Boris and the missile | Marie and the mess
When quotes get streamlined, stories become what we want them to be rather than what they actually are...
Previously: I, Columnist
Nick Cohen's bullsh*t exit from The Observer and hype about AI articles reveal similar unpleasant realities about columnists and columns.
Desublimation is the term in physics for the transition where a gas becomes a solid without passing through a liquid phase. News reporting has its own version of desublimation, where a quote or incident goes from allowing doubt and nuance straight to a solidified ‘fact’ without passing through anything like analysis.
That’s what has happened with Boris Johnson’s claim that Vladimir Putin threatened him with a missile. Briefed to the press as part of the promotion for a new three-part BBC documentary series Putin vs. The West, in the hands of The Daily Mail it became the front page headline:
With a story bylined to political editor Jason Groves and deputy showbiz editor Emma Powell that begins:
Vladimir Putin threatened to assassinate Boris Johnson in the run-up to the Ukraine war; it emerged last night. The former prime minister said the Russian leader had bragged it would ‘take only a minute’ to kill him with a missile after he warned him to abandon his plans to attack Ukraine.The Sun gave it the following screamer…
Chilling No10 Phone Call
Boris: Mad Vlad threatened to kill me
… with political correspondent Ryan Sabey writing:
Vladimir Putin made a chilling threat to Boris Johnson that he could kill him in a missile attack, the former PM reveals today.
Mad Vlad’s menacing phone call came a day after Boris visited Kyiv last February amid fears of a Russian invasion.
Mr Johnson makes that shock claim in a BBC series starting tonight. It made The Telegraph's front page (Putin’s threat to kill Johnson) as a small story, page 3 of The Times under the headline It would only take me a minute to kill you with a missile, Putin told Johnson, The Daily Express’ front page (Boris: Putin told me, I could kill you in a minute), and the strapline of the Metro front page (Vlad’s ‘threat to kill Boris’). None of these stories noted the former Prime Minister’s long history of giving the truth the same level of respect he gives marriage vows.
The Guardian’s Ukraine live blog (at 11.01 GMT) showed a better example:
The Kremlin said on Monday that former British prime minister Boris Johnson was lying when he said Putin had threatened him with a missile strike during a phone call in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters that what Johnson said was not true, or “more precisely, a lie”. Johnson, who has repeatedly been accused of dishonesty during his political career, was speaking to the BBC for a documentary, and said the Russian leader had threatened him with a missile strike that would “only take a minute”.The point here is not to argue that Vladimir Putin isn’t also a dangerous and habitual liar; he absolutely is. Putin’s entire career has been built on deceit; he’s a ‘former’ KGB agent leading a kleptocratic regime: lies, dissembling and distortion are his currency (and hold their value far better than the rouble).
All that said, Boris Johnson is a fabulist; a man who lies with such greasy ease that he comes to believe his deceptions are reality. This interaction from Michael Cockerell’s 2013 profile of the then-Mayor of London, Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise, is telling:
Johnson: (talking about being stuck on a zip-wire) It was jolly high up, and after you were stuck up there for a while, things started to chafe.
Cockerell: Where was it chafing?
Johnson: I don’t want to go into details, Michael.
Cockerell: But in your book about the London Olympics, you said: ‘There was chafing in the groin area.’
Johnson: Did I? Oh, right.
Cockerell: That’s what’s so difficult about interviewing you, Boris. You can’t even recognise your own words.
Johnson: I can never remember what I’ve written — but if it’s in my book, it must be true. John Palmer, who was covering Brussels for The Guardian when Johnson was filing his notorious fictions about the EU for The Daily Telegraph, warned him that his lies would have consequences. Palmer claimed he replied:
You’re taking it all too seriously, for God’s sake. Have a sense of proportion, old boy. It’s the underlying truth that you’re missing, the underlying truth.The “underlying truth” is what appeals to the papers and broadcasters who are taking part in the desublimation of Johnson’s assassination claim. But here is the full anecdote as it’s delivered in the documentary:
I get back from Kyiv and the following day, I’ve got Putin on the blower again. This is a very long call and a most extraordinary call. I said to him, ‘If you do this it will be an utter catastrophe, it will mean a massive package of western sanctions; it will mean we intensify our support for Ukraine; and it will mean more Nato, not less Nato on your borders.’ And he said, “[puts on a Russian accent for the next word] Boris, you say that Ukraine is not going to join Nato any time soon…” — he said it in English “… what is ‘any time soon’?” And I said, “Well, it’s not going to join Nato for the foreseeable future, you know that very well.”
