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April 13 - April 25, 2018
The news knows how to render its own mechanics almost invisible and therefore hard to question. It speaks to us in a natural unaccented voice, without reference to its own assumption-laden perspective. It fails to disclose that it does not merely report on the world, but is instead constantly at work crafting a new planet in our minds in line with its own often highly distinctive priorities.
For all their talk of education, modern societies neglect to examine by far the most influential means by which their populations are educated.
Once our formal education has finished, the news is the teacher. It is the single most significant force setting the tone of public life and shaping our impressions of the community beyond our own walls.
We need news organizations to help our curiosity by signalling how their stories fit into the larger themes on which a sincere capacity for interest depends. To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to ‘put’ it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already know how to care about.
The news shouldn’t eliminate angry responses; but it should help us to be angry for the right reasons, to the right degree, for the right length of time – and as part of a constructive project.
These stories circle their fallen prey without any interest in the evolution of public life: they aren’t trying to get accountancy, marriages, universities, immigration or the tax system to go better. They are just inviting us to have a particular kind of
the press had made it very possible for a person to be at once unimaginative, uncreative, mean-minded and extremely well informed. The modern idiot could routinely know what only geniuses had known in the past,
they are in truth suffering not so much from ignorance as from indifference.
Catholicism
It's fascinating to think that Catholicism is partly to blame for our celebrity culture.
