eBay and I don't want to send men to Martha so what is it that I'm really envious if I analyze my Envy and actually is I think about it really what I'm envious about is this guy is unbelievably brave he's unbelievably brave he's had one idea after another which everybody ridicules electric cars men on mark PayPal's every stage people laughed at him and he kept going through unbelievable opposition and that's what I like that's what I'm envious all so pathetic spite a while and some and telescoping what happens takes quite a while to get there so we need a bit of help with our NV and the news doesn't give this to us okay NV and the news moving on to something else now look serious news organizations believe that what makes them serious is that they don't have much bias okay the word bias has a really bad name in serious journalism so the lowest kinds of journalism like you know the mail online or Fox News that are they've got lots of a bias but the really kind of policy news organizations don't have bias you know they said can't come to us listen to the news from us we don't have any bias and this is supposed to be a good thing so there's no more high and mighty news organization on the planet than the BBC and the BBC all the time speak about their lack of bias and they always always will say that when they're covering an issue they just balance out whatever it is so if they're doing a story on say genital mutilation they'll have someone who's very anti genital mutilation and then in the interest of balance someone is you know find some things to say in favor of the practice if there's you know do a piece on genocide you know someone who's really anti-genocide know just for balance someone who sees the point of a bit of genocide every now and there it's always trying to kind of balance everything up okay it's ridiculous it is ridiculous this obsession with a lack of bias when these people are asked to justify what they're doing they often say things like well we wouldn't want to unduly influence the audience oh really why not right first of all what is the audience a two-year-old child that can't make up its mind on anything it's like surely the audience can just tell us what you think you've been sitting in the newsroom you've got the best data available can you please think it through and tell me what you think don't tell me that it's like a chef coming out of the kitchen going look I didn't want to unduly influence your dinner so I haven't cooked it I've just hear the angry you cook it you cook it because you know you know better than me what you like come on cook it and if I like it I'll eat it and if not I'll walk away we're treated like children by these anti bias news organizations of course we need to know what to think one of the most one of my favorite by news organizations is the Economist it is so biased from page one to the art last page everything is bias and I often don't agree with the bias but I love that these guys have got an angle on stuff they believe in stuff you know one of the great dangers is people is is we've drowning in fact and we don't know what to think about them you know the image of the viewer and the listener of the news is someone who kind of has a very clear sense of everything just looking for the ingredients and then they're gonna cook them in their own minds most of us are like I don't know what to think about that pipeline is it good we're looking for some help and if we don't like the help we might move away from it but we need it and look the area in which this matters most of all is economic news okay now the major failing of news organizations worldwide in the early 21st century was missing the financial crisis okay every single news organization managed to miss this and part of the reason why they missed it is they can't talk about economics in ways that raise the really big questions I mean up take the New York Times okay the New York Times is you know how there's they have that strap line all the news that's fit to print okay all the news that's fit to print that's about the most asinine strapline you could ever ever have imagined these guys were 20 blocks from Wall Street and in 2006 all the news that's fit to print they managed to miss the fact that JP Morgan's balance sheet was you know up the creek that the Bear Stearns was about to collapse it couldn't notice anything right they didn't have that optics were were wrong the way in which the news discusses economics is one of the great problems of our time you know people often say young people often say things like um oh I'm not very political and did it interested not just in politics right my answer to that is you're not interested in the way that news tells you about politics right you're not trying very hard but at the same time nor is the news okay so the blame is shared and the great problem with the way in which economics is reported in the news is that all of us have got really big questions when it comes to economics what kind of a society we're living in who gets what why is the money shared this way what our corporations about what's the meaning of work all these kind of questions they never crop up in the news when it says business news economic news right it's all about well the inflation rate edged up not point five percent what about the meaning of life and the great questions of economics they don't appear weirdly you know news organizations always like to tell you things all bit the big bosses of news organizations always like to tell you things like well in the modern world we've got Twitter and so everyone can do everything there's so many plural voices oh yeah really if you