.. >> and this is the feature of my nw book, which looks at views not from an industry point of view

as so many books do, but from an audience's point of view. if you like a piece of literary criticism of the news. i was challenged to write this because of an awareness of how little we are systematically educated into this business of looking at the news. i mean, when we're at school, someone will have a shut at telling us what pictures -- a shot at telling us what pictures do to us, someone will tell us a little about theater, literature, drama, poetry, but, of course, no one really educates us to the day like this. we get no guidance. and when we come to this, we're lost. what is this really doing? it's a new age. we're still one of the early generations to be coping with this stuff, right? and there is not systematic attention to what it's doing to our insides. you know, the promise, in the 8th century -- 18th century the promise of news was enormous.

the idea was if you have free information about the workings of government, about the people, about other peoples, about other countries, if you have a free flow of information, you will lead to an informed citizenry, there will be pressure on legislatures, and you will have a flour you shoulding country. flourishing country. enormous promise of what news was meant to be. i'm not sure it's necessarily worked out that way. it seems nowadays that if you want to try and keep a population confused, supine, unsure of how to grasp ask change the status -- and change the status quo, you've got two options. the first option is what you might call the north korean option. you throttle news. you stop anyone getting any information. that's one way to keep the population confused. but the other way, of course, is far slier, far cleverer, much better if you want to keep things as they are. you flood people with news. so much news that no one can work out what on earth was

happening last week. does anyone here remember what was on the news last week? of course you don't, no one does. because, very cleverly, it's not that we're kept in ignorance, it's that we are flood with information, so much information that we cannot hold on to the things that matter and, therefore, political agendas run into the fan constantly because there is no steady constituency for the very important challenges we face. the german philosopher hagel said that nations become modern when they replace this with the news, when people stop going to church, when they stop seeing religion as the touchstone of authority, the place that will tell us about right and wrong, the place that will create our sense of what matters, that will deliver our a feeling of what we should be aiming for if life. that is no longer, for many of us, the church. it is, of course, the thing that relaces it. in hagel's eyes, the news. the news repluses religion. it's -- replaces religion. it's a very key moment in

history. we're way past it now, i think, in the united states and u.k. and much of europe. and just as in the area of religion, there are firm believers, there are agnostics, and there are atheists. so, too, when it comes to the news. and so, too, if you start to ask questions. well, boy, you'll run into some accusations of heresy, as i've already done. very care canful what questions -- very careful of what questions you raise from the media. you will gatt orer from my tone that i'm more on the skeptical side of things. definitely a little skeptical. nevertheless, the news has an unparalleled power over us. you get a sense of this whenever anyone wants to start a revolution. you want to start a revolution? where do you drive the tanks? active question now and at all times really. where do you go? you don't drive the tanks to the homes of the novelists, the poets, the social sign cysts -- scientists. they're very important, but no one really cowers about them. you drive your tank to the news

hq. you always have done, you'll keep doing that because that is where a sense of reality is formed. that's what you need to control. the person who controls the news controls the minds of the population. it's been true for a while, it continues to be true. now, what i want to do tonight is take you through a number of areas where i feel the news presents us with challenges and feel with you towards a slightly better resolution. i'm an optimistic sort of guy. i think the news is not perfect as it is, i want to try and make it better. i want to think with you about how we might do that. okay, look, one of the things that anyone working in the news will immediately tell you is there's some very important issues out there in the world, and if you put them too prominently on the front page, your audience will chi die of boredom. the architecture of news is broken down. it used to be the case that the most important issues came first, and they would attract the biggest audience, and there might be some fluffy stuff at the bottom. that wouldn't necessarily take

up too much of anyone's time. the froth has come to the fore be, and nowadays if you really want a big audience, you put someone like this on. i mean, taylor always gets huge hits, particularly when she's wearing shorts. this drives serious people crazy. crazy. we're neglecting this for this. what is going on? have we become degenerates? well, it's a challenge. it's definitely a challenge. and if you're feeling gloomy and high-minded, you may take to the hills, and you may decide that we have entered an era of unparalleled decadence. i don't despair because i know, and i think back to the history of the renaissance. in the renaissance the catholic church had some really serious and important things to tell people. how to live according to the gospels of jesus christ, quite an arduous message, and they thought very hard about how to get that message across. and when they came to painting their very large advertising posters also known as altar pieces, they did some interesting things. they realized that it's no good if you've got some important truths to say to put them in the

hands of this fellow here. this perioded man, st -- bearded man, st. jerome, carrying a heavy book is just not that appealing a figure. i don't mean to single out anyone here, but guys with beards, heavy truths, are not an appealing sight really. [laughter] if you want to get your message across, you've got to go to the taylor swifts of the day. to put it crudely, we can put it crudely, sex sells. now, intelligent people when they hear that, they think, oh, it's just awful. sex is used to sell everything; flights to florida, chocolate, household goods. what kind of a civilization do we live in? look, we'll always be prone to feeling the assure of attractive people. it's not necessarily so bad that sex is used to sell things, but it is used to sell the wrong things, and this is the problem. now, the catholic church had one solution to this, and arguably, they got sex to be selling the right things. but i'm bringing this up because a challenge that anyone involved

in the news nowadays has to face is the collapse of architecture and the blurring of the important and the popular. these two with categories which for a generation really held steady, you know, what was important was popular. that is no longer the case. that architecture has broken down, and we need to face a up to that. and in a way, one of the most popular, so one of the most important goals nowadays is popularization. you know, what is popular sawtion? popularization is the capacity to take a complex and important idea and render it palatable to a wide audience. there is almost no more important skill in the newsroom now than that. but this is not a skill that is normally taught. it's assumed that that's what journalists know how to do. they don't necessarily always, which is why we get some of these tensions between the arctic melt and taylor's legs. now, i was saying to you that there was too much information, too many stories. the good news is that there are actually not that many stories out there. there's lots and lots of

