奥妮How news becomes opinion

2020年12月26日发(作者：许寒冰)
How news becomes opinion, and opinion off- limits
Article from: The Nation Article date: June 24, 1996Author: Rushdie, Salman

I was wondering what, if any, common ground might be occupied by novelists and journalists
when my eye fell upon the following brief text in a British national daily: yesterday's
Independent, we stated that Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is farming ostriches. He is not.

One can only guess at the brouhaha concealed beneath these admirably laconic sentences: the
human distress, the protests. As you know, Britain has been going through a period of what one
might call heightened livestock insecurity of late. As well as the mentally challenged cattle herds,
there has been the alarming case of the great ostrich-farming bubble, or swindle. In these
overheated times, a man who is not an ostrich farmer, when accused of being one, will not take
the allegation lightly. He may even feel that his reputation has been slighted.

Plainly, it was quite wrong of the Independent to suggest that Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber was
breeding ostriches. He is, of course, a celebrated exporter of musical turkeys. But if we agree for a
moment to permit the supposedly covert and allegedly fraudulent farming of ostriches to stand
as a metaphor for all the world's supposedly covert and allegedly fraudulent activities, then must
we not also agree that it is vital that these ostrich farmers be identified, named and brought to
account for their activities? Is this not the very heart of the project of a free press? And might
there not be occasions on which every editor would be prepared to go with such a story--leaked,
perhaps, by an ostrich deep throat--on the basis of less-than-solid evidence, in the national
interest?

I am arriving by degree at my point, which is that the great issue facing writers both of journalism
and of novels is that of determining, and then publishing, the truth. For the ultimate goal of both
factual and fictional writing is the truth, however paradoxical that may sound. And truth is
slippery, hard to establish. Mistakes, as in the Lloyd Webber case, can be made. And if truth can
set you free, it can also land you in hot water. Fine as the word sounds, truth is all too often
unpalatable, awkward, unorthodox. The armies of received ideas are marshaled against it. The
legions of all those who stand to profit by useful untruths will march against it. Yet it must, if at all
possible, be told.

But, it may be objected, can there really be any connection between the truth of the news and
that of the world of the imagination? In the world of facts, a man is either an ostrich farmer or he
is not. In fiction's universe, he may be fifteen contradictory things at once.

Let me attempt an answer.

The word
news reports. A hundred years ago, people read novels, among other things, for information.
From Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, British readers got shocking information about poor schools
like Dotheboys Hall, and such schools were subsequently abolished. Uncle Tom Cabin,
Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick are all, in this newsy sense, information-heavy.

So: Until the advent of the television age, literature shared with print journalism the task of
telling people things they didn't know.

This is no longer the case, either for literature or for print journalism. Those who read
newspapers and novels now get their primary information about the world from the TV news and
the radio. There are exceptions, of course. The success of that excellent, lively novel Primary
Colors shows that novels can just occasionally still lift the lid on a hidden world more effectively
than the finest reporting. And of course the broadcast news is highly selective, and newspapers
provide far greater breadth and depth of coverage. But many people now read newspapers, I
suggest, to read the news about the news. We read for opinion, attitude, spin. We read not for
raw data, not for Gradgrind's
Now that the broadcasting media fulfill the function of being first with the news, newspapers, like
novels, have entered the realm of the imagination. They both provide versions of the world.

Perhaps this is clearer in a country like Britain, where the press is primarily a national press, than
in the United States, where the great proliferation of local papers allows print journalism to
provide the additional service of answering to local concerns and adopting local characteristics.
The successful quality papers in Britain-- among dailies, the Guardian, Times, Telegraph and
Financial Times--are successful because they have clear pictures of who their readers are and
how to talk to them. (The languishing Independent once did, but appears lately to have lost its
way.) They are successful because they share with their readers a vision of British society and of
the world.

The news has become a matter of opinion.

And this puts a newspaper editor in a position not at all dissimilar from that of a novelist. It is for
the novelist to create, communicate and sustain over time a personal and coherent vision of the
world that entertains, interests, stimulates, provokes and nourishes his readers. It is for the
newspaper editor to do very much the same thing with the pages at his disposal. In that
specialized sense, we are all in the fiction business now.

One of the more extraordinary truths about the soap opera that is the British royal family is that
to a large extent the leading figures have had their characters invented for them by the British
press. And such is the power of the fiction that the flesh and blood royals have become more and
more like their print personae, unable to escape the fiction of their imaginary lives.

