The Allure of Bad News – My 2008
This piece is bookended with letters of complaint to our National Radio about the quality of their news items, or rather lack of quality. This one was entitled “Hard Up?”
March 7, 2016
Sir, Madam,
I listened to an item, notable only for its lack of interest or relevance on your news at 7.00 this morning.
You must have been hard up for anything to report if you choose to
include something about a Chinese person found dead in China
somewhere in a lift or something. Sorry, my attention sags when
I feel your writers are just primping the news full of sensation. A
30-second silence would serve your listeners better.
How about asking people what kind of news they want to hear?
I’d wager that anything similar to a dead Chinese, no matter the
circumstances, would rate pretty low because it’s not in the least
edifying, educating, relevant to us, or even newsworthy.
Many years ago about 1975, I wrote to The Dominion, as it was called then, and told the Editor that I didn’t want my morning coffee and toast disturbed by their front page news about a goat being dragged behind a vehicle driven by cruel youths. I suggested that if they had to publish such idiocy it could be tucked away in the middle somewhere. I got a reply saying that it was the duty of the press to report bad news as well as the happy stuff and they’d put it where they wanted to put it. I thought of writing back to tell them exactly where they could put it but refrained from lowering myself to the level of their news content.
Over 50 years on, I would say times have changed for the worse. It is now the norm to read unhappy news everywhere in a newspaper, especially the likes of The Dominion-Post, as it is now called. The propensity to print bad news is huge as sales depend on it, and of course the desire to read bad news is equally great. Psychologically it’s schadenfreude, where some people take pleasure in others’ misery and misfortunes, glad it’s not happening to them, and they certainly love the false stuff. A new study by MIT analysed thousands of tweeted stories. They found that false news spreads three times more quickly than the real news, and was much more shared than anything true. The thing is that the truth isn’t sexy, false news is much more fun. Clearly The Dom-Post and many other newspapers follow the rule of “If it bleeds, it leads”.
Then there’s also the “tut-tut” brigade, where people put themselves above the perpetrators and judge their silly actions, saying they got what they deserved, or should have been punished more severely, and if I were a god or the government I certainly wouldn’t allow that kind of thing to happen again. Generally though, people love to hear about others doing badly, suffering greatly, losing everything, drowning, crashing, falling, freezing, being poisoned, getting tortured and raped, and of course, if there are terrible circumstances, being saved. This latter outcome is not as exciting as lots of people being killed, but there have been wonderful stories reported of people saving beached whales and fighting off killer sharks and rescuing each other, including their pets. Personally, and I suspect I’m not alone in this, I can feel more for animals’ welfare than many humans, something to do with creatures’ helplessness and dependence on us. I know for sure that French women love their dogs more than anything else – it’s been proved in surveys!
My belief is that all the news stuff around now, be it fake, bad or sensational, is popular because it’s easy to understand. Like many other aspects of life, there’s been a dumbing down, a simplification for the masses. The reasons are easy to find: there are too many people seeking information and education. There are too many institutions competing to help them with this, so in this competition you find they have to offer their wares to lower and lower qualifications in order to stay in business.
These thoughts about bad news came to mind as I cast my mind back over 2008. I realised that it had been a year for me full of bad news, that I had lurched around in it not feeling very good and dealing with several quite severe disappointments. I thought that if a newspaper or magazine wanted a good “bad news” story, my year would get into the top twenty.
My bad year stuff started on January 17 when I got out of bed as usual about 7.30 and staggered across the other side of the room, falling in a heap. At first I thought it was a stroke or heart attack without any pain. It turned out after an hour of vomiting that if I lay down, all the awful symptoms of dizziness and nausea went away. After 36 hours I was able to stand up again and get to a doctor who told me that it was labyrinthitis caused by a virus. I was secretly pleased at first to hear that two staff at the medical clinic also succumbed to this dizzy sickness – misery loves a friend! – but unlike people who read about others’ misfortune quite happily, I later hoped that I hadn’t been the cause of their getting the virus. I checked on this with the doctor and he said it would have been unlikely because it’s not contagious and anyway, would have been well passed its pass-on capability by the time I visited. More likely, he said it was in the water or in the air.
Compared with that episode, the next events are minor but no less irritating, because they interfered with my gardening work. I pulled a muscle in my shoulder, but had to put up with the pain and inactivity for weeks because treatments such as acupuncture didn’t work. Then an old injury in my right hip flared up again really debilitatingly. I decided that it needed some serious intervention and booked into a good physiotherapist for a diagnosis and recommended treatment. After nearly two months and over 15
visits and lots of home exercising, the pain of three years had gone. It was one of the year’s happy events issuing from adversity.
OK, that’s enough of my physical ailments for that year. It was also the year of several crises for my mother-in-law, Elena; she had come to stay on doctor’s orders in 2006, unable to look after herself anymore in her own home about an hour’s drive away. That was all right as she was a pleasant person, able to live semi-privately with us in our house’s kitchen and bedroom addition. She had dinners with us at night but fell into the habit of not joining for the meals we cooked. I told myself protectively nothing to do with her not liking our veggey food but more to do with her physical health, simply quite difficult for her to get anywhere on time. There were a couple of ambulance calls to take her to hospital in Wellington. Each time I said a silent goodbye to Elena for ever, not wishing her gone at all, more responding to the grey near-death look she had after yet another small stroke.