look at Twitter it's all merely a reflection of what the big guys are doing right where's this famed public opinion where everyone can have every you know say did they spot the financial crisis did Twitter SWAT the fans know they don't you don't support it it's still the big guys who are controlling the narrative and the narrative doesn't allow for the big questions of economics and that's why when there's a big problem okay you either get confusion and sort of depression and melancholy and then occasionally you get an outburst of fury okay this is the Occupy movement and it's like I can't bear it I'm gonna I just need to do something so this guy's Scrolls a thing let's get out of this let's figure this out together I'm gonna go into sets tan and a placard I'm really wired up etc I can't bear it okay the news is responsible for this man okay this man is a product of the news and I'll tell you two things about it a he's incensed he's appalled he wants them he wants to make a change and B he's got no clue he doesn't know what to do he has no clue that was the problem of the Occupy movement they had no ideas now there are fantastic ideas out there but weirdly or suspiciously or something they never make it into the news sometimes at this point people say to me are you a Marxist you are you advocating the ideas of Karl Marx no of course not there are hundreds of ideas out there about how we might live economically and arrange the economic system but weirdly despite all those stories and Miley Cyrus and all the time that can be told to us about Kim Kardashian etc there's no time for that other stuff weirdly and if anyone is talking about those topics were I'm sorry he doesn't quite fit she doesn't really work on TV etc sadly those stories just never appear so this rage is a product of this kind of strangely cool view of well let's not say how we should live let's not unduly influence the population let's not tell them what's right and wrong let's make them let them make up their own minds oh yeah well that's quite hard to do to make up your own minds but you haven't really got the data and the concepts and etc so this guy is a symptom in a way of the news look part of the problem of the news another kind of related problem is that if you open up the hearts of most journalists and look at what they really believe in inscribed on their hearts is the word Watergate okay they operate with a Watergate paradigm now what was Watergate okay Watergate was something's wrong somewhere in society okay at the top with some politicians who are honorable and nasty and along comes the journalist who's kind of like James Bond and so James Bond journalist goes and finds the truth and so busts open the gates and so an eavesdropping thing and and then society changes and the politician gets put in jail and then society improves and journalists are obsessed every young journalist still today wants to be you know Bob Woodward wants to be part of the what you know once might uncover the next Watergate okay that is still what people think now they're really bad news for these guys is that the bad stuff in society is not actually susceptible generally to a Watergate type analysis there are actually not that many guys in rooms plotting and all the rest of it you can't send James Bond in and actually most of the stuff that's wrong with this world is not a secret it's out there you can just the facts are there okay what's lacking is analysis and the passionate telling of that story of what's wrong but it's not a secret the news is obsessed by identifying a few bad guys it's like there's something wrong in the world what is it oh it's him oh it's him okay so let's go and get him let's put handcuffs on him and take him to prison oh great you know he did things with prostitutes a bags a bit fat he's ugly good good you know the world will get better and it's like look guys that's not the real problem of the world you have spotted you know it's a very nice story but it's not addressing what news needs to really do which is to systematically address the needs of the nation and what's really wrong with a nation so then use too often settles for a very kind of easy Pat narrative around the bad stuff in society look joy things to a close now the news is based on the idea that you need to keep checking the news because the most important thing that's ever happened has happened in the last half hour since the last bulletin so that's why you need to go and check it right because something they have changed in those that you know in the world of news and you need to find out because it's new and therefore it will be important the truth is as we know that some of the most important things had ever happened in humanity happened about three thousand years ago okay and but this stuff never makes it into the news you know the Buddha said some interesting things about compassion the news you know or you know a Plato wrote Plato philosopher Plato wrote a fascinating book that will tell you more about what's happening in Canberra than anything alive from the guy I'm standing with a microphone with a satellite dish behind him okay get rid of that guy and let's talk about Plato but we don't because we've got this narrative that it's all you know what's happened in the last five minutes so that way we lose a massive capacity for insight the news by claiming that the new is always the important robs us of an unbelievable richness of concepts ideas etc so we really need to be careful you know it's very hard it's become very hard to think for yourself okay part of the new pilot prom is the prestige of news news is so prestigious you know if you say ah