ROD DREHER posted on X this week: “Gosh, I don’t understand why war studies Prof. David Betz thinks that the UK could be heading towards civil war. /sarc”. This was his response to someone in The Daily Telegraph outraged that Kneecap (a popular music combo, m’lud) had urged their audience, during a concert in November 2023, to “kill your MP”, and yet were not to be prosecuted for it, while Lucy Connolly, who tweeted an incitement to racial hatred in the middle of a race riot, remains in prison.
Dreher continued: “Glastonbury last weekend became a condensed symbol for the malice and madness of the UK Left. If you doubt the thesis about British civil war, imagine how ideologically berserk you have to be to cheer for these scum, & endorse their lies.”
This is such an extreme example of a general phenomenon that it is worth taking seriously. I don’t mean here the obvious point that he illustrates — if unwittingly — that tribalism is always the fault of those evil swine on the other side. There is a more subtle point about context here. The reason that Lucy Connolly ought to have been jailed — if not for 31 months — is that she tweeted her incitement to 9000 followers, and it was viewed 310,000 times, at a moment when some of them were about to try to burn down an asylum-seekers’ hostel, as she suggested they do. Context and timing make all the difference. If she’d put it out today, it would have been normal for X.
Dreher wrote some years ago: “Believe me when I say I believe [the Rolling Stones] are the greatest rock and roll band of all time. No band has ever matched the successive greatness of ‘Beggars Banquet,’ ‘Let It Bleed,’ ‘Exile on Main Street,’ and ‘Sticky Fingers.’”
Presumably he has danced to these records, in which Sir Michael Jagger sings “Summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the streets. . . I shout and scream, I kill the King, I rail at all his servants”; and, on the live version of “Stray Cat Blues”, he urges a 13-year-old girl up to his dressing room, along with her friend “who’s wilder than you . . . if she’s so wild, then she can join in too”.
But no one would ever call Rod Dreher ideologically berserk. Besides, he might plausibly defend his enjoyment by saying that everyone knows the Stones’ lyrics were just drug-crazed posturing, and no one took the play-acting seriously. It was all only ever rock ’n’ roll. To pretend otherwise is to take things grotesquely out of context.
This is fair enough, but it is also where the argument gets fun, because the whole business of news journalism requires us to take things out of context and bring them into another one. It is the context that they are brought into that determines their news value. A news judgement is not about whether some fact or event is interesting in itself, but about how the facts will look in their new context, which is composed of the stories that the readers already are agreed on.
That’s not all there is to journalism, of course. There is the kind that shuns news or prefers to make sense of the original context in which things newsworthy to us appear normal to them. “How could anyone possibly be so stupid?” doesn’t have to be a rhetorical question. It can enlarge the ways in which we understand the world.
I used to think of journalism as a kind of arbitrage of facts: I would find out something at a particular time and place, which would be worth more later on to a different audience. This is obviously true of financial news, and — because people are emotionally invested — true about sporting news as well. But it turns out that facts are like national currencies. They are worth anything only in certain places and at certain times.
THE Telegraph’s report of the Rt Revd Justin Welby at the Cambridge Union was news only to those readers who had not seen the story in the Church Times (News, 27 June). Lifting stories from the trade papers is a traditional piece of journalistic arbitrage, and I’m not knocking it. But, because those readers have already been told that Bishop Welby is a Bad Man, the story had to contain several paragraphs from an unnamed survivor accusing him of “trying to rehabilitate his reputation”, because he had said — with irrefutable truth — that Makin had wrongly accused him. Give a dog a bad name and hang him.
