THE NEWS.

1. Introduction.

There’s something called The News which is found in newspapers, radio, TV and the internet. What is the content of The News? The obvious answer is that it's important things that have happened in the world recently but what does this mean exactly? What's important and why?

I want to know because the ubiquity of news material is like somebody insisting to me that I must be told the information that is contained in The News. That it is really important. And I ask myself: why is it so important?

If I switch from Radio 4 to Classic FM even then The News is still there in hourly bulletins! Why? I've switched to Classic FM to listen to music haven't I? It's like someone is saying: "no, it doesn't matter what else you are doing, you must be informed".

2. The questions.

There are three things I'm interested in here.

First: what is the content of The News and how has it been selected?

Second: how is that content reported? By which I mean what kind of thing is said about the events that have been selected to be reported. An obvious example of the different ways something could be reported is that it could be reported simply clearly and factually. Or it could be done in a hysterical and emotionally overloaded way.

The third thing is what other content does The News have apart from reporting what has happened? (This other content is mostly comment and speculation.)

3. Basic News.

The main criteria for selection seems to be events which affect, or are likely to affect very soon, the well-being of very large numbers of people. Thus earthquakes, famines, wars, conflicts, economic difficulties (unemployment etc). Especially when the events are likely to effect the life of the reader of The News.

But with a lot of items on The News items this criteria does not apply and I find myself thinking: "well why are they telling me this?" An example of this sort of thing would be murders of individuals. Is it that important? Do I need to know it? Are they telling us it because it is in our interest to know it (and so is important) or just because they think we are interested (and so not important?

4. Political bias.

Most mainstream news sources are not neutral. All newspapers are not and they have no problem admitting the fact that they have some sort of political bias. On the basis of which they select stories accordingly. For example The Daily Mail will select more stories about immigration than will The Guardian.

Even news organisations who protest that they have no bias really do. For example the BBC is left of centre. And it shows its bias frequently. For example (21.11.13) there was a report on the Radio 4 Today programme about the 'disgraced' former bank chairman who was also associated with the Labour Party. The BBC reporter says: "Number 10 is straining to tarnish Ed Miliband by association". This is a very loaded and judgmental way of describing David Cameron's comments. The connotation of the word 'straining' is a dog on a leash. And about David Cameron it suggests that he is being vindictive and keen to take advantage of another's misfortune. Also the word 'tarnish' suggests a superficial and unimportant blemish on something that is otherwise sound. Again a very judgmental way of putting it.

(I particularly hate it when, as in this case, the bias is in favour of political position I hold myself.)

The civil strife in post-war Iraq was reported on The News frequently. At the same time other conflicts in the world such as in Columbia, Mexico and Karachi (Pakistan) were resulting in a comparable death toll but were not reported as much.

An easy way for news to be biased is to report second-hand. So a newspaper will report: “X says the Prime Minister is useless”. People will accuse the newspaper of not being objective and they will reply that they are just reporting the objective fact of what X said.

5. Discrete events are preferred.

An economic crash will get more coverage than an economic problem which is low level and takes 10 years to happen. And a single incident on a road that kills 40 people will get more coverage than 40 people dying in traffic accidents separately. This suggests that one of the criteria of selection is how dramatic the event is. Because dramatic events are more entertaining and long term slow-burn events are not very dramatic.

Even when longer term events like economic decline are reported they are always reported using a particular discrete example. During a recession The News will have stories mostly about how, for example, a single business is suffering during the recession. The reason for this is that the story of an individual is more dramatic than bare figures. So The News will concentrate on individual events even though bare figures and statistics are better at giving you an accurate account of reality than descriptions of a few individual cases.

Sometimes I will come across a news story describing how a beggar is making a fortune from begging. And I think: "so? what am I supposed to conclude from a description of a singular (likely very unrepresentative) case?" That report is worthless!

Journalists will add drama to a story. I remember the famous Michael Buerk BBC TV report on the 1984 famine in Ethiopia: the report starts "Dawn and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem it lights up a biblical famine". And I thought: "you're a journalist not a novelist: just tell me some facts."

6. Local bias.

Events closer to the consumer of The News are given priority. Thus policies of the domestic government are more likely to be News than policies of foreign governments. A conflict in Europe which kills, say ten people a year would be regular news, but a similar one outside Europe will almost certainly never get reported.

