It is not the media’s job to restore our faith in humanity

Nothing has the power to make me feel as weary as news people who call themselves “storytellers” with a straight face – well, nothing apart from downloading pictures from WeTransfer, but that’s another story.

In structure, if not in content, reporting is the opposite of fiction. A standard news report relays the most important information first, while good fiction often omits or holds significant details back. “Storytellers” have a big box of tricks at their disposal, some of which reporters can borrow, but many of which they would do best to avoid.

Yet it is apparent that even when media organisations stick to sober “who, what, where, when, why, how” rundowns, there is an instinct among the audience to create their own narratives out of the chaos. And these narratives – okay, stories – recall artificially sweetened, tied-up-with-a-bow drama an astonishing amount of the time.

Twitter users, certainly, require no news outlet to provide them with uplifting story arcs. French police were still in the thick of the terrorist attacks on November 13th when the hashtag #PorteOuverte, meaning Open Door, began to trend. The hashtag, a means by which Parisians could offer people in the city a safe place to shelter, soon became swamped by people outside France declaring that this simple act had restored their faith in humanity.

The immediate problem was a practical one. In rushing to commend Parisians for rallying round, Twitter users repeated #PorteOuverte so frequently they made it harder for those in need of a roof to search the hashtag. But its spread was curious for another reason. At this point, not only had the death toll not been established, but exactly what was happening at the Bataclan theatre was unclear. It felt like some Twitter users had chosen to skip ahead to the heartwarming coda even as the horror was still unfolding.

And it was the speed at which #PorteOuverte was wrapped up into a story of help and resilience, and rounded up into articles, that stood out. If 2015 has had a common theme – which it hasn’t, as years don’t have neat common themes, but if it had – it would be this race to find in even the grimmest and messiest of events the faith-in-humanity angle.

Twitter, plagued by criticism that it doesn’t do enough to counter ugly abuse and trolling on its platform, was this week only too pleased to list hashtags such as #JeSuisCharlie, #JeSuisParis and #RefugeesWelcome among its biggest moments of the year.

It is cheering when Londoners’ pride in the onlooker who shouted “you ain’t no Muslim bruv” at a knife attacker garners greater attention worldwide than the violence itself. In that case, it feels right.

But there is a wider question. What weight should serious media organisations give to reassuring counter-narratives in times of bleak news?

It is 75 years since the UK government, at the peak of the London blitz, encouraged news accounts of bomb shelter singalongs and censored reports that pondered whether people could take much more. Today, there’s a self-imposed tone-policing at play, in which complex tragedies must share media real estate with more palatable expressions of hope, or get subsumed beneath them, as if all has been resolved and the credits can roll.

Twitter's year of hashtag solidarity is only one example. Intense tabloid yearning for heroes is another staple. One news hero, an ex-firefighter photographed supporting a woman in a gauze mask after the London 7/7 attacks, became a character of such interest that his phone was later hacked by the News of the World.

Then there’s the “miracle rescue” story genre that appears after an especially miserable natural disaster. The loss of life in these earthquakes and tsunamis may be too huge to contemplate, but what is digestible, and straight out of the Hollywood handbook, is the story of the child who is lifted from the rubble days later with barely a scratch.

There is, clearly, audience demand. But #JeSuisCynical. The day in which news organisations base which events they cover and how they cover them on viewer ratings or most-read charts is the day they jump the shark and it doesn’t even go viral.

Humans do what they can to cope at times of shock and despair. It is normal to feel several conflicting emotions (disgust plus relief, fear plus love) at the same time and express them, just as it perfectly normal, and part of life, to respond to pain with laughter. Perspective is everything.

But the media has a responsibility not to turn life-affirming postscripts into pat distractions from ongoing crises, and not to treat the news as entertainment. There is a lot to be said for the stony-faced approach.