incidents, but if you've actually boiled down what those incidents really mean, what their emotional core is, what their message is, it's very often the same story. in my book i say there are really 32 stories in the news, they just keep going browned and round and round -- round and round and round. of course, the news will never tell us this, everything is always new in the news. it won't tell us that something's already come round. so when there's a crisis in the ukraine, this is totally new. it's never happened before. of course, it did in 1789 and then again a few decades later. it keeps happening. but the news does not want to alert us because everything's always got to be new. so what we've got to do as the audience is get better at spotting archetypes because they reduce the number of phenomena and lead you to certain truths that hold together a wide variety of incidents and pick them clearer. -- and pick them clearer. let me show you something that looks like three stories but is

really only one story. this is one part of the stoirt, and this is another part of the story. it looks like lots of stories, but it's one story. and i'll tell you what it's about. it's really a story about someone very important doing a quite ordinary thing, and the sight of that ordinary activity in the hands of someone extraordinary produces an emotional charge in the audience which is very satisfying. so it's really the same structure of stories. there we are, there's a british member of the royal family, and he's playing with the car seat. and it's amazing because, my god, he's using a car seat, and yet he's going to be the king. that's very special, isn't it? and then this is taylor swift again, and she's buying letters. amazing. and this is a very important person who was born in a stable, and he could have been born in a palace, but, no, he's chose to -- it's the same story. so what we've got to do as consumers of news is become experts at archetypes. because that way we'll have a lot less news to read, and we'll

think there's a lot less out there. there is, actually, much less out there than we think. the sense that we're dehuged with there's so much, so much, this is simply the lazy thinking that the news industry wants to promote. it doesn't want to sharpen our sense of the eternal stories of which or the cyclical stories. okay. look, moving on, what are the promises of news? when news got downing in the mid, late 19th century, the promise of news was we'll find out about life far away, you know, over the hill, in another country. and that information will increase our feelings of empathy, sympathy, it will make a kind of brotherhood of man, and it will reduce warfare and peace will reign across the earth. that was the original, beautiful promise of what we now call foreign news or world news. but there's really bad news because last week 200 people died in the democratic repluck of congo -- republic of congo, and none of you care. you don't care at all.

you didn't even know about this probably. and the reason is not that you are monstrous, but it's the way in which the news has presented in this information to you. how could you possibly care about the existence of 200 people, or rather the death of 200 people whose existence you hadn't even suspected? you had to know someone was alive before their death can come to seem striking. we are all very empathetic, sympathetic creatures. we can see a performance of king leer, and we can be -- king lear and we can be crying over a guy who didn't even live. he died and didn't even live, and yet we're crying. and yet we can then here about the death -- hear about the death in the democratic republic of congo, and 20 minutes later we're fast asleep. what's going on? it's all to do with the way in which the information is presented to us. now, the news industry has basically, is basically working all the time with the data or, if you like, information-based model of how our minds work. in other words, they believe if

you collect important data that is accurate and you lay it before an audience, if it's important, it will sink into the hearts and minds of the audience. and that's why, you know, we can tell people that 200 people died here, a typhoon happened there, a landslide over here, and this important information will find an audience. the problem is it didn't. it repeatedly does not find an audience. we don't care. and the reason we don't care is that in order for something to start mattering to us, it has to enter our imaginations. and that requires the discipline that we might as well call art. art is the name of the discipline that we could, that is, has as its intention to try and get important ideas and truths into our minds in a way that it stays there. now, the art form that the news is most closely connected with is photojournalism. photojournalism, young, i'm a philosopher by training, and there's a lot of gloomy

philosophers out there complaining about all sorts of things, but the gloomiest constituency by far are photojournalists. i don't know if there's any here, but they are a very, very sad and depressed bunch. [laughter] the reason is everybody's forgotten about them and their contributions to humanity. and the reason is no one's paying for any of this. yes, there are photos everywhere in the news, don't get me wrong, but not good photos. what's a good photo when it comes to photojournalism? one could spend a year on this, but let me boil it down to a simple thing. it's got nothing to do for me with a color balance. what it's really got to do with is a photo that somehow advances your knowledge, right? it is not merely confirming something that you already knew perhaps through words. it is itself a bearer of new and original information. that, for me, is a good photograph. it is advancing knowledge in itself. not merely a tool of cooperation. i was thinking of this when i saw a photo essay by a pulitzer

prize winner called stephanie st. claire who went to the yemen and did a photorep taj on child marriage in yemen. now, we think we might know quite a lot about child marriages, but through these photographs you learn so much. i learned so much. for example, i learned that it's not actually child -- children who are getting married. these girl cans who are getting married are not children. if you look at their eyes, these are little old ladies. the trauma they go through ages them almost 40 years. extraordinary. similarly, the men. they're not really men either. they're little boys, they're lost. it's much more point whereabout, pathetic -- poignant, pathetic, confusing than we move thought. so this is a picture that is advancing your knowledge. and there's so many others like it. it's not just in the developing world. take a look, this is a bad photograph of your president. it's bad because it's a dead photo. it's not teaching you anything that you didn't know. it's not advancing your knowledge. this is a good photo. the reason it's a good photo is

