The missing deadline
by Peter Preston Posted Thu, Sep 1 2005
There's another London terrorist alert in full swing as I write this article. Twenty-four-hour cable news is blaring in the next office, bringing news that Whitehall has been closed to traffic. A colleague pops her head around the door. “Whitehall's closed.” No, wait a moment. The same head appears at the door. “They've reopened Whitehall,” she says. And I sigh, wistfully, for the good old days when deadlines mattered.
Deadlines, they were a very movable feast. But at least they gave working days some form and discipline. You needed to pause and summon your thoughts when they came around; you needed to think.
It isn't quite like that any longer. When — as more and more frequently happens — I write for a website, there are no constraints on length or time. Just send as much as you can, pronto, and keep updating through the evening. Publication is a finger on a keyboard tapping continuously, not an industrial process. Cable TV seems exactly the same, using tongues not fingers.
In many ways you could call that progress the wonder of instantaneous communication. When bombs go off the reader rush to the Internet is palpable. Tell us what's happening now, this second! And TV has developed a habit of signaling “very important developments” by breaking into existing programming with minute-by-minute coverage. The wonder of the mobile phone allows ordinary members of the public who witness disaster to call on the spot with eyewitness reports. The additional wonder of the mobile is a shower of pictures of bomb debris, screaming victims or general mayhem. Let Joe Public be your guide.
What is there to worry about here? Very little, at least in theory. If journalists aren't entirely trusted by their readers or viewers — a constant, dreary refrain — then turning those readers or viewers into surrogate journalists for a day may be a wonderful antidote. We always said we wanted to be ordinary with no special privileges or status. Now we're exactly that. Trust is all around, and the chance of finding a “reporter” at hand when news breaks is hugely increased. More must mean better in every way.
But then, in mid-flow, there is a glitch. Twenty-four-hour TV executives make it fiercely clear that they don't put material on screen without careful checking. The journalism filter still exists. Yet if you step back for a second and examine content not form, you know there's a hole in that argument. The trouble with continuous news is that it can't separate the gold from the dross. It is as good or as bad as the last witness to flit across the screen, the last press release from some authority or other, the last swiftly shredded message.
Nothing I'm saying here diminishes the job that instant TV or instant Internet players do when a crisis happens. They're part of our reaction to it, an inescapable and necessary resource. However, they can't do cool analysis, context or expert assessment. They're not hot on meaning among a babble of voices. Their job is to tell you what went on, or what seemed to be going on till the smoke cleared. They can't “stand by” their reports because such reports, in human life and human confusion, are liable to change. They can't raise deeper questions because deep down they just have to keep moving along.
And there are stickier issues here, too. Do readers truly trust the reports and pictures that other readers phone in because they're first hand and unmediated, or do they blame the medium when the message isn't right? Where, from 9/11 on, is rationality in the chaos of bombs and confusion?
The lack of a deadline, in short, also involves a lack of anything much below the surface; a relentless chase after some pack rather than a search for meaning or point. Yet there's a mortal deficiency hidden in this equation, one almost eerily designed to go with terrorism coverage. What, after all, are the terrorists trying to do? To scare, alarm, send shock waves coursing through society. They take the normal patterns of life and seek to disrupt them. They want us to lose our bearings. And there, precisely, is the difficulty with responding on the double, hour after hour, for that, in turn, is normality tossed away in the heat of the moment.
Once the rush of early events subsides, it's clearly important to maintain momentum. Events seem to pile on top of each other. Who needs calm when frenzy is so much more compulsive?
There's a change in behavior here, one we have to start to come to grips with. What, after all, is freedom but the time and space to think? Where are still, small voices in the melee? I used to curse when the clock came around; when the thinking stopped and decisions had to be made. But better the curse of the deadline than the curse of the endless treadmill.
Peter Preston
Global Journalist columnist Peter Preston is editorial director of the Guardian Media Group and was the chairman of IPI from 1995 to 1997.