The reason for selection on this basis is the psychological fact that we don't care about foreigners. And (more generally) that our affections are parochial.

7. Prurience and entertainment.

The private lives of famous people are News. And stories that are affecting such as the murders of small children. Murders of small cute looking children are reported more than the murders of slightly older scruffier children or adults. And murders of young females where there is even a hint of sexual activity are always reported more. The murder of a single female in Bristol December 2010 got intense media coverage. The murder rate at that time was about 10 per week in the UK. Don't those other victims matter? Where's their publicity?

Incidents that are unusual are reported more. Like shark attacks and ‘interesting crimes’ such as cases of fraud and spectacular robberies. Also crimes that are particularly shocking are reported more: if somebody is murdered in a particularly brutal way this will be given more coverage. (For example on 22.02.08 I heard on the radio of a murderer being convicted. The report gave the detail that the victim was stabbed a number of times once with such force that the blade went straight through them and out the other side. And I was thinking: do I really need to know that? And this was the BBC too!)

The embarrassments of famous people are good stories. For example if some celebrity is caught taking drugs or being unfaithful to their partner. (I think to myself: "why do I need to know that she's been taking cocaine?")

8. Scoop. Truth.

If a news organisation has got a scoop they will give the story more coverage than they otherwise would. Often the BBC or Channel 4 news will find out about some private argument between two politicians and they will report on this at length. Such stories will often be prefaced with with some phrase like "an investigation by this programme has revealed" or "information obtained by this programme". (Which make the report sound spurious, almost as bad as “sources close to X have said” which actually means "we've made this up".)

The reason for selection of scoop stories is that it serves the purpose of making the news organisation look good. They are trying to say: look we have been active in uncovering the truth (The Truth). I find this rather smug self-congratulatory attitude very annoying. They make out that they (The News) are disinterested getters of The Truth. But they're not really. The task of getting The Truth is something that's far too important to be left to journalists and the news media. Can't we have somebody more responsible and sensible doing it?

The news media people say that freedom of the press is important so that they can perform the important job of holding the government to account. But it should be elected people who do that. Not unelected journalists who might have their own agenda. Freedom of the media is freedom for them to influence public opinion. People are lazy and rely on, say, The Guardian or The Daily Mail to tell them what's important. (Or at the very least to confirm their pre-existing opinions.) They determine the agenda. Which gives them immense power over people's minds. I'm not saying that they're going to use it for evil ends. But consider the case of MPs expenses from a few years back. The News brought to our attention the MPs' wrongdoing. But what other wrongdoing is it failing to point out to us. How do I know that there is not some other wrongdoing that the News people have never pointed out to me yet? Because they don't want to. Maybe they are pointing out the MPs' wrongdoing to distract my attention from the other wrongdoing. The way a magician uses misdirection. In this case I suspect the story about the MPs was to distract us from the banking racket which had caused the recession!

Sometimes the news media will alert us to some injustice and we will (rightly) be outraged and might even do something about dealing with the injustice (donating money or going on a march). But how do we know that there aren't other injustices going on that (not having had our attention drawn to them) are invisible to us. (A bit like an 'Elephant in the room' or Douglas Adams' idea of 'somebody else's problem'.) In pre Civil War USA people in the southern states would get outraged at cases of injustice but the regular daily injustice of black slavery somehow escaped their perception.

Another example of us being manipulated is the way Google have immense power in choosing their regular Google Doodles. They determine which people or events we know about. (Because it takes a lot of will-power to not click on a Google Doodle!) Who put them in charge of that? (Imagine how much money Coca-Cola would pay Google to let them have a Google Doodle advertising their product!) (Aside: think how much office staff work time globally is wasted by Google Doodles. You might only be on for half a minute but times that by a 100 million.)

News about what's going to happen. Sometimes on BBC radio in the morning they will say something like "The Prime Minister will today say that...". This has the hint of declaration of scoop about it. But really it just an inside job. In other words the PM's office gives prior notification of what he is going to say before he says it. To get some publicity for him actually saying it.

9. Selection and accuracy.

All the actions of selection described so far contribute to The News failing to be accurate. And the main cause of this failure looks like it's the desire of The News to be entertaining. Which maybe just demonstrates that The News is actually a branch of show-business. But at the same time purporting to be definitively informative. This can cause problems. For example if the murder rate is falling The News might not reduce the quantity of their murder coverage. They could even increase it. Thus giving the false impression that there is an increase in the rate of murders actually happening. They might even be doing this kind of thing deliberately!