Fundamentally it wasn’t about, you know, he, sort of, threatened me at one point and said, “Boris, I don’t want to hurt you but with a missile, it would only take a minute,” or something like that. Err, yeah, jolly. But I think from the very relaxed tone he was taking, the air of detachment he seemed to have, he was just playing along with my attempts to get him to negotiate. Look at the caveats that he uses (“…sort of…”, “…or something like that”) and consider Johnson’s own “relaxed tone” as he recounts this tale like a P.G. Wodehouse character discussing an awful brute who got agitated at a garden party.
The story comes late in the third part of the documentary series but the film-maker Norma Percy cuts and shuts part of it with another phrase at the start of the episode:
Putin’s a very, very clever and calculating man. It was very, very difficult to find leverage and ways of constraining him. You know, he sort of, he threatened me at one point and said, ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you but with a missile, it would only take a minute. In that construction, some of the doubt, the sense of mirthless jest from the full retelling is eradicated; the phrase is recontextualised by placing it just after the observation of Putin’s “clever and calculating” nature.
The news stories that strengthen the “threat” play as a similar game of cutting up the quote. In The Daily Mail, the phrases are scattered through the copy, while The Sun buries the full quote on page 4 in the middle of the story. Johnson’s statement that Putin “sort of, threatened [him]” is not enough to maintain a front-page story so it has to be desublimated and solidified to become a certain threat with a clear intent.
In The Times original story, the headline is certain (It would only take a minute to kill you with a missile, Putin told Johnson) while the copy is equivocal:
It was unclear if the comment was made in jest. The Times’ habit of making wholesale updates to the headline and text of stories online muddies the situation here. Following the Kremlin’s claim that Johnson had engaged in “either a deliberate lie… or an unconscious lie [because] he did not in fact understand what Putin was talking to him about”, the paper’s website updated the headline and opening text at the URL where the original story had been to read:
The Kremlin has denied that President Putin told Boris Johnson that he could easily kill him with a missile during a phone call before Russia invaded Ukraine. The former prime minister said that Putin had made the comment during an “extraordinary” long call last February as Russian troops massed near Ukraine’s border. “He sort of threatened me at one point and said, ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile, it would only take a minute,’ or something like that,” Johnson told the BBC.This is a problem — one I’ve mentioned before and will continue to mention — because it means days/weeks/months/years from now anyone who refers to the online archive thinking that it’s a contemporaneous record of the paper’s reporting will be presented with a muddied timeline.
There’s a very good reason for writing standalone follow-ups and linking to previous stories rather than updating in real-time with no indication to the reader. If you don’t, the progression of the reporting is entirely obscured. In most cases, I think The Times updates stories rather than writing new ones through a mixture of time-saving and perceived SEO advantage, but sneaky updates also allow it to obscure errors, bad calls, and poor analysis.
Polishing quotes to shave off sharp edges and erase caveats leads to similar issues. Already the certainty of headlines and broadcast news reports on the Johnson claim is leading to pronouncements like this Dan Snow tweet:
Putin’s threat to kill Johnson reminds me of the German attempt to assassinate Lord Northcliffe in WWI. Owner of The Times & Mail, the press magnate was virulently anti-German, becoming a government propaganda official.
A German naval ship bombarded his house Elmwood in Broadstairs. An unverified anecdote from a habitual liar keen on burnishing his reputation in the history books is tied there to a claim about an alleged assassination attempt on a long-dead press baron, which itself has solidified into settled fact through repetition.