you know I'm gonna go off and read the news I please leave me alone I remember is reading the newspaper and people go oh wow we in the newspaper it must be left alone what are you doing and you go I'm just kind of looking out the windows for thinking about stuff that happened to me when I was 12 and thinking about something but go come on don't do the washing-up stop lazing about right there's not much sympathy for thinking there's a lot of sympathy for the dignity of watching the news but you know a lot of it is nonsense a lot of it is not it calls itself the news but it's only ever some news it's some news it's not the news it's some news masquerading as the whole story it's some news that some guys put together in an office you know they were drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups they were trying to work out what was what and they've decided to shovel these few stories and make up this thing called reality welllook reality is a multi-faceted gloriously complex thing which no news organization is ever going to pin down but boy oh boy does it try and tell us that it has that's you know that's the claim you know this is one of the few areas where we can still think until they put Wi-Fi reliably on aeroplanes you know thinking for yourself is really hard cuz you know you're thinking about the news from inside all of us have got news from inside but it's hard to get to because it's bound up with anxiety and sadness and regret and challenge etc so it's always good to say oh I've just got to follow the news instead but you know sometimes on an airplane we can we can think about that sort of quieter news we can hear about the voice from within as such an important voice you know many of you and me and and people in modern citizens that is we can't sleep at night can you sleep at night everyone's got insomnia it seems there's an epidemic of insomnia now what is insomnia insomnia is basically all those thoughts that you didn't have in the day coming up for air coming up for revenge waking you up at 4:00 in the morning and demanding to be heard and the reason why you didn't hear them in the day was because of the news in part because of the news of chatter the noise that you know that the synthetic sounds all around that's drowning it out so look you know the final sort of takeaway message is really there's a lot of stuff happening out there which never makes it into the news we can't mortgage our intelligence our critical faculties to the news though that is even benevolently so what the news wants us to do we miss so much we miss stuff from within we miss stuff from our own societies we miss guys like this he never makes it into the news right there are quiet things going on there are subtle things going on the news can't see it can't see an awful lot of reality and we need to keep our wits about us in contact with this message now look one final thing I'm a philosopher by training and philosophers are a very serious sometimes self-important bunch that really think they know the truth about all sorts of things and they analyze life and they they come to big conclusions but then a philosopher friend of mine told me a little while back that the average work of philosophy sells 300 copies okay that's nothing the average work of philosophy no one's interested in philosophers they are totally useless marginal bunch okay no one's listening to them so they remember listening to this fact 300 people read the average book of philosophy and then one insomniac night I was thinking about this and I thought about the mail online which is the English languages most popular news source 40 million souls 40 million people go and visit that website every day so you know on the one hand you got 300 people reading the philosophy book and then I had you've got a 40 million a day who were checking out the that the news website what's going on what can we what can we do about that one look one thought I had was what about if you took a daily mail the mail online and you simply rewrote it using philosophers you invited philosophers to rewrite all those stories that are always appearing in the mail like about murder and incest and Taylor Swift in all of it you've got these philosophers to rewrite the mail online with paying attention to all the things that philosophers are interested in like subtlety and complexity and justice and humanity and all the rest of it what would you get anyway we think it around with this and then a few months ago we launched our answer to this which is called the philosophers mail and it's it really exists you can look at it and it's a WWF in Lucifer's mail calm and we scour the world for interesting stories and and and this is what we do and it's an attempt to fight back against the news monolith and I think you know my book is in a way the theory of the news and it's kind of distillation of my deepest thoughts this is an attempt at some practice but really what I'm inviting everyone to do is take conscious command of your life around the news we're taught and encouraged to be very very passive we don't need to be we're still inventing the sort of news that we need in order to be healthy and good citizens we haven't got there yet I'm very optimistic that we can be we can make the news better and my book is a little contribution to that journey towards a better sort of news thank you very much what an excellent illustration of the irrelevance of philosophers and the fact that no one's listening I think there are some people listening and I imagine many of you have questions of your own that you would like to pose there are fixed microphones in the aisles either side here on