It doesn't matter how few bad things there are going on, there's always enough to fill the pages of a newspaper. Or the half hour of a news programme. Sometimes a story will be on The News and I think: the selection of this is arbitrary because if something bigger had been happening then this would never have been selected. So the importance accorded to it by being at the top of The News is somewhat misleading. In fact if you had some bad news about yourself to release it would be best to wait until there was a bigger bad news story about something else. Which would 'bury' the bad story about you.

If there's a news story about a murder then the implication is that there's been no other murders that day. Otherwise they would have been reported as well. But often that's not true.

10. Need to know.

I ask myself: so what should the criteria of selection be? To my mind this is an even more general question which is: "what do I need to know anyway?". If, for example, people are killed in a war hundreds of miles away from where I live then I can't see any reason why I need to know this. Of course this comes close to saying that I don't want to know which then suggests that I don't care. I think it would be wrong to conclude that I don't care. I suppose it depends what you mean by "don't care". If "don't care" means not going to do anything about it then yes it's true that I don't care. (But then even people who do want to know are often people who "don't care" in this sense.) If "don't care" means "don't have a feeling of concern" then no it's not true that I don't care.

And neither can you argue that I need to know about distant wars because reports like that one tell me, ie give me a picture, about the world as it is. Because they don't give me any accurate information (as explained above).

And even if they did give me an accurate account of the world as it is do I need to know that? The suffering of other people is something that me knowing about benefits nobody. It doesn't benefit me, it makes me upset. It doesn't benefit the people who are suffering because I can't do anything about it. If some event is going to affect me and/or it's something I can/should do something about then it would be fair to say that I need to know about it. Otherwise not. Which rules out almost all of the content of The News. Because The News isn't things I need to know. It's not stuff that it's in my interest to know, rather it's things that the News producers think I might be interested in.

Imagine there was a car crash and I went with my camera and was taking photographs. People would say my behaviour was disgraceful and tasteless. But if a News photographer does it then it is OK. Why? Basically The News is like rubbernecking at a crash on the highway. A lot of it is just "other people's misfortunes".

11. Context.

Apart from the selection of content (ie what is reported) the other main issue is about the presentation of the content (ie how it is reported). A big problem here is that context is not given but without understanding the context the report of an event is meaningless.

For example for years the European CAP (common agricultural policy) gets reported on The News. In particular when EU member states argue about its implementation. It will get reported that the French government are trying to defend the CAP against attempts by other EU member states to reform it. Now, if you don't know what the CAP is or how it fits into the way EU works then this report is not really of much value. From the report you will learn many things such as which European countries are in favour of it (France, Ireland) and which ones aren't (UK, Germany). Also how long the CAP has been in operation (at least 40 or so years) and how much it costs (so many billions per year). The only thing I have never learnt from all this paying attention to The News is what the CAP actually is! In general the report of an incident has no value if you do not understand the context.

Other examples are: some civil war in a foreign country (The News will describe particular acts of violence but without describing the background to the conflict those acts of violence could be happening anywhere), famine (The News will show you distressing images of people suffering from the effects of the famine but it won't tell you what has caused it), proposed reform to the NHS (if you don't understand how the NHS currently operates this will not mean anything).

Again with the news about the conflict Syria. There's a lot of descriptions of the actual particular incidents: this many people were killed in this manner. But the important thing is: what is the conflict about. Exactly.

Sometimes very obvious questions about the context won't be answered or even asked. For example when it was reported that Enron had collapsed. Apparently this was after it was found out that they had been declaring false accounts. It seems that they had overstated the amount of profit they were making by billions of dollars. In The News there was stuff about who was responsible and how many people have been made redundant and how the stock market reacted. But there are plenty more obvious questions which you would have thought The News should be answering! Like, how is it possible for a company to overdeclare like this? How did they do it? Why didn't the IRS notice? Where did they find the money to pay the IRS? The profits might have been phantom but they must have still paid actual taxes mustn't they?

History writing is often contextless like this too. The history of a war is often just lots of descriptions of the ways in which groups of men are killing each other. A much smaller portion of the history is devoted to telling you what the war is actually about. But without that the descriptions of people killing each other are meaningless.