The top reader comment underneath The Daily Telegraph’s story about the ‘threat’ at the time of writing sums up what I think is the correct position on this tale:
Don’t take anything Putin says as a joke, but in the same breath, don’t take anything Johnson says as the truth.An interview with Marie Kondo has led to a similar, if considerably less geopolitically perilous, set of stories. Kondo, the Yoda of tidying up, told The Washington Post:
My home is messy, but the way I am spending my time is the right way for me at this time at this stage of my life. Like Johnson’s conversation with Putin, Jura Koncius's talk with Kondo was conducted via a translator. Her words are framed by a headline — Marie Kondo’s life is messier now — and she’s fine with it — designed to surprise the reader and presented via the prism of the interviewer’s expectations, prejudices and preconceptions:
This book is a bit of a reality check. Kondo, 38, has caught up with the rest of us, trying to corral the doom piles on our kitchen counters while on hold with the plumber and trying not to burn dinner. The multitasker seems somewhat humbled by her growing family and her business success, maybe realizing that you can find peace in some matcha even if you drink it in a favorite cracked mug rather than a porcelain cup. It made sense for the Washington Post to pretend that Kondo has only just ‘admitted’ that keeping your house tidy with three kids in it is hard; it gives the piece an angle that hits the sweet spot of anger and self-righteousness that really makes interviews fly online. But it’s not true.
In 2019, when she was promoting her children’s book Kiki and Jax: The Life-Changing Magic of Friendship, she wrote on her blog:
When I first became a mother, I felt frustrated when I couldn’t tidy my home exactly the way I wanted. Then, after having my second child, I didn’t even have the energy to consider some of my former practices around the house! Motherhood taught me to be more forgiving of myself.
The joy that comes from parenting exceeds any satisfaction that could have come from a perfectly neat home.The Washington Post quote that has prompted so many gleeful follow-ups from other outlets reads:
Up until now, I was a professional tidier, so I did my best to keep my home tidy at all times. I have kind of given up on that in a good way for me.
Now I realize what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home.Just as the caveats from the Johnson quote have been desublimated away to make the threat sound more serious, the detail of the Kondo quote is boiled down to just six words: “I have kind of given up…” The detail (“… in a good way for me…”) is erased.
It’s because the image of Kondo disappearing beneath a pile of washing is appealing to people who mistakenly think she was some cleaning commandant forcing everyone to obey a set of ironclad rules. The “kind of given up” stories are being clicked and shared so much because it seems like a comeuppance.
But read the whole Washington Post piece and you discover:
[Kondo] and her husband, Takumi Kawahara, president of KonMari Media, the company she founded, carefully plan their days to spend time with their children while still getting other tasks done. (Kawahara, by the way, goes to bed at the same time as the kids and gets up at 4 a.m.) She gets through the day by flinging open her windows for some fresh morning air, lighting incense and wiping the soles of her shoes. And, yes, she does thank her shoes for supporting her when she is cleaning them after a day of service.Marie Kondo’s house is still cleaner and tidier than yours or mine will ever be. And that’s okay. She’s not coming around to do an inspection.
But the nuanced version will now disappear beneath the avalanche of stories relying on the ‘better’ quote and it will become a settled fact that Kondo “gave up” on tidying. It’s a ‘fact’ that feels better and fits with the story that a lot of people want to be true — tidying guru clashes with reality and reveals she was full of shit — rather than the gentler version: Kondo was just mildly honest about life when she could easily have pretended to be perfect to keep the uncomplicated sales coming.
In the physics of modern news, the most streamlined quote wins and inconvenient facts and caveats just slow that down.
Thanks to Dr Kate Devlin for reading today’s draft and sparking joy for me.1
There are 7,305 subscribers to this newsletter (up 55 since last time). Consider upgrading to a paid subscription. You’ll get bonus editions and help me keep writing.
Thank you if you’re one of the 582 (up 1 since last time) people who do. My new target is hitting 600 before Valentine’s Day.
This is a Marie Kondo reference and not just a weird wife-guy thing.
Either it’s true that Putin threatened Boris in order to gain popularity by being the guy who killed Boris or Boris is lying again. The trouble being is that Boris tells that many lies that it’s difficult to believe. The boy who cried wolf