that we're learning stuff. [laughter] now, we know that your esteemed president lies. all presidents have to lie in order to get elected. that's not news. did we know he could lie in order to please the son of a white house staffer by pretending to be shot by spider-man? that's new information. pete souza who posts his photos on the white house blog every week full of insights. that's what we need more of. but the argument has tended to be lost. if you go in the newsrooms, most newsrooms the argument about good photography is really on a knife edge. there are fewer and fewer people who understand that and who, therefore, want to pay for good photography. but anyway, i'm a great fan of the medium, and it pains me how little good photography's now, arguments for it are being made. look, something else i want to talk about. when we, when we're consumers of the news, something that happens to us, you guys seem very nice. i seem quite nice. on a good day i'm not -- you

guys are nice, and people out there are nice so generally as we go through the world, we'll assume people are generally quite friendly until we go to a news organization and say put it in the trade below the line. and you start reading the comments pages that are on -- [laughter] and ten you suddenly realize -- then you suddenly realize something frightening which is your fellow human beings are crazy. [laughter] they're passionately angry about everything, absolutely everything. [laughter] i took a, looked at an average article, this is a fellow who runs the national finances in britain, the chancellor of the excheck kerr, george osborne, a hated figure among the left, and there's a typical article about him in the guardian. there were 400 comments, most of them wanted to kill the man, put a pull low over his face, kick him. are we crazy? no. i think this is a version of keeping a journal. you know when you keep a journal, right? things are not going well, you've had a bad day.

you go up to your room, you pull out the journal, and you write down how it feels at that moment. so you say i've had enough, i'm going to kill myself. i hate everybody, right? you write, the tears are mixing with the uncle. i'm being a little autobiographical here. [laughter] you put the journal away, and it's very, very important that you do not tell anyone about this incident and that no one reads your journal because if they did, their view of you would be permanently lop lopsided. so it's very, very important. the problem is these comments are, basically, journal entries. but they're public, and this is a real problem because we have to trust one another. we have to love one another, we have to go out and do business one another, and that's hard when you think you're surrounded by psychopaths. so we need to take care. we have learned something that is really quite disturbing, and we're one of the first generations to face it, the first generation to face it. it's happening every day below the line. we need to take cower as we would with journals -- take care

as we would with journals. look, something else. this is a man who worked in the queen's cavalry for many years. a distinguished military career in the u.k. and this is his son who's 5, and he's got, he had a older daughter a couple of years older. and shortly after this photo was taken, he took his son and daughter and he put them in his car, and he stabbed them, and then he stabbed himself. and the car was found a few days later in a lay-by by a passing bird dog. the reason i pick out this picture is that it was the story that was most visited of any story two to years ago in the -- two years ago, the english language's most popular web site which is called the mail online can which none of you know about. and it received the maximum number of hits. what is it about the news that seems to mesmerize us with appalling stories?

it can seem as though we're rubber neckers, we're really the lowest of the low to take such interest in these things. i'm more optimistic about human nature. partly because with i think way back, and i'm thinking of aristotle. now, aristotle in his poetics analyzes the way in which stories of horror this which people murder each other, in which there's incest and fatal jealousy, rivalry, etc., how the grimmest possibilities of human kind are not necessarily degrading to watch and witness. indeed, if presented in the right way, they can themselves be an agent of civilization. so horror has a role to play in civilizing a people. that was the argument that you find in the poetics. and the reason why aristotle argues this is that he argues it in the plays of people like soft cleese or euripides. you find two emotions that are being arouseed in the spectator;

fear and pity. pity based on an awareness of how close you might be to undergoing some of the traumas and torment of the tragic hero, how every life is prone to catastrophe. that if we are pushed hard enough on our weakest spots, we, too, will collapse. if we haven't done anything catastrophic, we'll be victims of the furies of fate, yet it may come tomorrowment so these very, very cautionary messages are coded in tragedy and so we feel fear, and then we feel -- so we feel pity, and then we feel fear for ourselves based on an awareness of how close we are to the tragedy that we have witnessed, the kind of tragedy that we have witnessed. this is immensely sophisticated, and it is absolutely the material with which "the new york post," the mail online, any number of outlets every day are presenting us with this stuff. it's not low at all. as so often is the case -- and i argue this consistently in my book -- the news takes us to the

only of something -- edge of something deeply interesting. but it abandons us. there is no resolution of the emotions which the news has set in train which explains the background anxiety which the news constantly creates, because it doesn't tie things up, it doesn't resolve things. it presents the ingredients but doesn't do anything with them. look, another kind of news which is immensely popular is disaster news, right? so that was tragedy. before it was tragedy, this is disaster. in other words, things where nature or mechanical failure creates sudden disasters and car crash, brilliantly popular. if you're in the newsrooms and there's a car crash, you know this is going to bring in the advertisers and shoot up the ratings. people love it, especially when there's fog involved. but the thing that really is successful is air crashes. nothing beats a good plane crash. the wide-bodied airliners and it's an american airliner, many

dead, brilliant. what's going on, are we sick? no. we're looking for the meaning of life. in the middle ages, a standard piece of interior decoration was a skull. you would put a skull on your table or paint a skull and put it on the wall. what were you doing with that skull? you were trying to remind yourself of what was important in life. the thought of death has a very vital role to play in shaking us from our habits, from our assumptions, from the waste of time that we constantly engage with normally. the thought of death has a role the play in clearing up what life might be about for us. and that's why it's very important. nowadays we don't put skulls on the desk, but we do this, right? we look at these things. and i think we're trying to get back in touch with some of the emotions that the skull is good at eliciting. but again, let's come back to this point, the news doesn't do this for us. it doesn't tie up. it presents us with a goolish event, it doesn't tell us the one thing we could draw from the event. so it's very unresolved.

