Just browsing our local Facebook page and came across this post from BBC Spotlight and I agreed with a lot of the reply posts. I don’t watch BBC news, I watch Sky News, and the reply posts could be aimed at that too as well as ITV. Of any evening I scroll the papers and majorityy of them are all doom and gloom too. Why can’t the news focus on good uplifting stories too. Is it us the consumers who love hearing about doom and gloom or is it what’s being sold to us. I notice The Guardian always asking for people to write in about doom and gloom too.
“Hi everyone. I’m a reporter at BBC Spotlight and hoping to talk to people about their experiences of ambulances and A and E over the Xmas period. Please could you message me if you’d be happy to share your experiences with the BBC on camera? Thanks!”
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“You would get more respect if you did a program on how the BBC protected Jimmy Saville and the bosses that support paedophilia. Then follow it with another of how the BBC accepted millions from Bill Gates to promote the plandemic and the poison thats killing people .”
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“Think that news outlets should make a collective resolution to report on positive things instead of constantly pedalling doom, gloom & fear articles. There are plenty of feel good stories if you bother to go looking”
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“Or maybe you could just ‘change the record’. Report on some positives for a change instead of purposefully dragging people down into your world of doom and gloom.”
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“…stop reporting on negative issues… …what we all need is positive items…remember “happy”?..”
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“Maybe if the media actually reported in an unbiased way and stopped continually broadcasting a diet of doom laden fear porn, people mental health might improve.”
Papers long ago decided that happy headlines don’t equate to sales. As for the MSM, all most of the big boys aim for is that gotcha moment. Good quality investigative journalism has largely been replaced by lazy reporters who use social media as their main source of information.
I wrote a thread about this a while ago. Humans have a negativity bias that is hardwired for survival. Good news registers less for people than bad news.
In my book it’s not the newspapers that decided that good news doesn’t raise sales figures but they simply noticed that people were more likely to buy a newspaper with negative headlines and concluded that people preferred bad news to good news. Another reason is that the press themselves considered it their main task to focus on what doesn’t work in society thus going for bad news rather than success stories.
The trouble is, I think, is that we need to prepare ourselves for what is to come or might come and have a realistic grasp of what the current situation is, so we can deal with it/put it right
Ignoring it, head in sand and living in cloud cuckoo land and insisting on being spoon fed good news instead, like parents placating toddlers, doesn’t really cut it for me
And also those good news programs, threads, sites, people can get a bit twee and ruddy irritating
I’m not so old yet I can’t cope with reality and need a pancreas exploding dose of sugar to make the medicine go down. Like being in one of those retirement homes where people come in to sing at you and be jolly
Yup, I’m grumpy and I’m afraid I’m more of a Diana Trent in Waiting for God type
I have noticed that my local news broadcasters often finish their daily News Reports with an uplifting story.
I do want to hear all the bad news too - forewarned is forearmed - but after hearing all the gloom and doom about the North East - the latest criminal / murder investigations, the latest manufacturing plant closing down, job losses, local politics, the cost of living crisis etc, it’s nice to hear an uplifting story about someone doing something nice for others or something charitable to support folk in their community.
I’ve noticed that ITV also try to lighten the mood at the end of their 10 o’clock news - either by finding an uplifting story to report on or by finding a funny side to a serious bit of news - that’s why I prefer to watch the ITV News at Ten, especially when Tom Bradby is the Newsreader - sometimes it’s just a slight lift of Tom Bradby’s eyebrow and a hint of a cheeky grin that cheers me up when he is reading the News.
The youngsters of my acquaintance tell me that “Facebook” is a thing of the past for them - if they post a few pics or comments on it, it is mostly for the benefit of the “oldies” in their family, like me!
Sadly, most teens nowadays get their “news” from Instagram, Tik Tok and YouTube, often second-hand from other posters, where there is very little journalistic checks or integrity.
That’s right and it’s been happening everywhere because feeding people with bad news chiefly worked for the paper versions of newspapers in the past. Although there are electronic versions of them these days, the same strategy doesn’t suffice in a world with more powerful opposite trends such as a lot of younger people informing themselves through social media exclusively where they find the same, and even worse, negative news items pepped up with videos and a lot more entertainment. The reasons for the printed newspapers declining go deeper and are manifold.
Well,I get liking to end on a positive note but it always feels a bit contrived to me. I picture the program controller frantically hunting around for something positive. Plus what they find is often a bit trivial compared to the serious stuff before it. Covid deaths and then someone’s found their cat! And it must be hard on the newsreaders having to switch mode after just reading the bad stuff
If they’re going to include good news it needs to be equally newsworthy, I think
