No news is bad news?
Media expert Dr John Jewell on why it is the news’ job to tell us when things in the world aren’t right...
AS I write, the full horror of last Wednesday’s tower block fire in London’s North Kensington is only just beginning to emerge.
I watched the news live, like millions of others, as TV breakfast reports showed the blaze in its intensity and eyewitnesses told of their experiences. It was an obviously traumatic experience for those involved – as it was, to a far lesser degree of course, for those viewing at home.
In terms of localised tragedies it’s been a pitiless few months for the United Kingdom. Coming so quickly after the terror attacks in Manchester and London, the fire in Notting Hill serves to illustrate the fragility of life and the tendency of the modern world to serve up catastrophe and loss on a seemingly daily basis. If it is not calamity at home, then it is war, disease, famine and death abroad.
All of which can lead to a general mood of despondency and even despair.
In our hyper-mediatised world of 24-hour news from a variety of platforms, the opportunities to learn about catastrophic events as they happen can increase the sense the world is irrevocably and increasingly dangerous. It’s no wonder psychologists and media theorists seek to evaluate the impact of such exposure.
As Professor Graham Davey of Sussex University writes, negative news items not only lead to a more uneasy world view, they are also likely to have an impact on an individual’s personal worries and anxieties unrelated to the subject at hand.
According to US expert on media consumption and stress, Mary McNaughton-Cassill, it’s reasonable to see media coverage as an “unrelenting flow” especially when regularly complemented by social media. Part of McNaughton-Cassill’s advice for coping with an omnipresent bad news cycle is to simply turn off or take a break.
She told Jesse Singal of New Yorker magazine: “You can’t change the externals. You have to get some control mentally. What’s most important is getting a handle on why you get anxious and worried about things that probably aren’t going to happen, or knowing what your triggers are. The more you understand your own reaction to the news, the easier it will be to shape your newsconsumption habits in an adaptive way.”
But there are also those that recommend a complete disconnection from the news. Businessman and self-help guru, Rolf Dobelli argues that “news is to the mind what sugar is to the body” in his words, it’s toxic to our bodies, it makes us passive and it increases cognitive errors. It grinds us down, he posits, to a state of “learned helplessness” characterised by sarcasm, fatalism and pessimism.
For Dobelli, a 30-day detoxification will leave the news addict refreshed and relaxed – with improved understanding, better concentration and more time to do other things. Anything important to your job, family or community will make it through anyway, he writes. Really important facts will not be lost to the ether.
But while it would be foolhardy to reject Dobelli’s arguments completely, they do strike me as simplistic and potentially damaging to active citizenship. If we are to be informed about society and to be aware of its injustices and inequalities, then we cannot rely solely on personal experience. How are we to evaluate the quality of our own existence if we do not know of how others live, behave and are governed? How would we develop our empathy to those in situations far less fortunate than our own?
News literacy – or more broadly media literacy – is more important than ever in the digital age when the old paradigms of what is news are changing. The sheer amount of information available to us and the ability of anyone with a PC or smartphone to publish information means that engagement with news becomes absolutely necessary. To be able to detect “fake news” we must first know the environment.
I would argue that our ability to succeed in life depends on our mastery of modern media and to disengage completely should not be the preferred option. The images we see on news programmes may disgust us and cause us to despair about man’s inhumanity – but they help us to comprehend what is going on. The real world is not one where global problems are solved by individual purchase decisions and the happy endings of popular fiction are not the norm. Dreadful things do happen and they have always happened.
But it’s about balance. It’s vital to also understand that we get the news we do because media organisations are in the business of drawing our attention to unusual occurrences which disrupt everyday life. The world is not a fundamentally evil place but it’s the news media’s job to tell us when things aren’t right.
And though it’s hard, let’s be positive – we can see that out of bad news examples of human kindness can emerge. Look at what happened when news of the tower block fire first broke. Social media was alive with people offering shelter and clothing. People made their way across London to offer help. Similarly, in three days after the Manchester Terrorist attack millions of pounds was raised to help those affected
The final thing to point out in these days of doom and gloom is that statistically there has never been a better time to be alive in human history.
Evidence provided by the World Economic Forum indicates that global poverty continues to decrease as economic conditions for those still struggling shows signs of improvement.
It’s important to not descend entirely into hopelessness. That in turn means we’ll be more able to properly digest the worst news we hear – and to respond to it seriously and compassionately instead of just switching off.
Dr Jewell is director of undergraduate studies at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media