we're constantly being shown unresolved things, and our emotions are extremely unresolved and perturbed. ultimately, the news spends its time making us frightened, frightened offering. the one thing it never tells us is, it's okay, you will survive. we're afraid of bird flu, swine flu, ufos, spies, etc. there's always something new to be terrified about. and, you know, the very basic point is the news picks out the anomalous events, the murders, the disasters, the tragedies, right? and because we're looking at the news all the time, an anomalous event becomes the normal, right? it becomes the norm. and that explains why when your car breaks down on a saturday night somewhere in a remote place and you've got to go and seek help from a stranger, you know what's going to happen. you're going to talk to a stranger, and today will chop you up into small pieces and put you in the trunk. [laughter] and the reason you know this is

you are a consumer of the news, and, therefore, everybody is a murderer or a crazy guy. and that's what we know. and, of course, they're not. and then we come to the stunning realization, they were quite nice. [laughter] of course they were quite nice. everybody's quite nice. apart from 1%, but that's the normal, that's the people we hear about all the time. so we have a fundamentally distorted picture of the united states, right? what is the united states? a country of crazies where everybody's killing everybody else. that's what we know in europe because we've read the papers. [laughter] so in other words, we are getting, i mean, it is in the power of the news to give us that feeling which is so important which is what kind of country do i live in, right? most of to us, we only have a very narrow circle of friends, acquaintances, work colleagues, right? who are helping to give us a face-to-face sense of what it means to live in the united states now. most of our information about what it means to live in this country now is fed to us by the

news. so we have surrendered a vital thing to the news, the news machine which is -- [inaudible] and that's a striking surrender. and, of course, the picture that comes back is deeply, deeply worrying. and, well, there's one area of hope, and that concerns -- the news is, it's very pessimistic and dark in many areas apart from the area of medical science. follow the news. the news is the project incentive of the en-- progeny of the enlightenment and life science which got going at the same time. the news is constantly bringing us fantastic news from those guys at mit and other research laboratories, johns hopkins, and lots of new developments that if you have an aspirin every night, you won't have a stroke or the you eat walnut, you won't get alzheimer's. or if you wear a special sock, you won't die young. whatever it is, there's always some new discovery. and the bad news, guys, is that we're going to die. of course we're going to die, and we're not going to die in some conflagration when an

airline crashes, we're going to die an ordinary death. our octogenarian hearts will give out, and that's the way it is for ordinary people. but the news doesn't reconcile this. it's catapulting us from terror and hope for eternal life. and there's always, you know, swinging between hope and despair. this is in politics, of course. this guy is going to save everything and, no, he's a most useless guy. hope and fury constantly, the constant things that drive the news machine. it's very, very exhausting. at least the guys who the news replaced broke the bad news to us gently. i mean, they said, look, you know, it's going to come to an end, it's very sad, get ready for it, you know, think about it a lot. you know, they were gentle. i speak to you as a secular jew. but, you know, they were gentle with this stuff. but the news doesn't do us this service. catapults us between hope and despair constantly. look, something else the news drives us crazy with, and that

is celeb throughs -- celebrities. just had the oscars. if you talk to intelligent, sensible people what's wrong with the world, they'll say, well, we live in a celebrity culture, don't we? influencing the young in horrible ways, very easy to despair. is that really the case? yeah, they're everywhere. their doing this kind of thing. ask you despair. so serious people think, okay, celebrity news is terrible. now, my line of celebrity news is a bit different. i think that it's very, very important for a country to have celebrities, okay? celebrities are vital in terms of guiding the nation, enforcing morals and manners, guiding people as to how to behave, right? the thing is, every society has had celebrities or role models. a role model is very important. you cannot have a society without role models. the problem is, there's a twofold problem. i think the problem starts at the top of society, right? very serious people don't believe in celebrities because

they have an individualistic, self-created sense. me? i would not be guided by a celebrity. i don't have role model, i just do it myself. that's the kind of standard, elite view. and then, of course, the business of anointing celebrities passes on to the lowest common denominator, and that's where we get our friend here. so it's very important not to do away with celebrity, but to get the right sort of celebrity, right? this is what we need. we need a right sort of celebrity. if we get better celebrities, the nation will go better. but because serious people don't believe in the job of celebrity, they don't even see it as a need. let me show you how things might go a little bit. recently an actress called natalie portman took her child to the park. and that's a very, very useful, indeed, because those of you who have had children, it's really boring to go to the park with a child. so boring. [laughter] but you know it's good. and, you know, you do it and -- okay, goes on and on. very, very good. it's very nice. as you're taking your child to

the park to think, well, natalie was there. she was there a couple of weeks ago with her kid. i'm kind of doing what a hollywood actress is doing, kind of cool. the light of glamour has momentarily shown on an ordinary moment of everyday life. that's important because we need glam or. it's not wad thing. we need things to be glamorous. so here's st. natalie taking her kid to the park. and these guys knew as well, they understood that a well functioning society needs role models. we're very confused about this. we need to clear up and get a little more optimistic. it could go better than it's going to now. something else the news because to us, and it tends -- does to us and it tends to do it on the weekend. on the weekend it's time for the slower bits of news, the blogs, etc. and sometimes, you know, we'll go out and go and buy the sunday paper. big, fat thing, and we'll sit down on the sofa, and the birds are chirping outside.

