Luyendijk suggests that journalists should be far more open about the difficulties of their work, about the limitations of working in dictatorships or propaganda wars and simply tell people about them. News stories should be more reflexive. Concretely, reporters should say “I am now embedded and that means that…”, or “X is offering us this ‘news item’, Y’s slant is this, but frankly, there is a lot of spin and I can’t really tell right now what is really going on”. This comes closer to the ideal of ‘telling it like it is’ than the usual convention of reporting like an omniscient narrator.

However, he also makes an even riskier suggestion: to simply drop the convention of journalistic detachment when it gets in the way of empathy. If more journalists would say things like “The grief was palpable, I was shaken and troubled by witnessing it as an outsider”, they might no longer return to their hotel rooms to see the mourners they had accompanied presented as an angry mob on cable news. Perhaps because the risks are obvious, it’s the immanent critique of journalistic objectivity which gets most of the attention. But I think we should keep in mind that empathy is the ultimate goal. We don’t merely want to spout fashionable postmodernist verbiage about the nonexistence of the truly true.

I think Tom Friedman has had a lot of success with taxi drivers.

I am glad to read it’s now translated!

But it is CB’s review that has prompted me to get it down from the attic and start reading it at last.

With the decline of the organised ‘radical’ Left, this is something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention nowadays. People have to become aware (as they once were, but aren’t any more) that, whatever the talents and abilities of individual teachers, schools are, in the final analysis, run by the State.* And, given this, one should not be surprised if they end up attempting to mould children into ‘worthwhile’ citizens of the State, and this is, in fact, what they do.

Obviously there are all sorts of problems with modern schools, but the most egregious of their sins, and the most relevant to the piece above, is in the teaching of History. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I was at school till I was 17, and yet in all that time, I was not given any tuition or teaching, or any sort, about the British Empire. This despite the fact that, for most people ‘abroad’ the fact that Britain had the largest Empire of all time (and then lost most, but not all of it) is the key fact about 19th and 20th century Britain.

But how are we to even begin to have an understanding of (for example) the contemporary middle East without knowledge of the Balfour declaration? Or Sykes-Picot? Or the WW2 invasions of Iraq and Iran? Or later British ‘interventions’ in, for example, Oman?

These issues are sometimes discussed but usually in terms of media analysis, and obviously, the media should be mentioning these things. But frankly, they should be part of ‘our’ ‘common knowledge’. And discussing these things in a media context gives one’s opponents the obvious rejoinder that these facts are ‘boring’ (as opposed to Nuts and Zoo magazine, which are, apparently, ‘fun’ and ‘exciting’). And to be honest, they are a bit boring. But that’s precisely why kids should be taught them at school.

Unfortunately, of course, I have no idea what to do about any of this. In the absence of the rise of a radical Left wing political movement (which, in Britain and the United States at the moment looks about as likely as a Martian invasion) to put pressure on the Govt, what can one do? Might it be possible to put together a ‘pack’ about the British Empire for possible use in schools? I seem to remember this being mooted a while back. Of course, it depends a lot on what might be in this proposed ‘module’: with Blair and Brown apparently convinced that the British Empire was a ‘good thing’, a genuinely critical discussion seems hard to imagine.

But to return to the subject of the post: yes. The average British and American are not sympathetic to the Arab cause, but that’s because of what they have been taught (and have not been taught) about the history of the Middle East, and in the United States we have the baleful influence of modern (radical, protestant) religion as well.

Of course this should in no way exonerate the modern media, who have so dismally failed to keep their readers informed about foreign affairs generally, and the middle eastern situation in particular.

*Or in the case of private schools, follow a curriculum set by the State.

Three different titles for the English translation? Seriously, publishers, have you not got your pointy little heads around the fact that books have a global market now?

As for the cheap shot about Glenn Reynolds, ask Yehia El-Mashad if saving potentially millions of lives is worth one?