048: "Not Quite Fresh:" On Truth in Broadcasting
Penelope Fitzgerald's "Human Voices" and the importance of independent media
[The bell’s] always got to be relayed direct from Westminster, the real thing, never from disc. That’s got to be firmly fixed in the listeners’ minds. Then, if Big Ben is silent, the public will know that the war has taken a distinctly unpleasant turn.
—Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices
Hello, book survivalists. It’s been a minute, so I thought I would send a quick dispatch from the front lines of traveling for work and writing while traveling.
As SBB regulars know, I think that Penelope Fitzgerald is the GOAT—the indisputable best of all the late 20th century novelists, and Human Voices, a comic novel about the BBC during World War II, has been on my mind lately.
Based on Fitzgerald’s own experience working in the BBC during the Blitz, Human Voices takes place inside the BBC mothership, Broadcasting House, where “the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and the barely sane, broadcast the news of the British war effort to the citizenry.” At the time of this book’s telling, an internecine conflict is brewing.
On one side of the divide is the BBC’s extraordinary wartime commitment to using live reporting whenever possible in order to cut down the number of recordings, or otherwise edited material, in their broadcasts.
Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective. And yet there was no guarantee of this. Truth ensures trust, but not victory, or even happiness. But the BBC had clung tenaciously to its first notion, droning quietly on, at intervals from dawn to midnight, telling, as far as possible, exactly what happened. . .The direct human voice must be used whenever we can manage it — if not, the public must be clearly told what they've been listening to — the programme must be announced as recorded, that is, ‘Not Quite Fresh.'
Even the sound of Big Ben’s bells must be live every single time they are heard on BBC airwaves—microphones have been mounted on the roof to capture for whom the bells are tolling, along with the beginning and end of nightly air raids.
On the other side of the divide are the people who make the now undervalued recordings, namely the Department of Recorded Programmes, which is known inside Broadcasting House as “the seraglio” because its Director (RPD) feels that “he could work better when surrounded with young women.” The RPD, already a fragile fellow, heaps consternation on the heads of the aforementioned young women who work for him as the need for his content dries up. Amongst other things, Human Voice is a wry send-up of office life—such as in this opening sequence, in which Vi, the novel’s protagonist, brings a new girl, Lise, up to speed on managing the RPD
Vi herself had only been at BH for six months, but since she was getting on for nineteen she was frequently asked to explain things to those who knew even less.
`I daresay you've got it wrong,' she added, being patient with Lise, who was pretty, but shapeless, crumpled and depressed. `The RPD won't jump on you, it's only a matter of listening.'
`Hasn't he got a secretary?'
`Yes, Mrs Milne, but she's an Old Servant.'
Even after three days, Lise could understand this.
The book is one part comedic war-time house party inside the headquarters of one of the world’s great broadcasting houses and one half dark satire of war-time survival. Most of it takes places between the walls of the BH; forays into the real world are furtive, ancillary, and haunted by the howl of the air raid sirens or fresh news of friends and family bombed out of their homes. Love affairs begin quickly and end even more abruptly. It’s a funny and sad and captures both the fragility and resilience of London during the worst of the Blitz, while paying tribute to a group of people who tried—even if they didn’t always succeed—to broadcast a trustworthy version of the news that could cut through the fog of war.
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Given that it centers on the idea that telling the truth about a crisis as a non-negotiable, Human Voices could fairly be considered required reading right now, especially given that we seem to be enduring a phase of mass confusion about what it takes to actually tell the truth and indeed recognize what even is the truth.
In a time of pre-prints, click-bait, quotes-out-of-context, immutable political polarization, and corporate-owned media outlets, the difference between signal and noise is getting more and more difficult to parse. “Believe the science” has become a darkly satirical phrase for me; between eyebrow-raising announcements from the CDC, pundits who freely opine on cable news without disclosing their ties to, for example, pharmaceutical companies, and the difficulty of interpreting and contextualizing rapidly emerging data sets, what is called ‘science’ and what is called ‘misinformation’ seems perilously subjective.
