IN THE wide-ranging history that misinforms her polemic against the low standards of contemporary journalism, Jenny Taylor tells us there is a group of Indian Christians “whose only food is undigested grain husks, extracted from rat droppings”. Since this claim is footnoted, it is possible to check her reference and discover that in real life they eat rats.
She also believes that Dante (d.1321) wrote in 1555 a defence of Savonarola (d.1498); she confuses Andrew Hamilton, a lawyer who won a historic libel case heard in colonial New York in 1735 (not, then, “in the US”), and Alexander Hamilton (no relation) who would sign the Declaration of Independence more than 50 years later. She claims that no Jesuit missionary to China had learned Chinese before a Baptist did so in 1783, when Matteo Ricci SJ had famously done so 200 years before.
She appears to believe that God literally engraved the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from the mountain, and that the printing of the Bible meant that “God had quite clearly provided a tool for the conversion and neutralisation of Europe’s greatest foe, Islam”; and — for some reason, this is my favourite — that an interview that W. T. Stead did with General Gordon not only led to his being sent to Khartoum in 1880 but “changed British foreign policy from Laissez Faire to interventionism from which it has rarely deviated to this day”. Ah, so it was Laissez Faire and non-interventionism which had led us to conquer India and the rest of an empire that by 1880 covered a quarter of the globe.
Enough. Is there anything that can be rescued from this farrago? She writes from inside an Evangelical subculture in which the only task of an intellectual is to identify a problem, because the solution is always more Jesus. Despite this, there is one element of her analysis which survives translation to consensus reality: this is her insight that journalism, if it is to reform the world even a little, depends on the existence of distinct communities.
Only within a community that agrees which facts are morally significant — and even on what constitutes a fact — can the discovery of new facts bring about reformation. This is why local journalism works, or, while it lasted, worked. As a former senior reporter for the Swindon Evening Advertiser, Taylor understands local journalism.
But moral salience is a complicated thing. Whatever the moral code involved, a fact can be morally important only if there is something that we can do about it. Truth matters only when we can react to it. The classic Evangelical conversion story makes this clear: the protagonist hears a call to which they can respond, and so they do. But what about all the calls to which we cannot possibly respond?
Taylor is bewildered that the Islamist atrocities in northern Nigeria are not news here. She thinks that this is because we don’t understand Islam. But the more important reason is that there is nothing that we can do about them, either as individuals or the British state. Similarly, there is nothing that I can do about the Uyghurs in China, the victims of the wars in Sudan or the Congo, the presidency of Donald Trump, or uncountably many other evils in the world. News about such things is necessarily a grim form of entertainment, in which the facts are secondary to the story. This was true even before the internet, although that has made it much worse.
Andrew Brown is a writer and journalist.
Saving Journalism: The rise, demise and survival of the news
Jenny Taylor
Global Resilience Publishing £35
(978-1-913738-33-4)
