‘Drink silver particles in water.’ ‘Make your body more alkaline.’ ‘Drink water every 15 minutes.’ These were just three online cures which circulated at the start of the Covid-19 (C-19) pandemic.
All such claims were plainly ridiculous, but there were others that sounded more plausible, due to being wrapped up in nice ‘science-y’-sounding language.
When people are vulnerable and looking for truth, many such cures look appealing. This is especially true when they offer quick solutions that involve little pain. Drinking the juice of ten lemons a day is preferable to the agony of being on a ventilator. Consuming water regularly would be a wonderfully natural solution to preventing the death of thousands of beloved grandparents.
But, as with most things in life, there are few shortcuts that pay off in the longer term. This is also true of the news we consume.
How did we get here?
For years people have been moving away from mainstream news sources, especially ones which require some form of payment. Many have moved away from trusting ‘Auntie’, having fallen out of love with the BBC – perhaps, understandably, due to its perceived liberal political bias.
Simultaneously, the BBC has been accused of being too right wing in its political coverage. Whether the BBC has moved right or left is perhaps for another article. Yet many are still paying for BBC news, through their licence fees, regardless of their consumption of it. And, broadly-speaking, the BBC does provide thoughtful and helpful coverage of news such as C-19.
Despite losing much of the respect it held in former years, the BBC certainly filters out the more extreme myths cited above. Still, it has not maintained the near-universal respect it once had.
National newspaper sales, meanwhile, have also plummeted. The Metro challenged its fee-paying counterparts with a paper which was free at every train station. The Evening Standard consequently had to ditch its price entirely in order to survive. But the killer virus for the industry hasn’t been our hesitancy about the BBC or our free newspapers, but the Internet. One click, and it’s all there. For free.
Some subscription services even provide 100% free news online on platforms such as Twitter. Yet, even in spite of it being free, our collective appetite has apparently shrunk to the first 70 words of an article (so say the marketing gurus). In fact, if one has been hooked beyond the headline and first two sentences, many publications now include the estimated time it will take to read the article. Gobbling up information in 2020 has turned into a race with time-checks at every turn. Whatever happened to thoughtful reflection after reading a long and well-considered article? Perhaps it has been drowned amid the constant deluge of articles and opinions poured out on us at every turn.
The cost of free
A desire not to pay for our news, our time-squeezed concentration spans, and our dislike or distrust of the ‘expert’, all make for a toxic mix. Facts are sidestepped. Social media is ‘free’. World leaders can shape the truth to their gain. A lie can travel around the world in seconds before the truth even looks for its boots. And when the truth finally shows up, it is hidden at the bottom of a comments page buried under the retweets of those who’d prefer to read the fiction than the facts. Even where filtering (journalism?) is going on, site traffic and engagement is often valued above factual reporting. We in the Christian media aren’t immune to this either.
Fake news surrounds us all. No, not the real factual news that politicians like to pass off as ‘fake’ because they object to it. Properly fake news is everywhere, as is its close relative: ‘Hiding Difficult Truths’. Some successful publications have been taking a stand against the latter over many years. Not to everyone’s taste, but Private Eye, for example, exposed Cyril Smith’s abuse of children decades ago. The Spectator often boldly challenges the liberal ‘rainbow’ agenda of the day. But for many people, the daily news they receive comes through Facebook or Twitter, and not from reputable fact-checking sources.
Lobby groups (or even just one keyboard warrior setting up shop in his office) who claim to ‘tell the truth’ about vaccinations or government conspiracies, see their ‘news’ flying around social media being quoted as fact.
One C-19 conspiracy, duping otherwise sensible Christians, involved a misunderstanding of how South Korea tracked the spread of the virus. Conspiracy theorists were suggesting a future vaccine may involve injecting a physical tracking device rather like ones found in cars. The success which mass vaccination promises could be scuppered by this false news. In the wake of another example, trying to stop people from believing the Vatican and the US government were in cahoots to kill swathes of the population turned into an almost full-time job on my Twitter feed.
The solution?
All this is less likely to happen when one pays for news. Subscription income allows others to be employed who have time to search behind the story, to read Hansard, and complete background work on a case. It buys time to search for original news and not just do ‘churnalism’ (news being reworked, or constantly re-reported from other newspapers, driving it further and further from its original source). This journalistic habit has grown because of a lack of paid subscriptions. Churnalism is not to be confused with publications like The Week, which collates the best of what has been published.
So what about en? We aim to report the news clearly and accurately (from a Christian angle). en contains a collection of articles each month which are either about Christians, or situations which may affect Christians soon.
There is simply too much UK news to consume. There are too many world mission partners providing news for an individual Christian to absorb everything available to them. Accordingly, one of en’s roles is to bring you the best (often hidden) stories from around the world and the most important news updates. If you were a Christian who had lost a husband or wife to an abduction, you would want the Christian world to know about this and pray. If you had seen your children or your church family slaughtered, you would want the international community to be informed and campaign on your behalf. And if you are a British Christian who is not actively persecuted today, you should want to know where the pressure points of tomorrow might be. Other faith groups hit the news for being persecuted, but Christians and the church are usually only given the spotlight when they sin or when they challenge unbiblical values.
The canny (or cynical?) amongst you may assume that this article has just been building to a plea for more en subscriptions (Well, we’re not going to say no to more of those. You are already a subscriber, so we’re preaching to the choir here. However, if you don’t subscribe, and this article has been passed onto you, do consider taking out your own subscription.) But this is an honest observation about how we’re all getting what we pay for because we’re less willing to stump up for a quality news service.
We’ve always worked hard to bring you original news, with original research on stories, and original interviews with people behind the headlines. We’re drawing on opinion pieces from across a broad range of British Evangelicalism. We try very hard to keep party politics out of the paper and take a balanced approach to contentious issues from within and outside the church.
So, a final plea. Think through where you get your news from. Think about the source of the news you’re looking at before you click and send on. Think about how you can support accurate news about Christians. And yes, encourage others alongside you to support en.
