Alain de Botton: 'fizzing with ideas'. Photograph: Karen RobinsonThe anxious question journalists ask themselves every morning seems simple enough, but is often devilishly difficult: What is newsworthy? (And where the hell can I find enough of it to fill page one?) Alain de Botton, staging yet another of his philosophical firework displays, asks a rather different question. Here is a construct he calls The News. What is it, and does obsessing over it do us any good? Enter Hegel, Tolstoy, Sophocles and WH Auden, among many others, expert witnesses in his diverting, often infuriating quest to pin down the reasons why we dutifully switch on a radio at one or a TV at six in order to be told that This (or That) is The News.
Diverting? Of course. De Botton fizzes with ideas. A Teesside doctor downloads more than 1,300 child porn images, is caught, tried and jailed. His wife and their newborn baby leave him. He tries to commit suicide, and fails. It's a morose, mundane yarn. But "no less sad than the plotline of Madame Bovary or Hamlet – and, let's argue, the character of the doctor is not fundamentally any worse; Hamlet is, after all, a murderer, and Emma Bovary is guilty of extreme child cruelty". Why don't we sense great tragedy in these column inches? Or is the tragedy we see, and the fear that we, too, could somehow be laid low by Disaster or Accident (two of his chapter headings), the reason why the doctor's downfall is news?
Here, though, De Botton can be infuriating as well as stimulating. He pronounces from a philosopher's lofty chair. He does nothing you could call probing research. He merely analyses what he sees – and that can be naively obvious. He wants fewer bare facts in The News and more context and explanation. Fairness and balance? They only make sense as part of an overarching narrative (which can also be called bias). Put aside the twists and turns of economic reporting. Seek economic understanding instead. Don't make politics boring. And, while you're struggling to do better, rediscover an abiding interest in foreign affairs. De Botton wonders plangently why Uganda is so sparsely covered.
These are all worthy areas, to be sure. They are what intelligent, concerned citizens ought to want to know about the world that surrounds them. Perhaps, two centuries ago, the general populace could manage without The News most of the time. But now it's omnipresent, inescapable and, on this thesis, stuck in too many arcane ruts, pandering to fear and pessimism, relishing disappointment.
Yet you can't make the whole journey merely by playing the dissatisfied consumer. You have to turn the mirror the other way and, perhaps, find an editor to examine his latest "reading and noting" survey in which those consumers actually tell him what they read one morning. That political lead story about improving growth statistics? Switched off after the first two paragraphs. Those grim tidings from Uganda as the peace agreements in the north of the country come under strain? Sampled by 2% of your customers, mostly in the FO and Soas. But "Swiss-born philosopher faces new book crisis"? De Botton has whizzed to that first.
News starts with you, your family, your interests, your street. It expands via TV, captured by the people and lives you see on screen. (It was more interested in foreign coverage when it seemed the cold war could destroy us all at the push of a button). It is a box of fragments you try to assemble for yourself, rather than a finished jigsaw. Which means that it can't be pinned down in a handy user's guide. But at least it's worth thinking about constantly, fine, frisky, philosophical minds applied. For the construct is you.