There are two reasons why context is not thoroughly explained on The News. First because, descriptions of actual incidents are more exciting than an account of context. Second because it takes effort to find out about and explain context but journalists are very lazy.

I suppose in a sense it is unfair to criticise TV and newspapers for not describing the context in any detail. After all they can't be doing that everytime they report an incident. This is why the internet is better than broadcast media. I like the cumulative news story articles on Wikipedia. They start with the context (the story so far) and then the current incidents are at the end. This format is overall more enlightening.

Really there ought to be a "story so far" article. Which is updated as new incidents happen. In the absence of this, if you want to know "the story so far" you have to go through all the incident reports and piece together the story. And then there's a sense in which the essence (the main points) if what has happened so far are lost amongst the many details of the incidents.

So the news is just incident reports. In the days the fact that there was no "story so far" resource was worse because then there was no real access to all past incident reports either. If you had tuned out of the news for a week and then tuned back in you would hear about reports about the most recent incidents of some ongoing situation. But without a knowledge of the previous incidents leading the current incidents you would be confused.

I know I'm going on about context a lot but it's something that has always struck me as an obvious point but I've rarely heard anybody else mention it. So I'm writing at length to make sure I've explained it properly. Maybe the best examples are from economics. Imagine it's reported that the nation's currency is being taken off the Gold Standard. If you don't know what the Gold Standard is then that fact will be meaningless to you. Even worse if you don't even understand what a currency is!

Without context The News is just The Vague News (a comedy concept which has been done more than once in the past) with stories like "today some people somewhere died in some sort of natural disaster" or "today a politician said something and some other people didn't like it that much".

12. Follow up.

The News will report something but then never follow up on it until it gets really bad again. For example a few years ago we got reports about the political crisis in Thailand. We got reports when there were big street demonstrations that look good on TV. But then nothing. And I was left wondering: what was the outcome, how did this thing get resolved?

Similarly for the Iraq war. There was lots of coverage of the war itself because that's sexy and exciting. And after that was over there is a lot of reporting of incidents such as terrorist attacks. What you don't get is details of how the politics and economics is being (or failing to be being) reconstructed.

(I remember many years there was a news show on some Asian TV channel called 'Follow up with Fahd'. The into was "in the end of the news is its beginning. Hi my name is Fahd and I will follow up!". This was good and not just because of the TS Eliot reference.)

13. Comment and speculation.

The other main content of The News is comment and speculation. The news presenter will have some expert on the show. And will ask them: well what do you think is going to happen now? Or: who did this awful thing?

Often the reason there is so much comment in news programmes is that something really big has just happened and the bigness of the event seems to demand lots of coverage. But the actual available facts are not sufficient to fill that coverage. The result is padding. So if a bomb has just gone off killing 40 people then this will be the top story on The News for about 10 minutes. But the facts available will be stateable in about 10 seconds. So the rest of the time is filled up with: what do people think, isn't it awful and I wonder who could have done it and why. That sort of thing.

14. Interviews.

A main form of comment is the interview. A large part of news media especially TV and radio news is made up of interviews with the people involved in the stories. Or with some people who have an opinion on the story. A lot of the interview often consists of speculation and comment as described above.

Interview questions will often state the obvious simply as an invitation for the interviewee to voice their own opinions. It's not really a question it's just a request for the interviewee (or a permission given to them) to deliver a monologue. For example the interviewer might just ask "so what do you think about all of this?". (Most interviewees treat a question as an invitation to deliver a monologue anyway. Usually a monologue that has got nothing to do with the question.)

Also often the interview is just a form of trial with the person being accused of certain things. Especially political interviews the gist of the questions will be that the person being questioned is doing a bad job. The question will often be of the form: "why are you so rubbish and what are you going to do about it?". And then they have to defend themselves by offering evidence to support the fact that they are not rubbish. But this doesn’t really get us to any conclusion. People on the defensive are less likely to be cooperative. Mostly because the politician being interviewed knows that they can just flannel and not answer the question and that eventually the interview will be over. It rarely happens that the interviewer cuts short the interview by saying: "you're not answering the question, get out!" In any case that sort of accusatory questioning is rude. An example is this interview HERE with the President of Syria. The interviewer's first questions are: "Is Syria a failed state?" and "Did you make mistakes?" (this last asked three times) and "Did you get it wrong?" and "Do you think that some of the activities of the Syrian army helped create the nightmare that Syria is in right now?". What if the President had just said yes to all these questions. And that's it. Is the purpose of the interview to determine the guilt of the President or to get a deeper understanding of the situation. The questions do not directly lead to getting any of this latter.

