A wheezing and groaning Tardis-type sound is heard… There is a flash of light, and your columnist appears, looking rumpled and disorientated… Now read on.
Much like Doctor Who’s occasional regenerations into someone the same but different, so the former Anglican Update column has now morphed, courtesy of our new editor, into a more wide-ranging opinion column.
So welcome aboard this regenerated column – although, unlike the famous Time Lord’s most recent reincarnation, I can report that I am still unfashionably the same gender as before. Like the new Doctor, I must find a different outfit for my altered persona: it’s a little-known fact that all Anglican Updates had to be written in a top hat and spats (a contractual obligation, you understand), but I’m told I can choose something different now. Someone said ‘jeggings’ are popular currently – so maybe I’ll try them, once I’ve Googled to find out what they are…
Instant news obsession
Self-indulgent whimsy aside, let us now turn to more serious matters, and begin with the subject of ‘fast news’. We’re familiar with the concept of fake news, of course, as popularised by Donald Trump and various others in recent years. But whatever the rights and wrongs of that particular issue, it’s actually ‘fast news’ that should concern Christians even more. For ‘fast news’ is the obsession with the instant in the news cycle, to the exclusion of the longer-term, slower and important stuff.
‘Fast news’ is something which happens on a given day, at a given time, and can be reported on and commented about seemingly ad infinitum for the next 24 hours. It does, of course, include many vital things: a key vote in Parliament, for example; a gun massacre; a stabbing, a flood, or developments in phone technology, and so on, to choose some recent things.
Downward spiral
But often what happens is that the media focus exclusively on just a few ‘fast news’ matters in this way – and then comment or over-report on them to the point of absurdity. We’ve all seen air-time filled, for example, with an expert brought in to fill space until the next sports bulletin; we’re familiar with the ‘going live’ segments where local news cuts to some hapless hack dispatched to mount a late-night vigil beside a darkened field or street in a futile bid to bring us ‘the latest’ on something that finished hours earlier.
And ‘fast news’ breeds fast reactions – on Twitter, on Facebook and across the rest of social media: fast reactions which are often unthought through, ill-informed, or immediately judgemental without having access to the full context of a situation. ‘Fast news’ breeds Twitter spats and Facebook rants, simultaneously leading to information overload and ill-feeling.
Suffocating the important
The problem with ‘fast news’ is that it so easily suffocates ‘slow news’ – those rather less instantaneous matters that are far more important. Matters like, for example, the fact ‘that persecution and genocide of Christians across the world is worse today than at any time in history’, according to Aid To The Church In Need, a Catholic organisation. Or that in 2018, the number of reported ‘assisted deaths’ (euthanasia) in Canada increased by more than 50% and represented more than 1.5% of all deaths. Or that February’s average temperature in the UK was so far above the usual range that scientists described it as ‘incredible’.
‘Fast news’ is not a new thing, of course. Acts 17 tells us how first century Athenians ‘spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas’, which sounds just like talk radio. But as Jesus warns us, ‘fast news’ – ‘wars and rumours of wars… famines and earthquakes’ (Matthew 24:16-17) – however important such matters may be, can easily distract us from the slower news: the gospel news of eternity – until his return in glory.
So let’s not be over-worried by the ‘fast news’ – and let’s hesitate before resorting to ‘fast comment’ on social media. We are, after all, called to be ‘quick to listen and slow to speak’ (James 1:19). Place a news bulletin within the context of a Christ-centred eternity – and then discover what matters truly, after all.
