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Friday 10 August 2007

Are they accountable?

Newspapers, Internet based news outlets. They rarely note anything good. 99% of the news from those outlets is bad news. Another murder. Another knife attack. Another beating. Another robbery. Etc, etc, etc. Same sort of news reported day in and day out.

Take the BBC web site at http://www.bbc.co.uk as a prime example. Every single day the report the same bad news. They even split the country up into chunks so you can read more bad news about your area! Very thoughtful I am sure. Other, noteworthy, news outlets do exactly the same.

What is stopping these news outlets from dedicating some space every day to some good news to cheer up their readers? Nothing. Well, nothing except bad news is good news for news outlets as that, they claim, is what their readers want. But, as a reader myself of several of the top online news outlets I can state I would rather read about some good being done somewhere than read about yet another death or fire or whatever is bad.

Our society is bad enough without these news outlets reporting on things that make our society seem much worse than it is. I'll ask again. Why can they not set aside some space to report only good news. I bet you that that space will be widely read and will probably get more hits then anything else they report on.

I know this is oversimplifying things but I still think news outlets, be they online or in paper form have a lot to answer for regarding how our society sees itself.

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