PRESENT TENSE:YOU MAY have noticed that there's been a lot of bad news of late. Every day. Most minutes of every day. It has, at times, reached almost bleakly comic proportions. As if you expected to wake up one of these mornings and hear that "a million jobs are to be lost because Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan forgot to carry the one".
It has made watching or reading or listening to the news an often gruelling prospect. People regularly talk about being depressed by the news, as if they wouldn’t be so upset and annoyed and scared by the economy if they just didn’t watch the headlines, or maybe just turned it on for the “And finally. . .” bit about a tapdancing bear.
As a journalist, it means constantly being told that the news is too downbeat. Not in a way that suggests that we could, you know, perk it up a bit. Instead, there are occasional requests for a good news page; a small island of optimism in the grey, foaming sea of doom.
If the public is wondering about their tolerance for bad news, you better believe that journalists are too. Is there a point at which the media can overdo even this almost unparalleled crisis? And does the public tire of bad news? Newspaper circulation figures are dropping, but that is part of a broader trend to do with changing media and less spending at the tills, making it hard to gauge. Traffic to news websites, on the other hand, benefits from lots of breaking news, whether it’s good or bad. And there may be some positives for business media during this financial crisis. For example, the Sunday Business Post’s circulation rose last year.
Elsewhere, RTÉ Radio One’s The Business, jumped significantly in the recent JNLR figures. A Prime Time special on the economy last month brought in 200,000 more viewers than the programme’s average. In fact, looking at RTÉ’s figures, there may be an argument that they are doing well, and will continue to do well, out of the financial crisis. As happens in Britain, where people naturally turn to the BBC in times of crisis, it may be that the Irish public drifts towards RTÉ, subconsciously treating it as a voice of authority.
There is no doubt that good news can boost sales, as was shown when people bought multiple copies of the souvenir newspapers that were printed on the days after Barack Obama’s election and inauguration as president of the United States. But Australian newspapers saw massive increases in circulation during the recent bushfires and its television news bulletins had even greater jumps in viewing figures. So anything that counts as big news can be treated as good news for the media.
When it comes to bad news, though, the media can hardly be expected ignore it and the question is really about balance. The problem for those editors and journalists who work in areas apart from straightforward news reporting is that the hunt for a fresh idea – or a twist on an old idea, or just an old idea that is dressed up as a fresh idea – is what consumes much of the thought process. So, when something such as a recession comes along, that hasn’t been seen in almost 20 years, which is genuinely novel to much of the public, and is pretty much dominating the thoughts of everyone out there, it is natural that editors will dream up recession-themed ideas to feed it.
With all this, though, comes the accusation not just that the media is reporting too much bad news compared to good news, but that in doing so it is actually part of the problem. That it helps drag down the country’s morale into a morass. The British press were even brought into a House of Commons committee to explain if they had contributed to banks problems through their reporting, and the papers quite rightly told them not to be silly.
It brings us to that old chestnut: is the media talking us into a recession? Or, in the case, is it keeping us there? The quick answer to that is: of course not. If it were possible to talk the nation into a recession then it would be just as easy to talk us out of it again. But it’s a strange turn around, in some respects, because during the good times there were a lot of people asking that the media look into the dark side of the boom. Now, we want the bright side of the recession at a time when we’ve realised just how much darkness lurked.
And there are good news pages, of course. The rugby has fulfilled that function quite well for the past couple of weeks, although the cheeriness of the sports pages depend on what team you support. And it’s not really what people mean anyway. What people really want when they ask for good news, or less bad news, is some relief from the collective exhaustion that has gripped us; a wish that they could switch off the recession in the same way that they can turn off the news.
