There's been an abundance of distressing news lately. Climate change. Sexual assault. Gaza. No wonder more than two-thirds of Australians say they actively avoid the news some of the time.
Then again, the news has long had a habit of being bad. That’s because there have always been evil acts and tragic disasters. But it’s also because of deliberate choices made by editors (and also increasingly by algorithms). One oft-cited maxim for news editors is, ‘if it bleeds it leads’. And so, the news served up to us is full of war, conflict, death and despair. Kindness, good fortune and peace don’t get much of a look in.
It doesn’t have to be like that. In 1997, Geri Weis-Corbley launched the Good News Network, or GNN, as distinct from CNN, for which she’d previously freelanced. As detailed in a recent Columbia Journalism Review feature, Weis-Corbley was worried that the barrage of bad news was going to turn her young child from carefree to cowering. Twenty-five years on, GNN is going strong, featuring, for instance, rescue stories, rare wildlife births caught on camera, and getting juveniles into environment support programs instead of jail. Other purveyors of good news include David Byrne’s Reasons to Be Cheerful project and Good Good Good.
And in Australia? While some major outlets have developed dedicated ‘good news’ sites, including the ABC, news.com.au, Nine and SBS, we don’t know how often they are updated, how many resources they get, and how much traffic they attract. It’s noteworthy that Stan Grant left the ABC this year to become Asia Pacific director of the Constructive Institute at Monash University in Melbourne. Headquartered in Denmark, the Constructive Institute aims, in Grant’s words, to ‘improve the quality of public discourse, to acknowledge that we don’t do conflict well, and to make media part of the solution rather than the problem.’
As people are turning away from news, trust in news is also alarmingly low. In part, these are problems of news media’s own making. Sure, bad news needs an airing, but it needs to be covered well. That is, in a way that doesn’t exploit its subjects, that treats subjects and audiences with respect, that doesn’t unfairly intrude upon privacy, that isn’t motivated by stoking division and polarisation and that, fundamentally, seeks to inform rather than just infuriate or upset. As well as that, good news needs more of an airing.
Sacha Molitorisz, Senior Lecturer - UTS Law