“There’s no point reading the papers. All that bad news make you want to cut your own throat”.

This may not be news to any fairly sensitive media bystander. Read the papers, listen to radio news or watch the news on TV and you may well feel worse for it.

What is news, is the fact that these words were uttered in the 60’s. Yes, that swinging decade when life was bright, cosmic and all a-go-go. My step-father reported them to me this morning, as he cast his mind back to those times, and remembered what his actor pal had told him on a film set. It seems papers were always prone to doom, gloom and depression - appealing to that dark side of ourselves that takes some perverse reassurance from the grim picture traditional journalists tend to create.

“Bad news,” as the old saying goes, “is halfway around the world while good news is still doing up its shoelaces.” And it may well be true. But only if you buy it, read it and repeat it. “News”, now and in the 60’s is bad news. And no news is still good news.

Interestingly, I understand the actor who took this wise position on the papers, is now in the cast of TV’s Eastenders - what might he say of soap operas and their equally damaging effect on the human spirit?

Filed under Media & Entertainment.
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