There’s a depressingly interesting piece by John Lanchester in the latest London Review of Books - an appreciative review of Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News about the parlous state of British journalism. It explains why people like me, who used read newspapers each day for information, now scarcely bother with them. The salient points are these:

Contemporary journalism is corrupted by an endemic failure to verify facts and stories.

Papers have switched from reporting facts to opinions from columnists.

Only twelve per cent of what’s in them is material the reporter has found out and checked on her or his own initiative.

Eighty-eight per cent is ‘churnalism’ - rewritten wire copy, mainly from the Press Association, and Public Relations organisations.

Press Association staffers write an average of ten stories in a single shift. ‘If the government says Saddam has WDM that’s what the PA will report.’

Modern journalism is now ‘the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those who provide it’.

Stories aim to be cheap, libel free, safe, and to give readers what they are supposed to want ‘lots of celebrity and tv-based coverage’.

Papers ‘have succumbed to their own internal celebrity culture of columnists, most of whom make no attempts to report on the world in favour of sermonising about it’.

Usually such columns are hung on news-related pegs so if the news is a load of churnalism…

Papers get larger and larger with no expansion of resources to do the work of filling them.

I found myself wondering about the effect on us of constant bombardment with misinformation. It seems we now live in a miasma of unreality – we should not believe politicians, we should not believe journalists, we should not believe what we’re told is so. And over and above doubtful veracity there’s so often an offensive tone from journalists, a sort of scornful superiority. In good fiction things might not be literally true, but the way they are told is literarily true. Which enlightens. But misinformation in a hectoring voice…

I suppose disaffection encourages solipsistic retreat: the turning to computer screens, to blogs, youtube and the karaoke mess on the ever growing world-wide-web.

I link up to this anarchy, to this interactive con. I quite like random blogging into the blue. But I have assiduously kept to a rule with my blog: print nothing out. My blog has no corporeal shape. It exists only in cyberspace. It is not for publication. Pull the plug and it’s gone. Which is no bad thing. And at least it leaves the trees in peace.

Paul Whelan being hauled from the stalls to the wings of the ENO the other night to sing Raimondo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, while Clive Bayley who had lost his voice mimed on stage, is a reminder of how fraught live performance can be. It can all get worse than drying, falling over the furniture and breasts bursting from cleavage. There was a Dutch production of Grease where the car with the lead lovers Danny and Sandy drove into the orchestra pit. One was concussed, the other had a broken arm but the musicians were all right. I remember Stephen Moore dangling from wires centre stage at the National Theatre for a quarter-of-an hour as he failed to fly in Peter Pan. He quipped about it being quicker by tube. Judi Dench as Cleopatra - was it again at the National - got her robe ripped to bits by a lump of set, but womanfully, and half-naked, went on about having immortal longings in her. The stage caught fire on the press night of The History Boys in 2004 and apparently that year too a lump of ceiling but not the chandelier fell on the stalls’ audience at the Haymarket in When Harry Met Sally.

And more on why that screening of Macbeth Live from the Met was such a touchstone – such a faith-renewer. It’s just so marvellous, in the sense of marvelling, that there’s William Shakespeare in about 1600 writing this sort of Ang Lee psychodrama about the controlling force of sexual passion, and then Giuseppe Verdi 250 years later, follows on, takes the drama further, and shows how flawed, self-seeking leaders destroy the lives of ordinary people, and then about 160 years after that Peter Gelb at the Metropolitan Opera House thinks about how to bring opera to a wide audience, and Adrian Noble thinks about how to stage Verdi with resonance for now, and those technological physicist wizards, whoever they are, do what they do with digital sound and high resolution whatevers, and live satellite transmission… and then this Russian Goddess, this Maria Guleghina, comes via heaven, understands all of it and pours out this extraordinary music and for three magical hours transports us £15-a-go (with discount) punters. Truly a good night out.

One of life’s Saturday evening pleasures for me is – or was – to hear opera live from the Met on Radio 3 on my DAB radio. Now that’s old hat. Yesterday evening, screened at the Barbican, I saw the first of the high-resolution videos the Met is beaming to Europe. It was of Verdi’s Macbeth with Maria Guleghina as Lady Macbeth. The whole thing seemed like genius. Apparently there were about ten cameras in the opera house and what we heard came from Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound.

We watched the Opera House audience taking their seats, saw the nervousness of the musicians, sneaked back stage and into the sound technician’s box, saw the sweat and dentistry of all the performers, understood what was going on because there were subtitles, and were musically, emotionally and artistically mesmerised. I’m ashamed to say I’d only ever half heard this great opera. Maria Guleghina was stunning. She’s from Odessa. She’s like some huge goddess who pours out divine sound. And Lado Ataneli was just as big as Macbeth. He’s from Georgia. John Relyea was brilliant as Banquo and Dimitri Pittas was brilliant as Macduff.

I felt a bit silly clapping in the cinema, but it was hard not to. It was like being a special visitor in the Opera House while a masterpiece was performed.

An idea that lingers from David Mamet’s Edmond: that behind fear there’s a wish. Watching Edmond’s descent, spookily conveyed by William H. Macy in the film version, it seems a persuasive thought. Locked in a prison cell, with the world lost, Edmond seems to find acceptance and repose.

Then I thought of some character from a James Baldwin story who says there’s always further to fall, and another who somewhere in Herman Hesse says we have to go through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. Cheery musings as the rain clouds gather and the globe hots up.