Bluetongue, bird flu, MRSA, winter vomiting virus. To the catalogue of plagues visited upon us in the new millennium we must add one more: Rowan Williams hysteria.
They went crazy. Not just the Sun, with its ludicrous write-in/ phone-in campaign demanding that the Archbishop of Canterbury be sacked, but all the rest - qualities, too. Front page after front page, leading article after leading article, fact box after fact box, cartoon after cartoon, spread after spread (a "four-page special" in the Sunday Telegraph, no less) - and, of course, opinion column after opinion column.
Williams was idiotic (Simon Heffer, Telegraph), "like some deranged Duracell rabbit" (Jeremy Clarkson, Sun), a moral coward (Matthew d'Ancona, Sunday Telegraph); he was guilty of "a kind of treason" (Minette Marrin, Sunday Times); he had taken "a gigantic step backwards" (Stephen Glover, Mail); the C of E was finished (Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, Express).
There was much, much more - it was a torrent - and the supposedly worldly-wise editorials (the Times ran three in four days) were scarcely less intemperate. What was it all about? You may well ask.
There was a speech at the root of it, but if you found a competent summary of it anywhere in your newspaper - that is to say, a report of what was said rather than a parade of the indignation it provoked - then you were lucky. You got a few lines of paraphrasing at best, and almost no direct quotation. As for verbatim extracts, the best I saw in print was 300 words in the Guardian - from a 6,000-word original.
In all the headless-chicken, frothing-at-the-mouth excitement, when we were being told that no one in the whole world agreed with what Williams had said, our newspapers could not be bothered to put the archbishop's own point of view in anything more than caricature form. (An exception was the Times, but in that case it was delivered between tongs, like something noxious.)
The consequence was that we had a caricature of a debate. Downing Street, Trevor Phillips, the Bishop of Rochester, Nick Clegg, Baroness Warsi and many more were wheeled out to denounce something, but was it the speech or the caricature? In most cases I bet it was the latter.
Not only was the speech inconveniently long, it was also "nuanced and complex" and "not easily accessible", as the Times put it - or "like wading through cold porridge", in Glover's phrase. This was journalistic code, and the hidden message was something like this: "We journalists are struggling to understand it, so you, dear readers, would not have a hope." Insulted? You have been.
Worse still, even our most thoughtful writers were asserting that this caricaturing was, to use a Williams word, unavoidable. Paul Vallely in the Independent wrote that our news culture had no room for academic subtlety and "a canny religious leader . . . ought to know that", while Andrew Brown in the Guardian argued that the rules of the modern media forbade an archbishop from saying some things even if they were "true, and urgent and important".
This is an abdication. If we have intelligent newspapers, surely they should be intelligent and brave enough: a) to deliver a sensible, calm debate about a speech even when it is long and expressed in academic terms, and b) to rise above the responses of less intelligent media. People don't pick up the Guardian or the Independent so they can listen to the echoes of the Mail and the Express, or even echoes of the BBC.
And if the newspaper brouhaha took place in the virtual absence of the speech that provoked it, it also ignored the practicalities. Let us say that Williams really had argued that sharia should become part of British law (the accepted caricature). Would that mean this change was about to happen? No. Would it make it more likely that it could ever come about? Marginally perhaps, but only in a distant future, far over the news horizon.
The pity is that real things happened in this country in those same days that were actually worthy of hysterics. Not least of them, we learned that an MP had been bugged by police while talking to a constituent, and we saw allegations that prisoners in jails were routinely (and almost certainly illegally) bugged while talking to their solicitors. These were not theological speculation, and they followed a stream of revelations about the growth of official surveillance. Can't we get excited about that instead?
Williams's speech, if you read it (try the Lambeth Palace website), was a cautious, almost apologetic attempt to address, in terms of principle and with due reference to learned literature, a matter that concerns all religions, including his own. You might disagree with it, but there was no justification whatever for a collective attack of the heebie-jeebies.
