Good news is no news
On the face of it last week contained two really good bits of news. First, there was unemployment apparently peaking at nearly half a million fewer people than most analysts, including the Government’s, were predicting this time last year. Second, the crime stats showed an 8% headline fall, again defying the widespread prediction that there would be more offences committed during the recession.
I am sure the Government wishes more attention was being paid to the good news, and hoping an effect might show up in the opinion polls. If so, ministers will have been disappointed to open Sunday newspapers, brimming not with glad tidings but endless analysis of the child assaults in Edlington, plus pages of speculation about how the current and previous Prime Minister will perform in the Iraq inquiry. But it’s not so much the politics that interest me.
Both the employment and crime news are genuinely interesting. There are various explanations for the former and tucked away on the BBC website is a very good overview from Stephanie Flanders. So the news was reported and there are analyses available, but why don’t people seem particularly interested? Compare this with the endless agonising – on the news, in the papers, but also in bus queues and pubs – about whether this would be the worst recession since (or even including) the Great Depression.
It’s a cliche that the news focuses on bad things. Over the years various people, from newsreaders to website founders, have tried to get people interested in a more balanced offering. But our lack of interest in how we have come through the downturn better than we expected, and our willingness to put so much more emphasis on the terrible crimes of two disturbed boys than the benign social trend revealed in the crime stats, underlines the depth of our social pessimism.
Last week, in an RSA Thursday event discussing optimism, a telling point was made. One of our advocates for pessimism, the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan, said that a great thing about thinking the worst is that pessimists are surprised and delighted when things go well. But, as Laurence Shorter, author of The Optimist replied, what actually happens when inveterate pessimists are presented with good news that they ignore it, discount it or start looking for its drawbacks.
So wedded are we now to social pessimism that we are unwilling even to acknowledge that as a country we appear to have become both more economically resilient and socially responsible. If we don’t take in the good news we will be even less able to deal intelligently with the bad.
Comments
3 Comments on Good news is no news
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Livy on
Sun, 24th Jan 2010 10:50 pm
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Kelly Neville on
Mon, 25th Jan 2010 9:10 am
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Indy on
Mon, 25th Jan 2010 3:17 pm
An optimist and a pessimist are having a conversation. The pessimist says, “Things are terrible, they can’t get any worse”. The optimist says, “Oh yes they can”.
Personally I think people have a special part of their brain that deals with news media. They subconsciously know it is a pessimistically conditioned opinion, and will draw on it when meeting strangers to break the ice when making conversation, like the weather. But underneath, relatively speaking of course, there is that balancing force going on, and I have heard two friends at least say something along the lines of; “under normal conditions we would be doomed by ….. but hey, this is 2010, we can do anything!”. And funnily enough I find myself believing this, we have the ability to solve problems today like never before, because everybody can communicate with everybody else today. Good ideas can go viral like a good joke, a youtube clip or a song that has just too much quality to need the conventional marketing avenues.
Matthew, it seems your evidence that “good news isn’t news” is that the media didn’t “run with” the good news… Some thoughts:
1) On Edlington (note: I used to live nearby) – there’s always been a fondness in the media (and audience) for macabre tales – the horrible details titillate – and it’s an arms race between the papers – who will break ranks? If one recalls the Bulger case, these incidents have a dark power of attraction for audiences. The sadness is that there was a time when the “broadsheets” would not have led with this, leaving it to the “tabloids” – but it seems they are all tabloids now…
That’s a ramble, but the key issue is that the specific triumphs over the general every time. There’s no “first person perspective” to a fall in overall crime. There could have been a first person perspective to the fall on crime, but that would involve giving some credit to someone and I’ll address that in my next point.
2) Unemployment – no macabre competition here, one might think… except the spectre of (potentially) some misleading statements finally catching up with our Teflon-coated former PM…
But I said credit was an issue? The problem with both these categories is that the positive story involves likely giving credit to people associated with the current government, where the negative story points to sticks to beat them with… and frankly there’s a lot of anger out there against New Labour. That’s the other big driving factor… no media outlet wants to be seen to be on the government’s side, because the government are now deeply unpopular.
Anyway… I’m hesitant to join with you in drawing conclusions about how optimistic/pessimistic “we” are because it seems to me that the news media of our time are slanted in a particular direction by commercial pressures. BUT they no longer have a truly mass audience, many people have tuned the media out (certainly newspaper circulation is down) so it’s hard to say “we” are all pessimistic.
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