I sometimes wonder if we'd be better off if there was no such thing as national or international news. I'd have been tempted to include "local news" if I hadn't spent most of my working life in a country newspaper.
Would we all be better off, I wonder, if we didn't know about kidnaps in Portugal, tribal and religous warfare in Africa and even rapes and road deaths in our own community?
I had a friend who thought this way, about 20 years ago. He, with as much fanfare as he could afford, launched a "good news" newspaper. It lasted two or three issues, attracted very, very few advertisements and had to be given away.
The truth is, of course, that we can't stop bad news spreading, any more than we have been able to stop bad things happening!
There's been tragedy and suffering since the World began, and if more of us read and hear about more of it, these days, then that's surely because there are so many more of us around the place than a century or so ago. On the same theory, we must believe that there's much more charity, compassion and justice happening because of population growth.
It's comforting, at bad-news times, to remember that "good" news doesn't score well with big headlines.
There's no point in "shooting the messengers" though. They're giving us (more or less) what we want.
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