One of my favourite stories from the annals of The Irish Times concerns an incident where several editorial executives got into a fluster about something, in the aftermath of which one of them said to the other, okay, but in future I’d appreciate being kept in the loop. To which the person being addressed replied: “This is The Irish Times. There is no loop.”
One of the things evolution has handed down to us is an inclination not just to believe in loops, but to desperately want to be inside them. Sometimes, working as a reporter, you find yourself being told stuff by powerful people, in politics, business, or other areas of public life, and it can feel like someone has selected you for a bonus.
Or, sometimes, you find yourself in an off-the-record conversation with the well-paid flunky of some rich or powerful person, and they tell you what they really think of their boss, and you put the phone down with a decided spring in your step. Such moments, of course, are only pleasurable if the assessment shared is a negative one. Everyone understands that the confidential sharing of praise is utterly boring.
The hard currency of what used to be called the newspaper business is hard news. Well-sourced, accurate information about matters of legitimate public interest. Being the medium for such information is an important function, and to consider the activity as gossip does not distract from that.
McGrath hurrah - Frank McNally on the first Kentucky Derby, 150 years ago
Disunited Irishmen - Frank McNally on the year Shankill Road protestants paid tribute in Bodenstown and were attacked by the IRA
Red into the record – Frank McNally on Peadar O’Donnell’s libel case against the Irish Rosary magazine
Remembering the many talents of broadcaster, activist and historian Máire de Paor
A good reporter is a lover of gossip. You walk into the newsroom, spot a huddle, and you just know that the reporter in the middle of the huddle has a juicy bit of information. The air gets sucked out of every other conversation in the room. Everyone wants, not just to be in the loop, but to be inside the loop before everyone else.
Looking at one of these huddles from the far end of the newsroom is like being at the wrong end of the dinner table while everyone down the other end is listening slack-jawed to the whisperings of a person who has an obviously wonderful bit of grade A gossip. Which you can’t hear.
Despite, or perhaps because of my being raised as Catholic, it was not until I was ensconced in middle age that I first encountered the Gnostics, having come across a copy of the Gospel According to Judas. Part of the great power of the book, it seemed to me, is the idea that only those with a copy knew the real story. Given that the book dates from the second century AD, that’s likely to have been a very select group. Furthermore, the story told in the book is itself about a loop.
Contrary to the four canon gospels, the Gospel According to Judas reveals that, rather than being the bad guy, Judas was in fact an uber apostle, whom Jesus instructed to do what he did – betray him – so that what then happened could happen. Not only did Judas thereby play a key role in saving mankind, he was also favoured by Jesus with an understanding of His true message, one not revealed to the other apostles. Only people who knew the true nature of this message – and this didn’t include the other apostles – would gain eternal life. Talk about being inside the loop.
Leaving to one side the role played in modern societies by the media and organised religion (including nutty political ideologies), it is worth speculating for a moment about the evolutionary reason for their prominence. One obvious possibility is that being in the loop back in hunter-gatherer times could have been a deciding factor in certain types of life-or-death situations. More generally, being inside the loop, or not, could influence whether you and your offspring flourished within the group, or not. Perhaps this is why feeling outside the loop makes us anxious.
Likewise, there may be good reason, viewed from the perspective our of evolutionary past, why we spend so much time, and devote so much ingenuity as a species to, creating loops. Being in them comforts us and makes us happy. Back in the day you got an in-the-loop-buzz from having a Bob Dylan bootleg LP. Or, further back, you could be part of the tiny Gnostic group that knew, unlike the rest of humanity, that we never did get banished from the Garden of Eden.
We’re still in it. Just don’t tell the others.
