Is no news really good news?

Imagine in the hubbub of a parallel contemporary London that a middle-aged woman, cryogenically frozen thirty years ago, were defrosted. After medical assessments and procedures, as part of a standard rehabilitation programme she is replayed news bulletins from the last few years. After witnessing summaries of the global pandemic, the man-made effects contributing to climate change, the double standards at the heart of Westminster politics, antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crimes, the suffering of displaced Ukrainian families, the cost-of-living crisis, as well as the fate of her football team, Hull City, is it so hard to sympathise with her request to her doctors to put her back under for the next thirty years?

This light-hearted scenario in no way belittles the well documented impact of so-called doom scrolling, when people become consumed by frequently scanning gloomy-sounding headlines broadcast by media outlets. Given that the UK’s news market is financially driven, it is little wonder that alarmist, eye catching journalism is conventional practice. Newspapers, hourly updates on television and radio, constant badgering reactions in chat rooms, some engineered by professional agitators, can leave people feeling not only consumed by anxieties in the face of seemingly irresolvable global and national issues, but even perversely gratified that the world is in the state that it appears to be in. Who would have thought that a situation so seemingly undermining, and demotivating for the media audience, could become a new source of self-affirmation? ‘The world is in an appalling state, but my life is at least more comfortable than many’. Pamela Rutledge, director of the Californian Media Psychology Research Centre, defines such conditioned behaviour and responses as deriving from ‘the need to try to get answers when we’re afraid’, something that the media do not fail to exploit to market and sell their individual brands of news.

So apart from switching off entirely from those never-ending live feeds and grandstand reporting of events on the world stage, what steps can we take to ensure that our outlook is not compulsively shaped by frequent reference to apparently endless doom and gloom? While stopping short of the alternative pursuit known as joy scrolling, we could always adjust our sources of news to aim for a greater balance of positive and negative stories. Perhaps a first step is to attempt to acknowledge that compulsive behaviour like seeking insight into doomsday scenarios does not bring personal enlightenment, safety or avert catastrophe beyond our control. Another step is to embrace the fact that frequent doom scrolling or headline hunting nearly always leads to negative reflections and feelings. This is the intention of the journalism at work, to hook the audience, to sensationalise the story. A third step is for readers to never underestimate the power of media context, that negative sentiment inevitably leads to orchestrated chat room uproar promoted by anonymous, self-styled oracular bullies. Beyond these suggestions it is never wrong to embrace what matters most to us at a personal level. The world has, so far, kept turning irrespective of our thoughts and reactions to the UK’s media.

Without putting our heads in constantly shifting media-laid sands, perhaps we could prioritise the most important things immediately around us, the needs of family, friends, local community. In such a shift of emphasis in which the media has its place, but not so dominant a one, our cryogenically defrosted friend might feel more attraction to our society, even see the good at large in our everyday lives, and possibly opt to stay with us.