in the olden days sometimes on the news they say viewers beware, there's some visually, you know, strobe lighting coming up, so beware of strobe lighting. there should be these kinds of warnings over the sunday papers. and what they should be flashing is envy. envy alert, right? but they don't because the news very frequently does not warn us. what do i mean by envy alert? we live in a very mobile, merit accuratic, on a good day, societies where people are capable of unbelievable transformations from their originnings. because it doesn't happen very often, but it does happen enough to not enable us to sleep that well at night. and there are stories all the time out there of people who used to be this and have now become that. people who used to be, you know, a boring accountant and they then decided to, i don't know, make a movie, or they were a failing movie star, and they set up some hotels. they had a garage and then they, you know, etc. and these story ises are

constantly all around, and they drive us nuts, nuts, because all the time we're will on a sunday morning, and we're thinking, i am a loser because i have not done anything with my life. and this i goo on the -- this guy on the screen, his name is elon musk. the real problem is that he's 46. now, for a long time it doesn't matter how old -- you know, when you're younger it doesn't matter how old people are because you always think, well, i've got some time. but the problem is i'm 44 now, and elon musk is 46. and the problem is he started ebay or something, and then he had pais pga, and he's worth $17 billion, and then he had tesla, and now he wants to send men to the moon. no mars. and this is his wife. [laughter] so it's going swimmingly for him. i'm so happy for him, but no, i'm not. i'm going insane with bitterness and jealousy and craziness. and when my partner says, is everything okay? yes, of course it is! and i'm going crazy. and at lunch i don't really want to communicate. and it's all very fraught. and the truth i can't quite face

is i'm jealous of elon musk. and the article was really nice. it was showing us elon musk's new home, and it was showing us how he's recently started to cook pasta himself. [laughter] sweet, nice things. delightly little detail. -- delightful little detail. we need help with envy. [laughter] it is rife. the news and envy are bound together like ivy around a statue. the two are so embedded. we need help. now, look, i'm not down on envy, although society tends to be because we still have a judeo-christian background that says envy is bad. envy's not bad, it's just terribly confused. envy is a signal, a guide to something that you need to advance your life, okay? but it's confused. it's a foggy thing. we need to get better at interpreting our envy. in every envious attack, i think most of us have that four or five times a day, maybe more. we need to keep an envy diary where we write down each attack and study it later. what were its themes?

it's a huge opportunity for learning. every envious attack is an opportunity for learning and sharpening it, because it's diffuse. if i start to analyze, okay, i'm envious of elon musk and analyze that. do i want to start the next paypal? actually, not really. do i want to send men to mars? am i interested in electric cars? is this lady so special? no. actually, that's not the point. but if i really analyze it, i really realize that what i envy this man is his courage because again and again and again he came up with these ideas that sounded crazy, and no one believed him for ten years, and he stuck with it. everyone telling him you're crazy, you're an idiot, you're wasting your money. he stuck with it, and the bet paid off. so he's a saint, a sudden vision of courage. and that's very interesting. and that's what i'm after in him. so, look, i went on too long, but really what this is all about is getting better at focusing on envy, realizing that the news does this to us constantly, hourly, getting

better at using it. now, look, something else. serious news organizations when they're looking at unserious news organizations tend to characterize the unserious news organizations as biased, right? so what's the most biased news source in the united states? everybody knows fox news, a bad source of news, and no one in brooklyn looks at fox news. it's horrible. [laughter] very, very bad. so what do we like? what kind of news do we like as sophisticated people in brooklyn? we like npr, and we like, you know, these guys as well. really chic, and we go across the pond, and we like the bbc. it's so fair and balanced and gentle voices, etc. [laughter] and the bbc is taken very, very seriously. and they are not biased at all. and the reason why they're not is they fundamentally believe that you, the audience, it's your job to make up your mind. they're not going to spoon feed you things. they're going to present you with the information, lay it before you, and you will decide

what's right and wrong. and they don't want to influence you one way or the other, so every argument is balanced. so in the bbc, if you've got a program about genital mutilation, they'll find somebody who's against it and find someone who's for it. a feature onside, someone who's pro-genocide and anti-genocide, just to get both sides of the story. [laughter] they only came down off the fence once in the last 40 year, and that was apartheid. after a lot of soul-searching, they decided apartheid was bad, and they were going to say it was bad. since then, on the one hand, on the other hand. sensible. this is disastrous! how do you mean? you've got the really, really, serious, clever news organizations, and they're not telling us what to think. why? because they think telling people what to think is very wad because it's -- very bad because it's not nice. so we've got the really nice organizations having all these qualms we can't tell anyone what to think, it's completely crazy. it's also patronizing.

let's face it, most of us are so good, and we've been good since we were 3 or 4 years old at pucking up on a biased source of information. when your parents would tell you you've got to eat that steak because it's good for you, that fish, and you go, no, no, i'm not going to eat that. we are very good at resisting stories we don't like, right? we are experts in battling back bias. the bwc and -- bbc and npr don't need to worry. what we desperately need help with is what do we think? what do i think about this or that? president obama's weighing up his mind, you know, to approve of a pipeline that's going to run from the tar sands of canada down to the gulf of mexico, but what should i think about this? is it a good thing, a bad thing? i don't know. we need help, right? but the serious news organizations afraid of giving us help in case they indoctrinate us. they need to get a little sharper in their questions and a little bit more aggressive in their search for the truth.