The difficulty of reading critically when the content is as complex as medical research is understandable, if worrying. But the quickness to censor dissenting views as ‘misinformation’ is beginning to border on terrifying, for me anyway. The whole mess between Joe Rogan and Neil Young is only the latest example. When the Guardian describes Spotify’s refusing to remove Joe Rogan’s podcast from its airwaves as “naked capitalism,” they may well be technically correct, but this refreshing critique of the capitalist impulse also begs the question, what good does it do anyone to take Rogan’s three hour long conversations on a wide range of topics out of the podosphere? You don’t have to agree with Joe Rogan or his guests to believe that their voices should be heard. You don’t have to agree with them to listen critically and even maybe learn something, if only how to ask better questions of the people you do trust. You also just don’t have to listen to him. Why die Neil Young have to fall on this particular sword?
And, how is it that we so easily gnash our teeth about the perils of the social media echo chamber of the people who disagree with us, and yet not expose ourselves to any thinking that might disrupt our own echo chamber?
Covid-19 may seem like it has gone on forever, but it is a new problem, scientifically speaking. The idea that the solutions to it exist as fixed science, as determined and disseminated by Jen Psaki, CNN, and the New York Times is silly. We are in a crisis that is plenty big enough to survive a lot of thoughtful ideas and questions. We are in a crisis that deserves some spirited debate. I would go so far as to say that we may well be in a crisis that is lengthened because we have shut down too much debate.
Matt Taibbi has a new piece out on this topic that is well worth your time.
The fact that Taibbi, who is a well-respected journalist, has taken extraordinary heat for defending the importance of investigative reporting on such topics as Hunter Biden’s laptop, the problematic origins of Russiagate, or the ongoing violation of Julian Assange’s civil rights, is telling. And, the now semi-regular hit pieces on the rise of Substack is likewise a red flag for me. It is very fashionable to decry the rise of fascism right now. It is also very fashionable to call for dissenting voices and independent media platforms to be shut down. These things do not add up. Independent media and reporting is one of the best weapons we have against the rise of fascist or corporate control (or both.) And, supporting independent reporting and media means supporting free speech—including tolerating people who have beliefs that are repugnant to us. We have learned this lesson over and over—why are we flirting with anything different?
When I read that Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” is being censored or that Glenn Youngkin has set up a tipline to report teachers who are fostering ‘divisive discussions,’ I think about 1930’s German fascism and 1950s American McCarthyism, don’t you? I also thought about the 1930s and the 1950s when Twitter banned Donald Trump. As much as I hated having him on Twitter, I hated it more that a small group of people in a for-profit company made that decision—and that most people who didn’t like Trump didn’t even question it.
Yeah, it takes work to sift through the noise—it takes patient reading and listening, a tolerance for ambiguity, a relentless love of questions, a willingness to understand data visualization, and an awareness that an army of marketers, publicists, lobbyists and other creative types (like myself) are paid, every single day, to put their company or politician’s spin on the truth and get it out into the world as “science” or “facts.’
We don’t have to do this work all the time—god knows we need to escape into one of Penelope Fitzgerald’s perfectly luminous novels or the second season of Starstruck just to survive the winter, but we could maybe lay off the idea that it’s a good idea to cancel dissenting views and maybe throw a few dollars toward independent news and media while we’re at it.
Here are a few independent podcasts and writers that I trust and support—please add your own recommendations in the comments!
Bad Faith podcast with Briahna Joy Gray: leftist political commentary with a commitment to thoughtful dialog across diverse points of view.
TK by Matt Taibbi: independent investigative reporting
Big by Matt Stoller: investigative reporting on the types and effects of corporate monopolies—he’s been especially trenchant on supply chain issues and big tech.
Naked Capitalism, the OG blog about economics, finance and power, still going strong
Freddie de Boer’s blog: extremely prolific (take the time to tweak your subscription choices if you do decide to subscribe), left-leaning, but widely critical of left- and right- leaning mainstream media, ‘pathologies of the left,’ and corporate influence on politics.
Ground Truths by Eric Topol, a cardiologist with “some expertise in genomics, digital and artificial intelligence” who has been writing about Covid as part of Substack’s writer-in-residence program
Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti. Originally the hosts of The Hill’s “Rising” news broadcast, Krystal and Saagar went independent last summer.
Hello from the Netherlands
I just wanted to share evidence that I’ve left my home state for maybe only the 3rd or 4th time since before the Covid era. ❤️
Survival by Book will re-commence for real in March—until then I promise at least one more excerpt from Socially Distanced and maybe another book chat—we shall see. Stay tuned.
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