The News Dilemma + a Good News Revolution
Over this past year or so, I have found it increasingly difficult to keep up to date with the news. This is not because I have been busy or not had the time or wanted to stay uninformed, it is because I find it extremely difficult to watch and read the news when everything on it seems so awful and dire like there are no solutions to any of the problems and struggles in our world and there is pretty much no good news.
The news never seems to involve enough “happy” stories or ones where someone was able to fix one of the many problems within our world, they just continue to give us more and more problems without any solutions. I find that this can make me avoid keeping up with the news because it can make me feel sad and hopeless because there is so much bad and there doesn’t seem to be a way for me to change any of this. The problem is that I want to keep up with what is going on in the world and to know about current affairs so that I can be more aware of the global situations and gain general knowledge but I don’t like the way the news channels currently show the news.
The news seems to have an obsession with going beyond the facts of an event and dwelling for much longer than is appropriate on “sob stories”, trends and negativity. This isn’t what current affairs was ever supposed to be about. The idea was for us to get all of the information and the facts and be able to make our own minds up about how we felt about it and therefore where we stood on an issue whereas now the news channels seem to feed us certain perspectives with certain biases. This is unfair to everyone. We should not be deprived of the opportunity current affairs provides for us to extend our general knowledge, to have our own voice and opinion on specific matters. This method makes it all too easy for bias on all topics and specific minority groups to end up scapegoated.
So that is my problem and so far with normal news channels, I am struggling to find a way for me to be able to keep up to date without getting bogged down in the depressing nature of a lot of it. However, I have come across a few alternatives which have begun a kind of good news revolution.
I want to point out that a good news revolution does not mean that the facts are avoided or that only the stories which are inherently happy get told, but that focus is a lot more on for example the way people survive natural disasters, everyday heroes or how we at home can help to solve a problem. This means that the focus is not simply on the disasters and problems but on the positives around these like solutions and ways to help to make the whole experience much less despairing.
One example of a good news channel is run by Branden Harvey who has created the Good Newspaper and the Good Newsletter. The Good Newsletter is an email that gets sent out weekly with 5 global good news stories which show the resilience and bravery within people. I love receiving this because it gives another perspective to the news channels I have watched throughout the week meaning that I can see that there may have been for example a natural disaster, but someone showed extreme courage to save someone's life. The Good Newspaper is a more recent creation of Branden’s and involves a simply designed, full size, quarterly newspaper which again focussed only on the good news but also gives us ways that we can get involved and take action to change the news in the world to be even more good than bad.
My other example of a more facts bases news channel is from the design company Human After All who have created a magazine on current affairs called Weapons of Reason. Every month they write a review of the main news stories around the world with facts and ways that you can take action on an issue. This is always in-depth but simple enough for you to understand and take away facts to be able to digest and figure out your own opinion. I also like this slow journalism form because it means I am less overwhelmed by so much news at once and can more easily focus in on the important stories around the whole world.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” - Marcus Aurelius
Weapons of Reason, their magazine, is a form of slow journalism where they focus on a specific topic within each issue - so far there has been the arctic, megacities, ageing and power - before diving deeper with the relevant perspectives, opinions, facts and figures. I have all the issues so far apart from the megacities one and am really loving this magazine. It helps give me a full analysis on certain topics from experts and eye-witnesses meaning that all perspectives are included for me to figure out where I stand compared to the people in each article. Each issue splits into three parts - the past, present and future - this helps to show me the history of an issue but also where developments could possibly take us in the future.
I am so happy that recently I have been able to find these to current affairs channels which share news in such a different and in my opinion better than most of the general mainstream news channels. I think they are paving the way for a new format for telling the news in a way that gives hope rather than takes it away and is without bais so that we have the free will to make our own mind up about these issues.
From these alternatives news channels, I have learnt a lot more and stopped dwelling on all the bad in the world and realised there are sometimes things I can do to help with different issues. I hope you will check out Weapons of Reason and Branden Harvey’s Good News so that you too can start to learn more and take action if you wish.
Have you been frustrated by the news?
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