In the movie Broadcast News, the protagonist Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) has a routine every morning. At a set time, she sits and weeps abundantly for a minute. When the minute’s over, she wipes her face and goes about the day’s business as if she has no worries.

Journalists have always been a fairly glum bunch   ̶   I know, because I was one myself   ̶   and the news they produce reflects that.  Over many years and countries, communications experts have found that coverage of political topics tends to more often be conveyed in a negative or cynical tone rather than a positive one. 

In one study some years ago almost half of US, German, Italian, and Austrian political campaign coverage was found to convey bad news, while a mere six percent conveyed good news.  The situation is deteriorating; a recent study found that the “proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust, and sadness” grew markedly in the US between 2000 and 2019.

One might argue that the bad news prevails because over the last two decades or so we have had a truly extraordinary conjunction of disasters.  We have faced threats on many different fronts at the same time.  We are living through a ‘perfect storm’: a conjunction of bad news of historic proportions.

First, there were the two financial and banking crises in 2008-2012, then the Covid pandemic and the daily briefings on death and disaster, followed by the disruptions in logistics and supply chains that wreaked economic havoc, on which was super-imposed the Ukraine war and threats of nuclear war, followed by a bout of heavy inflation.   Some problems seem to have become endemic, permanently damaging the prospects of future generations. 

This perfect storm combines issues that may be proximate and practical for the individual (e.g. the pandemic lockdowns, the inflation crisis), with issues that are more distant, affecting others rather than the self (the plight of Ukrainians under shelling, the appalling killings and crimes against humanity in Israel and Gaza), as well as issues that may have little immediate practical impact for the majority, but which are existential threats for us all (climate change, mass extinctions, the possibility of a nuclear war).

Doomscrolling

Against this background of a bad news cycle, some news consumers have surrendered to the phenomenon and find themselves intoxicated by what is known as “doomscrolling”   ̶   that is, moving between articles asking if the war in Ukraine could be World War III, or whether another deadly pandemic could be on the way, if we’ve already passed key climate tipping points, or if Malta is destined to become Moslem or Hindu.

An international survey from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism last year found that, in almost every country surveyed, trust in the media is falling.  Successive Eurobarometer surveys have confirmed this trend. More people are saying they’re avoiding the news. Why? Because, respondents say, it “has a negative effect on their mood”.

The Maltese are no exception.  For the last year or so, we have been bludgeoned by a torrent of negative news stories.  Every release by the National Statistics Office (NSO) announcing a further increase in the Gross Domestic Product is met with a torrent of expletives from people who say they don’t care for a better economy. Any accident at a building site sparks a deluge of claims that all construction companies are cowboys. Any suicide attempt triggers claims that the whole population is suffering from deep anxiety and depression.

Whether it is health, transport, governance, social benefits, education, tourism, immigration, a cafeteria on a church terrace, youths cavorting in Paceville, or restaurants occupying the pavements, every single incident becomes headlines and the cause of controversies in the Press and the social media.  Naturally, the issues can also be more serious, like corruption, misuse of public funds, or unethical behaviour.  Politicians then milk the incidents to try to get the maximum political advantage.   

So … why are we like this?

Are journalists just a miserable lot who insist on spreading their neuroses to the rest of the world?  Are readers, despite their protestations to the contrary, likelier to click on news that’s negative or awful?

It’s both, of course.  Humans, it turns out, have what social psychologists call a “negativity bias”: we tend to pay more attention to bad-seeming information than good-seeming one. Demand begets supply and vice-versa.  That could be a root factor for why the news is so damn depressing. That’s what we’re looking for.

The negativity in the news and journalism is well-documented   ̶   if it bleeds it leads. We are presented hourly with the world’s atrocities and reports of political upheaval, war, terror, environmental degradation, climate change and epidemics, and it is easy to feel disheartened and disengaged. This has an impact on our individual mental health as well as our political beliefs and motivations, helping fuel public intuitions that the world is getting worse.

