The Hindu : National : "The apathetic voter is also the apathetic reader"

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Wednesday, Jan 11, 2006

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National

"The apathetic voter is also the apathetic reader"

Diplomatic Correspondent

Newspapers will have to try harder to persuade young people of the value of serious journalism: Alan Rusbridger

The former External Affairs Minister, Natwar Singh (third from right), CPI (M) general secretary Prakash Karat (third from left) and other dignitaries listening to two lectures by Alan Rusbridger and Ian Mayes, Editor and Readers' Editor of The Guardian, in New Delhi on Tuesday. — PHOTO: Rajeev Bhatt

NEW DELHI: "The generation that isn't interested in voting is the same generation which, all the signs are, isn't much interested in reading newspapers. That broad range of information that a newspaper can give — and which used to be considered important to being a good citizen — doesn't seem to be important to this generation of 18 to 25-year-olds," Editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, said on Tuesday evening.

Addressing a lecture organised by The Hindu, Mr. Rusbridger remarked that the apathetic voter was a cliché of Western politics, nowhere more so than in Britain. In the last election, the turnout was 61 per cent — compared with 77 per cent in Norway, or 88 per cent in Denmark. In the 1964 British general election, 87 per cent of under 25s voted; this figure had halved in 40 years.

News grazing

He asked the question: what if the citizens don't want to be informed? What if surface "news grazing" was sufficient for their purposes? News, he said, was all around — on radio, television, text alerts and free newspapers.

"That's fine for more and more people, it seems. How much more do I honestly need to read to be informed enough? It's all very well to talk about the compact between the citizen and the legislator, but voting doesn't seem to change very much. And the real power in the modern world — and the real problems — lies way beyond my ability to do anything about them. So, actually, why do I need to know all this stuff?"

As with politics, Mr. Rusbridger felt, the apathetic reader may not be apathetic about everything. "They'll have their own passions, their own obsessions and causes. But it's just possible that the Internet does passions, obsessions and causes rather better than newspapers. People can bury deeply into their own subjects, engage with communities of other equally engaged people. And, they can block stuff they don't want." For instance, some people may not want to know anything about what was going on in Africa.

Two options

In such a situation, two options were available to editors: one to give people what they wanted, if they don't want difficult stuff, we won't give them difficult stuff. A second option would be to "turn the volume up" — make the news more exciting, striking, pumped up.

If readers in Britain don't have the time, or appetite for much complexity, does that mean newspapers shouldn't give it to them? And if they didn't, what would that do to the political process? Would that end up reinforcing a pattern of ignorance, or carelessness about things that actually matter to us all, when we choose to think about it?

How would that affect the political process? At its mildest it might simply frustrate politicians, unable to get their message across. Or would it create a breed of politicians who felt that they could get away with more or less anything because the main medium of communication had abandoned the territory?

Referring to the British tabloid, The Sun, Mr. Rusbridger said it was trying a variety of techniques — very few of them to do with news — to sell the paper. "In some post-modern sense the selling of the newspaper has acquired a higher priority than the selling — let alone the telling — of news."

And, he stressed, it was not only the tabloids. British quality newspapers — previously called broadsheets — were currently locked in a circulation battle that involved spending huge sums of money in giving away free DVDs while cutting or freezing editorial budgets.

As competition for attention grew, newspapers will have to try harder to persuade young people of the value of serious journalism, whether delivered on screen, on plastic paper, which is the next big thing, or on old-fashioned dead trees, he felt.

Pointing out that the British Government, parliamentarians and even spooks had got the Iraq war wrong, Mr. Rusbridger said the only people who had succeeded in getting any of the troubling issues out into the open for debate were journalists.

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