Leadership Quote by Aneurin Bevan

Bevan’s line lands like a dry slap: the news as a novel you can’t stop bingeing, not because it’s comforting, but because it’s artfully selective. Calling newspapers “continuous fiction” isn’t a lazy “the media lies” shrug. It’s a politician’s insider indictment of how daily reporting manufactures plot from chaos - heroes, villains, crises, resolutions - and sells it as sober reality.

The intent is twofold. First, it mocks the reader’s appetite for narrative certainty. “Avidly” admits complicity: even the skeptic is hooked. Bevan isn’t posing above the fray; he’s confessing that the performance works on him too. Second, it’s a warning about power. In Bevan’s Britain - the rise of mass-circulation papers, tight party warfare, postwar reconstruction, and a press often aligned with proprietors’ interests - the newspaper wasn’t just describing politics. It was pressuring it, narrowing what could be imagined as “responsible,” “dangerous,” or “inevitable.”

The subtext is that “objectivity” is less a standard than a style. Newspapers deliver continuity by smoothing over contradictions and turning policy into melodrama. For Bevan, who battled establishment narratives as an architect of the NHS and a fierce Labour tribune, this is also self-defense: if politics is routinely mis-storied, the public must learn to read news like literature - attentive to framing, omission, and whose voice gets treated as fact.

It works because it’s compact cynicism with a moral edge: you can enjoy the page-turner, but don’t mistake it for the world.