As yet there is virtually no research that looks at how threats at those different levels will interact to affect the young (or the rest us, for that matter). Yet we need to know, to know how best to offer support.

What impact?

Direct experience of bad events adversely affects mental health. We know, for example, that child and youth mental health is affected by direct exposure to economic difficulty in the family; of living through pandemic lockdowns; of living proximate to acts of terrorism and violence; of becoming a refugee; or living through natural, industrial, or man-made disaster.  All these have been amply confirmed by various scientific studies.

We also know that those whose exposure to such disasters is entirely indirect, entirely through media reporting, are also affected. For example, research following the ‘9/11’ terrorist attacks found that 60% of school age children in New York were reported by their parents as showing severe anxiety even though they were not personally directly affected by the disaster (though it was, of course, ‘on their doorstep’). More formal professional assessments showed that over 28% of these young had at least one diagnosable anxiety disorder six months after the event (e.g. agoraphobia, separation anxiety, PTSD).

I myself can vouch for the indirect effects of bad events.  The election of Donald Trump   in 2016 affected me greatly and left me depressed for several months.  I can’t deny that, probably, my anxiety was greatly heightened by all the critical commentaries I was reading in the international Press.  Yes, I must admit, I seemed to gravitate to them every morning.  When I thought I had recovered, the Bully announced he’s running again, and my anxiety has returned.

I am sure that the negative news in Malta also has the same direct and indirect effects   on people.  It hardly matters whether the news being reported is correct or fake. The intensity and style of reportage of those events also play a key role. The more dramatic a story (Jean Paul Sofia’s death), the more often reported (financial crimes and fraud like Vitals), the more memorable (the charges against two ex-ministers), and the more probable it seems that this could happen (further escalation of the hostilities in Ukraine and Europe) – and happen to me (unbearably hot weather) – the more I am affected.

These very much belong to the ‘availability heuristic’ and are the reason why more people fear a plane crash (very rare, but very dramatically reported) than fear a car crash (much more common, but less dramatically reported in the media).  Even young children draw inferences about probability in this way. All the crises of our perfect storm are reported very vividly and dramatically.

How do we respond?

So how do we respond to all this negative news?  First of all, it helps if one makes an effort to control the amount of time one spends on watching news channels and how often one accesses them.  Second, it is worth keeping in mind that what may seem to be disastrous predictions frequently turn out to be much less serious.  Third, it is often the case that our assumption that the problems inherent in bad news will be fairly universal and that a whole will be damaged, is often wrong.                          

At the very personal level, when we are confronted with news that might affect us directly, it might help if we were to recall a story famous among Nichiren Buddhists.  This tells of a practising Soka Gakkai member who sought a leader’s advice about a particular problem he was having.  Before he could even start explaining his circumstances, the leader pointed to a large oak desk and asked him to lift it. Bewildered, the member replied, “There’s no way I can lift that. It’s way too heavy.” To which the leader replied, “The problem isn’t that the desk is too heavy. The problem is that you’re too weak.”

His point, of course, was that our ability to win isn’t determined by the size of our problems but by the strength of our life force. When you feel overwhelmed by your own life, rather than focusing on finding a different set of more manageable problems (as if that were even possible), you should look for ways to raise your life-condition so you can gain access to the wisdom, courage, and energy you need to solve the problems you have. If you don’t have a process or a practice that does this for you, find one. Will power and intellect alone are often insufficient.

Naturally, this might be hogwash for somebody who does not know who Nichiren Daishonin was.  The 13^th century Japanese monk tried to reform Buddhism and Japanese society in much the same way that the Protestant reformer Martin Luther did in Europe centuries later.   However, one does not need to be a Buddhist to gain wisdom, courage, and energy.  Most faiths have principles and practices that enable their members to confront the difficulties of the human condition.

The only good part about having multiple problems is that, when one overshadows the others, the others seem less overwhelming. It also sets our priorities straight. There is so much one can choose to be upset about right now; maybe just putting our focus on what’s going on in our own little world is enough for us to deal with.

At least for the moment, that’s the case for me.