Also, for political interviewees, often the interviewer's questions are trying to get the interviewee to admit something but the interviewee will not do this and the interviewee is right not to do so. I've seen a lot of interviews where an interviewer is trying to get a cabinet minister to disclose what happened at a cabinet meeting. Which is contrary to the rule about cabinet confidentiality. And I think to myself: why is the interviewer asking a question that they know the interviewer can not answer!

Or the interview will be adversarial in the sense that the interviewer is trying to demonstrate that the interviewee is wrong about something. This is counterproductive because it makes the interviewee defensive and evasive. Thus defeating a more productive aim of the interview which would be to just find out in detail exactly what the interview thinks about the situation. For example suppose Mary, a supporter of the Palestinian cause, gets asked about some recent terrorist act by a Palestinian group: “do you condemn this act of violence?”. She will respond with something like: “I condemn all acts of violence including those done by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people”. This is a rather evasive answer. Really she wants to say "no I don't condemn it, I think the Palestinian group were perfectly justified in doing this given the provocation from the Israeli side, and given that they are in what is, in effect, a state of war with Israel.” Which is a more informative and interesting reply.

Interview questions are often astonishingly dumb. So they will go some place of natural disaster and say: "hello, all of your family have been wiped out by this hurricane/earthquake/flood; how do you feel?". Or to a politician in difficulty: "are you going to resign?". The main time that TV news interviewers ask dumb questions is when they're unlikely to get an answer anyway. So on TV news reporters will shout questions. For example, the Prime Minister is getting out of a car and entering a building and reporters will shout dumb questions to him. As if he's going to answer! (A particularly funny example of a dumb question is when once on Radio 4 Today programme 3 September 2003 John Humphreys interviewing some representative of the Libyan government asks: “has Libya now forsaken sponsorship of terrorism?” (And has he stopped beating his wife?!).)

Interviewers will persist with dumb questions such as the above. This gives a bad name to persistence. But persistence with a sensible clear question is what is required. Often interviewers will not persist enough with a sensible question. For example at the Leveson Inquiry see link HERE. See page 43 where Lord Justice Leveson says to Rupert Murdoch: "Just before you leave the topic of privacy, you don't see a distinction, Mr Murdoch, between, for example, politicians [...] in those who hold themselves out or are held out as exercising positions of influence, and on the other hand somebody who is famous because they are a good actor or because they are a film star or because they've written a book? You don't see any distinction between the two? They don't hold themselves out as influences on the public, it's just that they're rather good at what they do." This is a very good question and Lord Leveson asks it three times and each time he is ignored by Rupert Murdoch who starts talking about how the Daily Telegraph uncovered the MPs expenses scandal. Which is irrelevant. Then Lord Leveson just gives up.

This ignoring the question is almost an accepted convention of media interviews. The most common example of which is where the interviewer asks: "Do you think X will happen?". Where X might be the government changing its mind on some policy. And the interviewee will say "I hope so." But that doesn't answer the question.

15. News is News.

Sometimes a news story will be something like: there is speculation about the future of the PM. And I am thinking to myself: yes, but that speculation is you, the media, speculating about it. So you are creating your own news, ie you are speculating and then reporting the fact that you are speculating.

16. Pictures.

TV news in particular (but also newspaper photographs). The pictures hardly ever really add anything to the facts that are conveyed in the words. They are almost always redundant. Either they can’t illustrate the story, for example which pictures go with the news about how interest rates have gone up? Or even if they can illustrate the story it isn’t important that they do so. For example pictures of the aftermath of an earthquake: we already know what scenes of ruined buildings look like. Pictures of these particular ruined buildings aren't really of any significance except for us to point at and say: oh isn't that awful! In general the only time it makes sense to see pictures is if it is a very particular event. Like a particular person being having something particular done to them. Most of the time the pictures are generic so they could use any pictures and it wouldn't matter. (Sometimes this will happen. The TV news will report on an earthquake in Iran and use pictures of some ruined buildings from other earthquake that happened in Turkey. And then they will apologise.)

