Too busy to read?

The statistics show that nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year - on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. Road traffic accidents rank as the ninth leading cause of death and account for 2.2 per cent of all deaths globally.8 By comparison, deaths from plane crashes totalled 303 in 2016 and just 79 in 2017.

We know that the news predominantly reports the problems of the world, from systemic social issues of poverty and inequality to individual petty crime, with very little to comfort the reader. We accept that these are the types of stories we expect to hear from the news. This expectation has become so entrenched in the news industry that a television news programme can have 'more images of violence, suffering and death in a half hour than most people would normally view in a lifetime'.

by reporting on problems without reporting progress alongside it, it creates a lack of context, an imbalance and an excess where negative news reporting has moved from being helpful to becoming harmful. The hypocrisy seemed absurd to me: news organisations that pride themselves on shining a light on the world's ills have have actually been contributing to those ills as no one is shining a light on them.

by selectively reporting on mostly negative events, we come to perceive the world through a troubled lens and have a distorted understanding of reality. This distorted understanding, rather than reality itself, can then determine public opinion.

Christopher Peterson, the late psychology professor at the University of Michigan, known for his research on character strengths, advises that 'people should be optimistic when the future can be changed by positive thinking but not otherwise'.9 Optimism therefore should not be blindly applied to a situation as a guarantee for a desirable outcome.

By having a more rounded narrative in my media diet that included a healthy balance of problems and solutions, I instead felt energised

The race to the top of search engines has inadvertently led to a race to the bottom in terms of quality journalism. Stories are decided on based on their 'traffic potential, revenue potential, turnaround time and at the bottom of the list editorial quality'.

I found this deeply worrying; the information we consume through the news becomes our basis for understanding the world. This then creates a filter through which we see things and influences how we feel, talk about and respond to global, local and even personal challenges. The overwhelmingly negative and sensationalised information I was getting from the news appeared excessively confrontational in its tone and it made me feel like the world was going down the drain and there was nothing I could do about it, except for switch off from it all together.

Well, food is to the body what information is to the mind. The information that we imbibe will turn into emotions, thoughts, actions and behaviours. The consequences are less visible but just as potent. The news is one of the most powerful and most negative streams of information we inescapably consume. Watching the news affects our mood, our beliefs, our understanding of the world, our relationship to other people and our politics, but its impact remains largely unquestioned by the consumers who are affected by its content.

The news is not, in fact, a reflection of everything that goes on in the world, it is a reflection of everything that goes wrong in the world. -- C. John Sommerville

There are six effective ways we can change our media diet in a way that will help us become more informed, engaged and empowered: 1. Become a conscious consumer 2. Read/watch good-quality journalism 3. Burst your filter bubble 4. Be prepared to pay for content 5. Read beyond the news 6. Read solutions-focused news

Does the media create or reflect opinion? Is the media a commercial enterprise that is led by profitability, or a noble one led by integrity? Does it report news that is in the interest of the public, or in the interest of its own success? What are the consequences of reporting such a negative picture of the world?

The reporting of the extraordinary is so ingrained in the news industry that when defining what the news is at its most basic level, journalists will say that the news is not 'dog bites man' but 'man bites dog' - that is, a dog biting a man is a relatively common occurrence, so it isn't news, but a man biting a dog is unusual, and therefore news. This perfectly captures the tendency for news stories to be about events that are infrequent, unusual and negative.

In less democratic nations, the media has been used politically to maintain the legitimacy of the government or state and to try and increase public support. It often violates the sanctions of freedom of information, replaced instead with censorship and control.

There is no denying that having a news industry that asks the challenging questions, highlights our failures, exposes corruption and scandal, makes us aware of problems and holds power to account in a democratic society is a good thing. The problem created by this kind of reporting comes from having too much of it.

Whoever controls the media controls the mind. -- Jim Morrison

Thomas Jefferson, the third US president and leading author of the Declaration of Independence, said, 'The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.' I would have to agree.