I remember sharply even now the time she fell outside and cracked her head on paving bricks I’d carefully laid, never thinking that someone could hurt themselves on them. I stayed with her talking about the sounds we could hear in the garden until the ambulance people appeared 45 mins later – they couldn’t find our place on their GPS system! If they’d used a map or looked for our letterbox, they’d have arrived in 20 minutes. Elena recovered enough after an hour of talking with the ambulance personnel, and was able to refuse to be taken away on that occasion.
The year 2008 was also the year of the GFC, the Great Financial Crisis which affected the whole world, including my savings which took a severe hit. To try to recoup and feel better I started an equally serious reduction in spending and ways of making money. The former involved not using the car so much (cycling’s healthy and I enjoy train rides). Also I resorted to not buying many things which I really didn’t need (an interesting discovery, I was an early non-consumer) and even reducing my hobby of betting on horses by 80% thereby saving 80% in losses.
All these things weren’t so much a huge saving but more a psychological salve, continuing them for over eight years. They helped me to feel that I had done something about my losses. I also looked at going back to teaching but there was too much paperwork and anyway, I didn’t really want to get into good clothes and change back into work clothes for looking after our two-acre paradise I so enjoyed caring for every day. So I took up investing in stocks and shares. Some would say that would be a good way to lose more money but actually I found that I could make a few thousand dollars a year, and so long as I didn’t account for the time these earnings took, I estimate that I have recouped about 30% of my losses this way. There were other actions to make money but not one of them worth describing. Suffice to say having to deal with the GFC in that annus horribilis was the opposite of icing on the cake.
I sent an article about my year of bad news to the Dominion-Post but they weren’t interested – I suspect it wasn’t bad enough news for them. Funny how I was able to take some consolation from that. The newspaper certainly heard from me two years later when we got news from the government transport agency that our home with its native trees and sandhills would be taken for a new motorway. We were on the front page looking suitably disconsolate! There was a huge government enquiry into the viability of the so-called expressway, a board of three dignitaries appointed to hear submissions from all quarters. It took place over a couple of months and we made a submission showing photographs of the natural beauty of some of the 28 homes to be appropriated in our area. (Further north it was over 80 homes to be taken.) There were many more submissions outlining how awful the expressway would be cutting through our narrow coastal township. Unbeknown to us it was all a charade, never intended to be serious, so the result was a foregone conclusion, no matter how many excellent submissions were made against the road. I’ll never forget the expert sociologist who was hired to tell the panel that in her long academic experience she’d found that it was all right for people to be moved out of their homes because they always manage to adapt to the change. If the media wanted callous and cruel, in my book that was one of the most newsworthy they could get, like kicking people when they’re down; the last thing people need in loss and pain is a glossing from a happy expert. So the year 2008 had been eclipsed by 2012, a worse news year, bad enough to print quite often! At the end of year 2013 we had to move out of our property.
The Dom-Post might have taken an interest in 2015 when my partner Beth of 37 years suffered a brain haemmorhage caused by an AVM or arterio-vascular malfunction, and was in the Intensive Care Unit and Neurology Ward at Wellington hospital for three weeks. With their specialist and caring ministrations she made a miraculous recovery, against odds of only one in three who survive such a catastrophic event well. Actually, the head of the ICU told us that a third die and a third survive but have serious problems.
I’m not sure where my years of crises come on the scale of the media’s bad news but I can safely say, certainly apart from Beth’s nearly dying, they weren’t as visceral or distasteful as reading about a goat being dragged by mindless youths in a car.
To conclude the litany of bad news, here are a few more letters to NZ National Radio News. I have several times offered to write the news for them if they have difficulty finding something worthy of intelligent listeners’ attention.
“Dearth of Good News?”
July 28, 2012
May I ask who is in charge of choosing items of news and how he/she goes about the business of selecting them? I listened to your less than inspirational News at 8.00 on Saturday morning (July 28, 2012) with its longish report about a woman in Nelson doing high speeds to get away from the police. Then there was the body of a young woman found in a stream in Whangarei. I switched off literally and metaphorically but felt impelled to write to ask how your News topics are chosen and how a speeding woman can outstrip anything about Syria or even the perennial Olympics or the possibility of a tsunami somewhere. Isn’t there anything else to report? Some new discovery in Science or Medicine, or something wonderful in the Arts, or meaningful events in the rest of the world? Anything like that would cut the mustard, even something broadly affecting the lives of Kiwis. No, not speeding, not an accident, not death on the roads, generally not murder and mayhem! At least, not until maybe the very last item if you must include such.
Broken News!
Morning Report
Jan. 26, 2017
The “Breaking News” this morning (in Susie Ferguson’s dramatic Scottish tones) about 8.45 was more like broken news, anti-climactic to say the least.
If I hadn’t been of an age to know who newly deceased Mary Tyler Moore was (acted with Dick Van Dyke in the eponymous comedies), I’d have been rushing to Google.
Doesn’t the term Breaking News introduce the likes of the invasion of
a country, the destruction of a terrible earthquake, the announcement of
a peace accord, or the death of a president or prime minister?
Perhaps I wouldn’t have bothered to Google anything as your so-called Breaking News really was insipid.
Regards,
Ed Murrow,
15 Panorama Dr.,
Paraparaumu, 5032
Burning News Item
July 22, 2019
Radio NZ News
“Some hay bales caught fire overnight at a rural property. The fire
services put the blaze out.”
Reader Nicola Wright, the professional she is, managed to keep a
straight voice, but she really shouldn’t have to read such rubbish.