because otherwise, right, this is going to come to the fore in economic news, right? now, in economic news the really powerful news organizations, they are unbelievably limited in the kinds of questions that they dare ask of reality. interest rates a little high or, a little lower, you know? unemployment a little bit more, this, that and the other. and meanwhile, the population at large is going insane and crazy, and every now and ten you get an explosion, right? be people can't take it anymore. and they start waiving play cards around, and the terrible problem with this is that this is the result of news, right? was this is the -- because this is the result of people who have been driven crazy with the indignity of the current economic situation. they're furious with. they want to do something, and they have no idea other than simply say let's sort it out. and that's, unfortunately, a really bad place to be in because the police show up a i few weeks later with water cannons, and off it goes, and it

dies. you need in order to change the world not just passion, but good ideas. and this economic news has a huge role to play in not providing us with the ideas that are going to get these guys to have a fair chance at changing something. so we've got a fatal weakness partly because of a curious institutional silence or a kind of pedagogical inhibition at the very top in the most serious news organizations. and this is, you know, as i say, pretty fatal. i mean, it's amazing. when we're in the city, you know, "the new york times" -- lovely, you know, wonderful institution, all the news that's fit to print. really? all the news? you've really checked it out, have you? all the news, you've watched all the news that's fit to print and you've printedded it? that's marvelous. it's 2006, anything going on in the banks? anything at all? anything strange about their capital reserves and -- no, it's fine. okay, fine, really. all the news that's fit to print.

oh, yeah, absolutely. nonsense. it's one of the most asinine lines ever. it is dangerous not just for "the new york times," but for humanity because, because if you have a world in which people expect that esteemed organizations like the bbc or the new york times will have worked out real estate, you're in danger -- out reality, you're in danger. you cop instantly have to operate with the view that these guys don't know very much. but, oh, my god, they make such a big deal that we know, and we the mix, we think, well, they must know. it's fine, they must know. they don't know. they've repeatedly shown us they don't know. they know some thing, but they don't know everything. at the end of the day it's not the news, it's some news masquerading as the news. we can't expect anyone else to get out there and harvest all the important be sources of information and sum my dump it in our -- simply dump it in our lap. we condition. we have to think for ourselves. we have to keep our wits about us. oddly and strangely, the news plays a role in rendering our

minds sop riffic. and repeatedly had if a recent american history catastrophic results. people say, oh, yeah, but nowadays, you know, everybody can start a twitter account, so surely i news just filters through. oh, yeah, really? with a audience with a twitter account has come up with a problem. there is still is such a thing as mass media, and i think the mass media very cleverly uses things like the existence of twitter and facebook to say, well, come on, a democrat, and everyone can do it, and it's not really us, and don't blame us. you can be a journalist too, etc. well, no, there is still such a thing as a news agenda. that hasn't gone away. and there is still a monothism around a lot of issues. and this leads to catastrophic errors. one of the real causes for error is that the news keeps expecting that when there are bad things in the world, they are the result of some bad guys, right? and those bad guys can be

pursued and locked up, and then the bad has gone away. if you open the up the hearts of most journalists, you will see inscribed the word watergate. journalists still nowadays are in love with the watergate paradigm k. what is it? the watergate paradigm is there's some bad stuff out there that is a secret, no one knows about it. it's behind a safe, it's in a computer, and the journalist who's kind of like james bond will go out there and get the secret, and through the secret will reveal it to the world and bring down the nasty, powerful people. okay? unfortunately, most of the things that are wrong with our world do not follow the watergate paradigm in any shape or form. for a 125r9, most things that are wrong with the world are public. we know them already. you don't need to go and break a code or get edward snowden to go inside a commuter, it's out there, but we're not looking at it. in other words, the problems are

systemic, they're not to do with rotten apples. of course, there's the odd rotten apple, but that's not really the dominant thing. the news so frequently doesn't have the right filter. look, moving on just a very, very quick, obvious point. the news is based on the idea that what is new is important. right? and the newer it is, the more important it might be which is why we need to keep checking the news. so there might be something new that's happened that is very important, and it might have happened since the last bulletin. so we need to keep checking the news to keep finding the important things that are going on in humanity. it's also very apparent, i hardly need to mention it, the very many things that have happened in humanity happened a long, long time ago. they have nothing to do with the last fife be minutes since the last bulletin. there's a lot of important stuff that is old, but the news can't see it because the news is committed to the idea that what is important is new. so if we keep following the narrative of the news, we will miss an awful lot out. you know, one of the most important books out there at the

moment was written by plato, and it's called the republic, okay? it doesn't feature only bestsellers, it's been around for a long time. if you put it on the nightly news and said greek guy writes a fascinating book, it can't be news for most people. right? it would be news, but it wouldn't be new. it would be news in the sense that it was important, but it would not be new, so the news can't see it, it can't feel it. so we need to be so aware of this because it's so easy to accept the narratives which we're fed. look, it's also very, very important that wi-fi is never installed on airplanes because airplanes represent one of the few times i nowadays where we can be left alone to think for ourselves, to take in the news from ourselves. we are unbelievable generators of important news. right? which we don't listen, because we use the news from the ukraine to stifle the news from within. and the thing about news from within is it's quite wrapped up with anxieties and ambivalence and doubt, but it's the richest sources of information. and those who get the news out

from themselves are giving humanity real lessons. but there have been few people in humanity who have properly picked up on the news from themselves. part of the reason has to do with prestige. if you say to somebody, somebody says, you know, what are you doing at the moment? i'm reading the news. ah, fine. that's very serious, carry on. read the news. someone says, what are you doing? well, i'm kind of thinking about when i was about 12 and remember looking at the sky and wondering about how -- come on, go do the washing up. [laughter] because that's not serious, right? so the news is, unfortunately, prestigious. and it often doesn't deserve that prestige because it misses so much. it misses guys like this. there's lots of things going on out there that the news can't pick up. it's not on its frequency. so keep looking out for this and others. if i had to sum up my book, that's kind of what it's about. [laughter] but, look, lets me finish with one last thing. i'm a philosopher by training, and philosophers are self-important people who