the ground floor up there at the your right hand aisle in the middle floor and in the top floor so if you can make your way to a microphone so that people can hear you that would be much appreciated just so glad I didn't know there were so many of you here I thought there were only about 20 people here thank goodness it was scary enough just the thought of 20 they go all the way up yeah I just got even going to look I'm going while they're making their way to their microphones nervously but they're doing it I'm sure and I wanted to ask you the philosophers male seems like an extraordinary distillation of the ideas you talked about in this book but the thing that strikes me reading it is an overwhelming positivity in the way that it writes about those stories and those issues is that inevitably the position of philosopher would take where's the anger where's the fury where's the sense of morality yes interesting we ran a piece the other day about niceness in news because if you're a serious news journalist you think it's almost your duty to pull people down and to cut them down to size being pretty tough on them right we see this again and again the character destruction it started with politicians and as we've done to pretty much anybody anybody's right for a character destruction now I think that the duty of the journalist is to find out the truth about situations and oddly if you hate from the start you don't get to the truth about people okay so if you're a French journalist and you're writing about Mary lepen the far right French leader and you start your story as almost all French journalists do by mocking this woman you are failing to understand what makes this woman powerful in French politics and you've got a real problem on your hands part of the problem that the reporting of Rupert Murdoch okay has always been this guy's the Antichrist is an awful man rather than okay let's just hold off we may conclude that we don't like him at all but we need to understand him in in order to understand him we can't start from the idea that the guy's a monster you need to understand and so niceness is not for its own sake but it's a scalpel to get to the truth and I think too often news organizations were revert to prejudice and that interrupts their capacity and the capacity of their audience to understand very important situations and dynamics within their own societies there's a question over here on the ground floor thank you yes well I think I enjoyed your talk I'm one of the points you seem to be making early on was that we sometimes don't get the news because it's been not not being told properly I wanted to find out your thoughts on the the effect of the observer of the news journalists particularly television news journalists have on a situation particularly a tragic situation the pursuing the victim and shoving the microphone and the battery of shoulder-mounted cameras in the face of the bereaved person how do you feel that your family are now at the bottom of the cell in southern Indian Ocean there's a conflict because in that particular case of the recent Malaysian Airlines plane that people want to have publicity for their for their case but there's an uncomfortable balance and in my mind about that level of intrusion yeah I think I mean for me is it's it's something that news does constantly which is it goes up to people and asks them how they feel as you say and it could be in a disaster but it's it's also it happens you know it happens a lot in celebrity news they'll say you know how do you feel about your latest film etc and celebrities and ordinary people tend to be quite inarticulate because they're bad people but just it's quite hard to know how you feel let alone tell somebody with a camera how you feel so the answer tends to be I'm quite happy or I'm quite sad or I'm devastated or it's not great okay really what you want to say to the news is hang on a minute don't ask them think about it well how would you feel if your entire family was at the bottom of the Indian Ocean can you can you just go away and think about that for five minutes they're not going to be able to tell you they're completely distraught get out of their way let them grieve and let somebody who understands grief who can think eloquently about these things do the thinking one of the things we do in the Philosopher's mails we've got these interviews which we call an interview with the soul of various people in which basically we argue that the interview which is an idea that if you get in a room with somebody you'll get to the truth about them okay um that's not really true because most people when they meet a journalist don't want to tell the journalist the truth about their childhood or their life or whatever and the reason they don't is because either they don't know themselves or they don't particularly care to tell this stranger this thing etc in other words a lot of the information that's it that could guide us to what other people are feeling is there already and again I come back to art you know did Tolstoy have to get a run up to Anna Karenina and go how are you feeling right now no use this faculty which all of us have in spades call imagination and knuckle is not making it up its imagination our capacities for empathy we can understand we can try to understand how people feel and that isn't necessarily reliant on sticking a microphone in front of them because they might not be able to tell you at that time there's often enough information out there to build a picture of what people must be feeling and it's I think lazy journalism to always want a person to encapsulate for you in a soundbite the