The creation of
stock in trade. Never have personality profiles and people columns--never has gossip--occupied
as much of a newspaper as they now do. The word
never confronted head-on but receives a sidelong glance. A profile is flat and two-dimensional. It
is an outline. Yet the images created in these curious texts (often with their subjects' collusion)
are extraordinarily potent--it can be next to impossible for the actual person to alter, through his
own words and deeds, the impressions they create--and thanks to the mighty clippings file, they
are also self-perpetuating.

A novelist, if he is talented and lucky, may in the course of a lifetime's work offer up one or two
characters who enter the exclusive pantheon of the unforgotten. A novelist's characters hope for
immortality; a profile journalist's, perhaps, for celebrity. We worship, these days, images but
Image itself: And any man or woman who strays into the public gaze becomes a potential sacrifice
in that temple. Often, I repeat, a willing sacrifice, willingly drinking the poisoned chalice of Fame.
But for many people, including myself, the experience of being profiled is perhaps closest to what
it must feel like to be used as a writer's raw material, what it must feel like to be turned into a
fictional character, to have one's feelings and actions, one's relationships and vicissitudes,
transformed by writing, into something subtly --or unsubtly--different. To see ourselves mutated
into someone we do not recognize.

For a novelist to be thus rewritten is, I recognize, a case of the biter bit. Fair enough. Nevertheless,
something about the process feels faintly--and I stress, faintly--improper.

In Britain, intrusions into the private lives of public figures have prompted calls from certain
quarters for the protection of privacy laws. It is true that in France, where such laws exist, the
illegitimate daughter of the late President Mitterrand was able to grow up unmolested by the
press; but where the powerful can hide behind the law, might not a good deal of covert ostrich
farming go undetected? My own feelings continue to be against laws that curtail the investigative
freedoms of the press. But speaking as someone who has had the uncommon experience of
becoming, for a time, a hot news story--of, as my friend Martin Amis put it,
front page
press intrusions and distortions, those principles have been sorely strained.

However, my overwhelming feelings about the press are ones of gratitude. In the long unfolding
of the so-called Rushdie affair, American newspapers have been of great importance in keeping
the issues alive, in making sure that readers have kept sight of the essential points of principle
involved, and even in pressuring America's leaders to speak out and act. But I am grateful for
more than that. I said earlier that newspaper editors, like novelists, need to create, impart and
maintain a vision of society to readers. In any vision of a free society, the value of free speech
must rank the highest, for that is the freedom without which all other freedoms would fail.
Journalists do more than most of us to protect those values; for the exercise of freedom is its best
defense.

It seems to me, however, that we live in an increasingly censorious age. By this I mean that the
broad, indeed international, acceptance of First Amendment principles is being steadily eroded.
Many special-interest groups, claiming the moral high ground, now demand the protection of the
censor. Political correctness and the rise of the religious right provide the procensorship lobby
with further cohorts. I would like to say a little about just one of the weapons of this resurgent
lobby, a weapon used, interestingly, by everyone from anti-pomography feminists to religious
fundamentalists: I mean the concept of

On the surface of it,
winter, like applause, like ketchup on your fries, everybody wants some of that.
Sock-it-tome- sock-it-to-me, as Aretha Franklin has it. But what we used to mean by respect, what
Aretha meant by it--that is, a mixture of good-hearted consideration and serious attention--has
little to do with the new ideological usage of the word.

Religious extremists, these days, demand for their attitudes with growing stridency.
Few people would object to the idea that people's rights to religious belief must be
respected--after all, the First Amendment defends those rights as unequivocally as it defends free
speech--but now we are asked to agree that to dissent from those beliefs, to hold that they are
suspect or antiquated or wrong, that in fact they are arguable, is incompatible with the idea of
respect. When criticism is placed off-limits as
strange is happening to the concept of respect. Yet in recent times both the American N.E.A. and
the very British BBC have announced that they will employ this new perversion of
touchstone for their funding and programming decisions.

Other minority groups--racial, sexual, social--have also demanded that they be accorded this new
form of respect. To
To
then we have indeed succumbed to the Thought Police.

I want to suggest that citizens of free societies do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting
around their fellow citizens' opinions, even their most cherished beliefs. In free societies, you
must have the free play of ideas. There must be argument, and it must be impassioned and
untrammeled. A free society is not a calm and eventless place--that is the kind of static, dead
society dictators try to create. Free societies are dynamic, noisy, turbulent and full of radical
disagreements. Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked, and it is the skepticism of
journalists, their show-me, prove-it unwillingness to be impressed, that is perhaps their most
important contribution to the freedom of the free world. It is the disrespect of journalists--for
power, for orthodoxies, for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for folly, for
pretension, for corruption, for stupidity, maybe even for editors--and the disrespect of every
citizen, in fact, that I would like to celebrate, and that I urge all, in freedom's name, to preserve.