believe they've got the truth in their hands. the problem is that no one's listening ever to philosophers. the average work of act dem you can philosophy, a present of friend of mine told me the other day, sells 30copys. meanwhile, the mail online every day gets 40 million people who go look at it. 40 million people checking out the mail online. 300 people checking out the truth. that's kind of depressing or perplexing. what do we do about that? well, this struck me one insomniac night a few months ago. i thought, yeah, what about this? and i thought, okay, what happens if you've got a bunch of philosophers, and you got them to rewrite the mail online, okay? so you took exactly the same stories about miley cyrus and taylor swift and, you know, this divorce and murder, etc., and you kept all the same stories, kept all the same pictures, but you simply got this philosopher to we write -- rewrite it with

complexity, truth, justice, poetry, all these things. what would that be like? anyway, we came up with the philosopher's mail, the only news outlet run entirely by philosophers. we have quite a lot of fun doing it. you can look at it, it's on the web, philosophers'mail.com, i'm not joking, it really exists. check it out. it's a practical application of many of the ideas that i've been talking to you about today. i'm always a guy who likes to write books and do other things as well, because ultimately what i'm interested in doing is trying to get the world to grow a bit better. we're up against a challenge with this thing we call news. it really is a big beast, and i think that we can get it better. i think future generations -- we're still learning how to handle this stuff, and i'm optimistic. we've just got to keep our wits about us. look, i'm going to stop it there, we've got some time for questions, so please come back at me with thoughts and ideas, and thank you so much for listening. [applause]

thank you. just stuck up your hand if you've got a thought. yeah. >> [inaudible] >> the news get better if it's for profit? >> [inaudible] >> yeah. >> [inaudible] >> yeah. look, i'm not an expert in this. i was at google today and had an interesting conversation. look, i think that idea that people don't want to pay for news is wrong. they do want to pay for news. they'd be quite happy to pay for news, they just don't want to get their credit card out and subscribe for a year. i mean, it sounds banal, but that is the crisis of journalism. there is demand for the stuff that journalists produce, and people would be willing to pay for it, they just don't want the hassle of paying it.

so the fate of journalism as a paid-for institution really depends on micropayments. once we crack micropayments, and it's slightly baffling, even baffling to the guys at google why micropayments have taken so long to crack. once you have to pay a cent to read an article, you'll pay a credibility, because who cares? that will completely change how news organizations can make money. at the moment people tell you anyone can start a news organization. yeah, but very few make money from it. a lot of people -- once people can make enough to keep going, that'll fundamentally change our democracy. i think we've too often been concerned just with the platform, and all the arguments are about, well, we've got the platform now, anyone can make this. you need to build and monetize it, and it is coming because the audience is not fundamentally resistant to it. others. >> are we do have mics in the

aisles coming, and in a mike doesn't get there, if you could remeet the question, that would be -- repeat the question, that would be great. >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> how is it possible -- i guess, look, i'm, this is something that philosophers sometimes work with. i'm utopian. what i mean by that is i'm always trying to think, okay, what is the ideal of this version of this thing that is currently only half of what it might be or a quarter? i'm always thinking what is, as it were, the ultimate version, the platonic version of this thing called the newspaper, of this thing called the museum, of this thing called, you know, the school, etc. i'm -- that's what gets me going. and so in a way i'm optimistic

because there is, there are very often no theoretical reasons why things couldn't get apartment. the problems are to do with inertia, to do with the right people meeting people. i mean, i don't know -- i've met a number of people at the top of organizations that kind of, the big guys. and then the few times i've met these big guys, i've been struck by something. they are, actually, quite evil and doing evil things, but not out of some entrenched view. they're doing so partly out of, you know, they hadn't thought there might be other ways, they're lacking inspiration. think of the way the very wealthy, what they co-- do with their money. oh, my god, i'm going to say something shocking. they accumulate all the money and at the end of the life, they give it to the opera or to the museum. now, my i immediate view is, guys, could you try and have a good life rather than try and make money morally rather than

accumulate money any which way and then give it to the arts, right? because the arts is all about morality and ethics and truth. and let's not, you know, make that all shiny at the end of your life by butting a -- by putting a pile of money at its foot. try and lift the values that art is only suggesting. so, look, i am an optimist. i think, yeah, look, there's -- you've got to be an of the optimist. i mean, the bleakness is all too obvious. i mean, there's so many good reasons to just despair and kill yourself. so i think to keep going -- [laughter] to keep going is just, a challenge. it's interesting. yeah, it's a bet against the facts really probably. [laughter] okay, thoughts. other thoughts. yeah. go for it. >> oh, hi. i was wondering in your discussion about news organizations being remiss to sort of tell us how to think or showing two sides of things but really stopping short of getting us to the point where we need to

be, what was your opinion of people like jon stewart and stephen colbert in that equation? >> well, see, it's really interesting because they are, of course, humorists. they're using humor. and humor is an art form. humor is another layer superimposed upon raw information. it may not look like it because you might think, oh, it's just a joke. there's a huge amount of distillation and interpretation goes into making a joke, right? so in a sense you're saying in order for information to become powerful, it needs to become subject to the processes of art. well, any news organization that is using humor like that has, is precisely subject to the processes of art. you could do it through tragedy. you could have a soft clean version of "the new york post." but, you know, the colbert version is the humorous take. but the reason why it often -- people say, you know, it's so striking, you know? i saw jon stewart, and he kind