complexity of a situation that they're involved in just because they're involved in a situation they may not necessarily be the best person to sum up that situation and yet the news assumes that they can be hence that kind of doorstep how you feeling journalism we're gonna go all the way up to the gods there I think there's someone I can't see a thing hello um I was just wondering I'm up here alone yeah why did why is the school of life come to Melbourne rather than anywhere else we're very pleased about that and how does the money work I mean and how do you get you stuff and your philosophers and people like that okay having been to the London one is tiny but very interesting and I've enjoyed it okay well just to explain to people who too might not know about it one of the things I do I used to just write books and then a certain point I had a long night of a soul and I thought he is it really enough to write books and I really realized that what I care about is ideas and then I realized that ideas certainly can go in a book in this thing called a book but they can also go into other things they could go to something that looks like you know a shop or looks like you know a website or looks like all sorts of things so then I started getting involved in various sort of more practical projects which are still very true to what I do in books but they're just another kind of attempt to do something so a few years ago I started this thing called the school of in London which is basically a one-stop shop for all the stuff the stuff that I've kind of written about it there's stuff about you know you can find books and courses and lectures and experts and meet other people around the big themes of life you know everything from birth to death is kind of covered there and it's a little home for all of that stuff it's a it's a it's a facilitation space to go there and it's done with a bit of humor and you go in off the street and it's very you know it's very everyday and very relaxed but hopefully is making a very serious point about how to live anyway we found a really astonishing thing that when we ran classes and did things in London about a third of every single event was staffed by Australians and we thought what is going on why there's so many Australians here Oh couldn't work it out and then I asked for a sir and they said well because we like this stuff we really like thinking about it I thought oh how very odd anyway then then a few years ago I was approached by its and very nice people from Melbourne outfit called small Giants and they came to us and they said we want to start the School of Life in Melbourne and they seemed extremely competent and very nice we gave them the license and it just opened on Tuesday so you can go a few streets away from here and see the School of Life Melbourne it's very much what happened in London but with a very Australian flavor and very now why Melbourne I think because Mel well you know why Melbourne that's why you live here you know why it's Melbourne you just are fishing for compliments cuz you guys are you guys are the thoughtful ones and you know the relaxed ones and the nice ones and you know that's why it's in Melbourne of course they're gonna be my what do you think is gonna be Sydney come on so so that's why it's in Melbourne and oh I'm gonna get into such trouble I didn't say a big hello to all of us hello okay I know what am I gonna do now anyway never mind no I love Sydney in fact I'm going there tomorrow and I love it anyway sorry okay next question that's like on the before we take another question am i interested the way you talk about the school of life it seems to me that the big change in news in recent years is the rise of social media even if to a certain extent as you suggest in your book when you suggested this evening that there's still a kind of monolithic nature to the way we consume use social media and the way we consume news on something like Twitter allows a community to spring up around the discussion of ideas the very kind of thing you're doing with school of life do you see that as something with potential for growth or are you skeptical about it sorry Twitter yeah as a news outlet yes I mean look I I think I I think it all depends how it's done you know Twitter's a platform and you can use it well or badly I think there's too much in a retweeting of stuff that exists in the news anyway but then there are some people who I follow who just you know have a take on the world that's really interesting and really good and you know at that level it can be great just just depends how it's done but yeah it's a platform it's like saying can a piece of paper be good you're in the right hands definitely yeah it can really it can work let's try again at the very top up here hi I'm right at the top hello thank you for having me hi um I thank you you've it's been a wonderful talk um something that really resonated in me was the idea of us wanting to know what to think when and at the risk of really paraphrasing you badly you were talking about the BBC and you know you are people who are knowledgeable knowledgeable about many things and please tell us what you think do you personally have any advice for someone who is interested in finding out some news about important things that are happening in the world is there any advice you could give to someone who's trying to less about Kim Kardashian and someone who is trying to find out important things look you know it's you've got to do a little bit of rooting around as it were you you can't go to the supermarket of news you need to go and find the corner shop the little farm weird thing that you know