A newspaper will have a story about the Prime Minister. And they will accompany it with a picture of the Prime Minister. Like we don't already know what they look like! Or a report about the car industry will have pictures of cars.

17. The internet.

Before the internet if you missed a story it was hard to find out about it. For example if there was a revolution in Incrediblania and you were on holiday that week (not in Incrediblania) you'd not be able to find out what happened. Unless you knew someone who kept newspapers.

18. Other content

There is other content on news programmes which should really be in some sort of lifestyle magazine. For example a pop band has released an album or a famous director has made an interesting movie. Or somebody famous has died. The latter I always find odd. Someone worthy dies and there is a report of people saying how fabulous they were. And I'm thinking: you should have told them that while they were still alive. They would have appreciated it more.

19. Conclusions.

There is an assumption that if you want to know about the world then it is very important to keep up to date with The News. This is not necessarily true. For those people who don't know about the background context situation (ie pretty much everybody). Those people should spend their time learning about that background. Until they know about the background anything they find out about ‘foreground’ discrete events won’t make any sense anyway.

Imagine all the time I spend in one year keeping up with The News. If instead I had spent that time learning some basic economics then this would have been more helpful in getting me to understand the world.

20. Coda.

We don't need The News because knowing about other people's misfortunes doesn't change the way we live our lives. ... It may well be that the real reason we need The News is some sort of psychological satisfaction it gives to us. It makes us feel a part of the world.

(NEWSFLASH: Frenchman has mistress.)

21. Other examples.

BBC Radio World Tonight 25.11.13. Story about an agreement reached whereby "in return for some sanctions being eased the Tehran government has agreed to curb its nuclear activity for six months". After that description of the facts there are a few comments from major world politicians (Obama, William Hague, Benjamin Netanyahu) about how good or bad this is. Then an interview with Michael Mann (not that one!) who is the spokesman for Baroness Ashton the EU Foreign Affairs Represtative. She being the chief negotiator it seems. The interview started with some comments about how hard the negotiations were. Interviewer asks: "you must have thought that you might not have reached an agreement". Mr Mann says "yes it was difficult". Then the interviewer asks him: "How much did personalities matter? Because it's a new government in Iran that the negotiations are with". Then some chit chat about how fabulous Baroness Ashton is as a negotiator. ... Me getting bored now. Thinking: where's the news about the actual agreement? What was actually agreed and what is its significance?

Channel 4 News 02.12.13. In a four minute report on unrest in the Ukraine the only thing that we get told about the reason for what's happening is that "the protests follow President Victor Yanukovych's refusal to sign a deal on closer ties with the EU". But why? Why exactly do the protesters want closer ties with the EU? What difference does it make to them? And, conversely, why do the people who don't want that, not want that. Nothing said about all this at all.

22. Details.

News reporting is often sloppy in other ways. I read a report which said "According to the US Census Bureau, in 2007 almost 46 million people in America didn't have health insurance.” But it’s the proportion that matters. They should have said so much percent rather than "46 million". It's as if the journalist who wrote the story just couldn't be bothered. Often when I read a news article I can spot plenty of places where some more detail is essential. But is missing. Other times a report will say something like that "in 1900 this cost £100". But this is of no significance unless I know about what £100 could buy in 1900 and what the earnings were.

23. TV News.

On TV (and radio) newsreaders don't talk in a normal voice. They have this weird singsong updown intonation which would sound ridiculous if you heard it in real life.

24. Addiction.

Despite all I have said about the insignificance of most of the news that we hear about yet people do seem to have a very strong desire and urge know what the news is. This has been increasingly served over the years by the advancing technologies dedicated to getting the news to us. You have 24 hour TV news channels. And then, with the internet, it's like constant. And people do have the permanent urge to know what's happening as soon as possible (if not sooner!). They are constantly refreshing the news feed on their devices.

But why do we have this desire to get The News? To know what is happening. I think it has got something to do with some kind of feeling of togetherness. So if there is some battle or disaster happening somewhere. This doesn’t affect Jack directly so that’s not his motive for wanting to know. But he knows that millions of other people are also wanting to know. So he joins in with this. As a way of feeling closer to all those other people. If nobody else was interested then he wouldn’t be either.