Don't read all about it

On this day in 1702 The Daily Courant, England's first national daily newspaper, was published for the first time. 

It's also Rupert Murdoch's birthday (b.1931). 

Sadly, the British newspaper seems to have been on a downhill trajectory ever since.

And the arrival of 24 hour TV news and the internet means that the newspaper has become even more of an anachronism in recent decades. It's no wonder that editors have increasingly turned to scandal, scaremongering and ‘catastrophising’ everyday life in order to sell papers. The worst of the tabloids put Herculean efforts into finding ways to show us that celebrities and other role-models are all philanderers, coke-heads and sex maniacs. Meanwhile, they keep us feeling unsettled and worried. Immigrants will steal our jobs and bleed the NHS dry. There are youths with knives around every corner. Everything we eat and do is bad for us. And even when they do report the news responsibly, it’s invariably bad news and in places far, far away where events are unlikely to affect you or the people you care about. 

One paper alone - the Daily Mail - has published hundreds of headlines about the things that will give you cancer. A chap called Hugh Davies maintains a list of them all and it includes air travel, baby bottles, being black, being a woman, being a man, bras, bubble bath, candle-lit dinners, childlessness, constipation, crayons, Facebook, flip flops, being left-handed, menstruation, milk, money, pastry, potatoes, poverty, pregnancy, retirement, shaving, soup, turning on the light at night to go to the loo, water, working and many, many more (you can see a full list here). 

For balance, he also catalogues a list of the things that the Mail reports could cure or prevent cancer. It’s a much shorter list and it includes acid, apples, Brazil nuts, circumcision, dynamite, horseradish, housework, magnets, masturbation, migraines, strip-search scanners, toilet paper, yoghurt and zinc. 

He also keeps a third list of things that, confusingly, have appeared in both lists. Among the things that can apparently give you cancer and prevent you getting cancer are aspirin, beer, breastfeeding, bread, Chinese medicine, curry, dogs, eggs, fried food, measles, mobile phones, rice, sex, tea and vitamins. 

What Davies finds particularly notable is not the range of things the paper reports on but the frequency - there is pretty much a ‘XXX will give you cancer’ story every single day. And that’s just one of the thousands of newspapers, magazines, journals, websites, blogs and forums that assault us daily with bad news stories and tales of misery.

The unreported truth is rather different. We've actually made extraordinary advances in medical science. Since 2001, deaths from lung cancer have reduced by almost a third and breast cancer by a quarter, while death rates from heart disease and stroke have halved for both males and females in the UK. 

That’s amazing isn’t it? But did you know that? Probably not. As the old adage goes, ‘Good news doesn’t sell newspapers.’ 

As Barack Obama told graduates at Harvard in 2016, 'If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be - what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you’d be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you’d be born into - you wouldn’t choose 100 years ago. You wouldn’t choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You’d choose right now.'

And he's right. The modern world is a pretty safe place. We live longer than at any time in history. We have access to education and medical services. We have safe food and drinking water. We have a rule of law. And while our democracy isn't perfect, it's not like we live under the rule of a mad tyrant or despotic dictator. Of course bad things happen in the world. They always have and always will. But there are far more good things going on than bad ... they just don’t make headlines.  

Meanwhile, the constant barrage of bad news is having a detrimental effect on our mental health and on society as whole. It's relentless and many of us are a lot more scared and worried than we really need to be. Global anxiety is at an all-time high - the World Health Organisation states that it could be as high as a third of the entire population. And it’s undeniable that an increasingly sensationalist press has played a big part in stoking our fears. 

But that’s not the whole story. We also have to be willing to listen. And, sadly, we are. 

We love a scary story. It’s hard-wired into an ancient part of our brain called the amygdala. We are drawn to anything that contains a level of threat - no matter how remote - and studies have shown that we are far more likely to remember a story that contains information that could help us to stay alive or find a mate. It’s why every homicide grabs our attention while the much larger and more prolific issue of suicide isn’t something we pay a lot of attention to. 

In a study conducted by researchers Marc Trussler and Stuart Soroka at McGill University in Canada, participants were asked to read a selection of newspapers while wearing headsets fitted with eye-tracking software. The results showed that people most often choose to read negative stories rather than neutral or positive stories. And yet, when asked, most participants stated that they preferred good news and that they believed the media was too focussed on reporting bad news. By way of another example, in 2014 a Russian news outlet called City Reporter decided to see what would happen if they gave all of the headlines over to positive stories and pushed the negative stuff into the background. Rather depressingly, it resulted in them losing two thirds of their readership. 

‘The fact is that we love to be scared,’ say the authors of Panicology, Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams. ‘But, in some cases, it is changing our behaviour and leading to emotional and financial costs.’ 

Unfortunately, continuous exposure to bad news can create something called 'Worst-case bias' in our minds. It means that we start to fear things that are actually pretty unlikely to happen to us. A perfect example of this is child abduction. 

It’s actually a very rare occurrence. So rare, in fact, that - as Warwick Cairns points out in his book How to Live Dangerously - statistically, you’d have to lock your kids out of the house every day for 200,000 years before there was a chance of them being taken. And, even if they were, you’d stand a 99.9% chance of getting them back unharmed within 24 hours because the vast majority of offences are committed by a family member. The whole ‘Stranger Danger’ thing is a myth. As the NSPCC reports, more than 90% of all sexual abuse and violence towards children is perpetrated by someone known to the child. The truth is that our kids are undoubtedly safer today than they would have been growing up at any other time in British history. They are safer than you were as a child, and safer than your parents and grandparents were. My parents didn’t worry about me being out all day. I was never abducted. Nor were any of my friends. But now many parents are terrified of letting their children out of their sight – and the blame for that falls squarely at the feet of the media and their constant scaremongering. 

They will, of course, claim that it’s for the common good. But, if that’s the case, why do they rarely mention the fact that around 100,000 children and young people go missing or run away from home every single year? Many of those kids come to harm through homelessness, illness, or desperation leading them into activities like drug trafficking and sex work. Someone under 18 is reported missing in the UK every three minutes and yet it get almost no media coverage. But that’s because there’s no Big Bad Wolf to hook our attention. Call me a cynic if you like but I’m pretty sure that the newspapers aren’t really interested in a story unless it’s sensational enough. Without a specific threat element it just isn’t headline-worthy. And we’re letting them get away with it. 

The newspapers are never going to change their ways. And I strongly suspect that they’re going to get worse as they become more desperate to survive. So I changed my ways instead. I stopped reading them a couple of years ago. And, within days, I felt calmer. It was as if a huge weight had been lifted from me. 

So I then decided to take the next step. I stopped watching TV news too. And current affairs shows. And I left Twitter. They were all making me angry, frustrated and they were skewing my sense of reality. 

I still know what's going on in the world - you'd have to be hermit not to. But the levels of bad news I'm now exposed to are at the levels they were before 24 hour news and the internet came along. And before the newspapers turned into the awful rags they've become.

The world still has its problems. 

But my world, at least, is a happier place than it was.