the market it's it's not mainstream there are places look I'm a fan of some of the reporting that viscom has done foreign reporting I remember a fascinating story called having an ice-cream with a suicide bomber a story that was done by a young woman who went to haven't tried have an ice cream if this was it sounds silly but actually it was a fascinating way it made you care about the situation it gave you kind of perspectives I'm a great fan of that kind of first-person journalism that takes you into a place my favorite journalists are probably Norman Mailer and Truman Capote both novelists in part and because they know how to tell a story but yeah you've got a hunt for that that you know there are websites there are places but it's surprising isn't it how the mainstream is still very very mainstream and that still dominates our understanding of news you know some people have attacked me and they've said you're not you're not being generous enough towards the really good you know citizen journalism that's out there and look I do absolutely recognize it perhaps I didn't say that enough so absolutely it's just I'm still struck you know I was in Singapore Airport with CNN my goodness I mean it's just extraordinary that stuff you know sophisticated a news gathering machine of utter inanity and banality that doesn't teach us anything the world never looks as sterile and as boring as seen through the prism of this global news yep it's also worth stressing this six chapters on Kim Kardashian in the book and you'll see oh very differently by the end of it we're gonna go over here on the floor mr. button and I'd love to know what do you think of one of our living legends Michael Lunik who is journalist who doesn't use photojournalism he uses drawing well I think that techniques like drawing and also satire and jokes and telling the news with humor I think these things can be very interesting because they subscribe to this other kind of rule or law that I was trying to tell you which is the news needs to become subject to the processes of art and comic art is an art like tragic art really what's happened is that the news has been filtered through an intelligence something's been made of it the ingredients have been cooked and in this guy's case cooked with great artistry and lightness and skill but they're going towards important truths it's not just meaningless entertainment it's it's education and it's seduction right this is about the seduction of the ordinance seduction is a particularly ticklish word we sort of think oh wait I want to be seduced into knowledge but I think often we do need to be seduced and it's you know the comics and the cartoonists and the satirist often who do that very very well so I'm a fan here listen sorry mr. DuPont Oh pleasure to hear you speak I teach people who are from the third world and have emigrated recently to Australia how to use digital media and whose lives have part largely passed the modern world of news by how should someone introduce the contemporary world of news to a person who comes from a world largely like that of 60 to 100 years ago news wise look it's a really big challenge I've got a job a little bit like you because I teach a seven and a nine-year-old about the world of news and in many ways they're in exactly the same shoes they don't know anything about it and suddenly there's this thing called the newspaper or the radio or whatever and it's I look like the first thing to tell people tell your people that I tell my people is it's very odd just it's it's weird okay it's man-made it's a construction and you need to take the Machine apart to work out how it works so I took my kids actually I took my kids to a TV studio because I was doing some reporting now I will just look Anna what is to show them that when you see a picture on a screen okay um it's very easy to think again it's it's the truth it's reality and then they go to the studio and just very basic things happen that backdrop of the city well it's not the city it's just a TV screen okay and my kids were fascinated by that is it but it looks like the city and I go here but it's not I know all this left them really thoughtful and this has been something they keep coming back to now and they see something on TV they go is it real or has it is it just the screen okay and that's just it's a basic lesson but I think it's that sort of lesson that all of us look at the end of the day it's not just the people you're teaching of people I'm teaching it's all of us because we've constantly forgotten these lessons in the artifice of the news and the power dynamics behind the news and the agenda behind the news which is not always a sinister one I mean don't get me wrong I'm not as kind of Chomsky eye that says that everyone's always trying to you know pull the wool over our eyes about you know modern capitalism I think there is a bit of that but sometimes it's even worse than that there's unconscious mediocrity lack of questions because people haven't thought of them not because they're trying to desperately keep those questions away but just they've forgotten them so yeah it's just keep keep stressing the artifice is is for me the key of media literacy hi there hi there I just wanted to ask I guess a lot of what I tend to say in the news a large percentage of it seems to its negative it's a sad story it's tragedy and all that sort of thing and I was just wondering you know I can walk away from it sometimes feeling like oh god I can't say any more bad news and I was just wondering whether you think that that has much of an impact over a collective consciousness in different societies I guess sure look