of says truths that you don't hear on cnn, and people are a little bit surprised. it's a joke, and yet it's kind of more true than the truth. and you want to go, no, no, guys, you've got it wrong here. it's not that, you know, the joke is the lie, the joke is a properly interpreted, worked-through, edited version of the to truth. and the truth that cnn serves up is merely a kind of, you know, edited, undie jested, factually, neutrally, you know, free-floating bit of information that we dismiss because our souls can't use it, to be pretentious. so, yeah, so keep going. those guys on those shows are doing a fantastic job, yeah. okay. other thoughts? yeah. >> [inaudible] >> about optimism. i read somewhere the other data we're actually in a point where

we're probably better off than we have been as a society than for hundreds of years and that it's just in the nature of who we are that we're constantly saying that society's about to fall, and it's all going to the dogs, and, you know, we've got all these bad role models. but it's really just that's what they've been saying for the last 300 years. and it just plays into the whole, you know, it's the end of the world is coming, kind of thing. >> yeah. you know, it's interesting because some people do say the news is always bad. there's so much bad news. why are we hearing all this bad news? why not have good news? in fact, recently in the u.k. occasionally people want to start you up a new news outlet t will give you the good news. there was, i don't know, a horse racing festival, or there's a new kind of school bus produced by pedal power. a lot of nice, good stories, stories to feel cheerful about. i don't know about you, but often when you read those things you're kind of left thinking -- because you feel envious.

look, i think, you know, what decides what is a news item? the kind of knee jerk, i mean, it's surprising, if you go to the top of newsrooms, the answers to this question are still so vague, you know? i was, i was with a british newspaper and, my goodness, they hadn't really worked it through. the dominant interpretation was we're here to hold the powerful to account. that's our job, we hold the powerful to account. okay, anything else you're doing? no, powerful to account. [laughter] sounds very serious. sounds, you know, great. but that's not good enough. look, my view of what the news should do, this is my -- i say it in the book at great length, but my view of what the news should do is it should gather information that is required by the individual and the state to flourish. not happy, happy, flourish. to properly develop. that may sometimes involve some really, really dark news. and it may sometimes involve

hearing about, you know, that school bus. but it just depends on your ultimate sense of where's it leading the individual in the nation. that should decide. so i think to try and distinguish between good news and bad news, some bad news is very good, and some good news drives us crazy. so, you know, it's -- i wouldn't necessarily say because it's not very cheerful, it's got no use. i think some very dark truths are very important. so i'm not sure if i've answered your question, but anyway. sorry. [laughter] yeah. >> i was going to ask in our -- [inaudible] >> look, i mean, yeah, so why does the news keep bashing people? i think because it's got an idea. you know, the watergate paradigm

run completely amok. so that everyone in power -- because the news hahas got this idea that it's holding the powerful to account, right? it used to be the president. i've got to try and check what the president's doing. now it's like the schoolteacher. anyone who's in any position of authority may have to be inspected and found wanting. and i think this is a kind of tuck, a neurosis of fundamental misunderstanding of what it means for good to occur in the nation. i mean, we need authority, and we need at points to respect authority. and this sounds really weird. oh, how do you mean respect -- sounds like fascism. no. in order to have a functioning system, you can't have everybody telling you who are you to tell he that? police officer, who are you to tell me that? doctor, that may be your view, but i've googled in the. [laughter] here comes another view. so this is a mass psychosis. partly brought on by this watergate paradigm run wild. so we need to rediscover that

holding the powerful to account we've got to get a little bit more nuanced. look, it's like meanness, right? i mean, no papers are as mean as british papers, but some papers -- you guys are catching up actually. [laughter] you guys have got some news outlets now that really would give our guise a run for their money. and -- our guys a run for their money. and the idea is you've got to be mean about people because you want to get to the truth, and the truth is only discover bl by being mean, so the nastier you are, closer you are to the truth. that's not true. ..

>> there are so many intellectual errors, the things that you have to take and we need to kind of work through this. >> i work at "the new york times." >> brilliant. thank you very much. >> thank you.

>> i have traveled to many places in the world and the way that you present this is very much with many countries that are working and living in the dictatorship style process with this information. and the second one, which is a little bit lighter is about the news consumer and some people don't read. there information can be limited. and we tell this news.

>> i don't think there's anything wrong with news with stories. part of the problem is because we are so impatient with the latest development in many stories are part of this it is fantastic. and he knew how to tell a story is a story and narrative fiction to narrative nonfiction. and it is tremendously valuable because it is so deep area and there have been very few people -- very few people who are even interested in that example and it's still a real minority. so that is what i would say.

so as for foreign lands, we have a friend of mine lived under communism and the problem living here is the kind of don't know that some of it is true and some of it is not. it does wonderful things everyday and it leaves out a lot of things. and in a way it is and when you trust someone a little too much you are in danger. so there's lots to be grateful for there. don't get me wrong. absolutely. humans have worked very hard to achieve this.

and we can do better especially when we are getting the news that we really dizzy deserve thanks so much. we are getting the news that we really deserve. thank you. [applause] >> there are books for sale in the lobby and i encourage you to pick up a copy. i will see you downstairs. [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching booktv, nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. >> now from the 2014 conservative political action

conference, americans and democracy, and the author argues that democracy is not what we think it is cracked up to be and we should get rid of it. >> the people have spoken, and this newest book. the case against democracy. where the people wrong about? >> they are wrong about everything at some point. so that is a problem. which is okay, we are all wrong about a lot of things, but more importantly when we are wrong we coerce others to have to act a certain way or upset social norms. what we do, democracy becomes a problem. >> in what way? >> we are undermining people's freedom because of coercion and democracy is essentially the tyranny of the majority. so the larger government grows, the more it intrudes on our everyday lives and our decisions and the more democracy matters and the more that we need to stop i