I I think it I think it's it does have an unconscious impact you know I think when you know when you read a story and it's three other people are killed etcetera in a way you don't care in a way something inside you because we are humans after all it something is a kind of affected and I know a lot of people who try and take new Sabbath's consciously say that's enough news I'm gonna stop for a while and report a different kind of state of mind so look I think we need to be careful with this sort of material it does have a huge impact on us we need to become more conscious consumers I don't necessarily believe that we need good news all the time you know they're people who go well because nalada news is bad and what we need a lot of good news I think what we need is the important news that will help us as individuals and as a nation collectively to flourish and sometimes that will mean that we have to hear some pretty dark news but sometimes it may mean that we also need isn't quite good news because that's as much part of national need as the need to hear the bad stuff so I think that's what should govern the balance of good and bad not a kind of desire to be more cheerful for the sake of it but really what governs it should be the needs of the individual audience members and the needs of the nation duty and there's a lot of people are leaving because they're hungry or thirsty or something should we should we start to draw things to close because I'll be out there and I ultimately as they're leaving for the moment of retail I don't want to bore them they want answers yeah I know the only way they're gonna get context okay will you turn to the in bigan book story I'm telling a couple more questions look why don't we take there are a couple of people have been waiting liable to cut him off from each of the top two floors okay then Alana's very kindly said he will sign copies of books he's happy to answer questions in that capacity and as I say you can buy those books from in big and bookstore in the foyer after the event we'll go to the very top and in the middle and then we'll call other night you know Alan since you mentioned Chomsky what is your take on the book that Chomsky wrote with Herman some time ago manufacturing consent and related to that what is your reading of the alternative media that's out there that's very different than the mass media look I think Chomsky is fundamentally mistaken in imagining that there is a giant conspiracy that surrounds the manufacture and dissemination of news I don't think that it's plausible that there is this kind of conspiracy as I say I think it would be nice if there was because you can untie a can Spira see more than you can untie what I think is going on which is an unconscious system of blind spots and biases which is which are operating not to protect corporate interests as Chomsky alleges but very often to protect weirder things like the ego of the journalist or the settled state of society as the journalist interprets it and somehow favors it so I think a lot of these biases are not as as kind of financially driven as we might say it's it's even trickier than that if it was just money we'd have a clearer luck we'd know who to go and get but we don't we can't trace it because it's in the minds of hundreds of actors who don't even know art even consciously aware of their blind spots so that would be my view I so want to follow up on that but we'll go to a question in the middle Here I am I'm a really big data nerd and I love the work of people like The Economist Justin Wolfers and the data analyst Nate Silver and what they're doing to use data to tell stories and what I'm really curious to know is how valuable do you think data is to draw people's attention to what's meaningful and what's happening around us and to give us that sense of scale you were talking about when you said there's you know 43 kinds of news stories in the world look I think the data can do some things but I'm suspicious of its ability to really properly motivate because at the end of the day we are emotional creatures and our most powerful sources of motivation come from our emotions anger fear compassion sympathy etc and it can be on a mass scale pretty hard to get that out of graphs you know of course it can be fascinating to reinterpret the world through data and all sorts of things come to light but if really really you're trying to in a democracy get a lot of people behind a story I think you'd be quite hard to operate merely through data so data is clearly part of the stories not negligible but I think it needs to be allied to other skills I don't think you can just change the world through data to Fanta see a very appealing fantasy you know philosophers love this fantasy in a way it's the idea that through pure numbers the truth you know as a Platonic ideal through pure numbers the truth will emerge and not sure it's that possible really ultimately so part of the story I think please join me in thanking a land of again thank you you

Channel: WheelerCentre

Views: 64,161

Rating: 4.8095236 out of 5

Keywords: Alain De Botton (Author), Ideas (Quotation Subject), Newspaper (Industry), News (TV Genre), Current Affairs (TV Genre), Media Studies (Field Of Study), Philosophy (Professional Field), Popular Culture (Literary School Or Movement), Books, Writers, The Wheeler Centre, Writing, Ideas, Philosophy, The News, News, he News: A User's Manual, Politics (TV Genre), Television (Invention), Entertainment, Reading, Technology (Industry), Library, Media, Celebrity (Media Genre), Michael Williams

Id: SNr-AoFLjok

Length: 76min 3sec (4563 seconds)

Published: Fri May 23 2014