Niche Markets Seem More Optimistic
Or The Misery Of Mainstream Journalism
by Paul Grimsley
When I look at any of the big news sites, trying to find something good about what is happening in the world, I find that I am hit with a sinking feeling, and the idea that I will have to take something miserable and shine a light into its dark heart.
Bad news as a constant backdrop to life feels psychologically damaging. It is depressing, and creates a sense of bleakness, and doesn’t seem particularly congruent with my day to day experience of living in and walking around in the world.
If I look at tech sites, culture sites, or those straddling the two, they generally have stories that seem more forward looking, and that is what I want to read. I don’t think I am alone in this. Facebook Sabbatical has become a term; signal to noise ratio is a concern; and one of the drivers of this withdrawal viewpoint is the amount of negativity that one gets exposed to — whether that manifests as a stream of bad news or the aggressive bullying of trolls, or both.
I am not saying that I haven’t been guilty of taking a bleak viewpoint more than a solution oriented one, it is a bad habit that you fall into. There are a lot more dystopian sci-fi novels than utopian ones. I suppose it is easier to envisage the current system’s problems and how they might break down, than it is to sit there and work out how you might fix it.
I am starting to adopt the viewpoint that if you aren’t working to fix anything you shouldn’t really point out how broken down it all is — sort of like, if you don’t vote or pay taxes your opinion is rendered less valid.
Journalists have the resources to find out about solutions rather than just offering opinions and muck-racking — while that provides some amount of entertainment value, it doesn’t really add to your life.
When you look at figures like Elon Musk and Richard Bransen, who are putting themselves out there, trying to fix broken models of transport and other issues, and then someone comes in to say how foolish the enterprise is, while having no real skin in the game, you have to wonder how useful the commentary is. If I were to read something that broke down the science and offered a way to remedy the errors of the projects as they stand that would be a different thing, but commentators are not often doers, and so, wanting some of these projects to get done, I would rather throw my weight behind the doers.
Technology journalism seems pretty excited about what is being produced, and about the possibility of what might be around the corner. Entertainment magazines are determined by the quality of the output they are covering. General news seems less reflective and more proscriptive in what it includes in its output — there has to be a certain quota of bad stuff there, and it distorts more than it should be allowed to.
I think people see that it is a broken model and they are tuning a lot of it out, because it puts you in a bad place where you can’t see a way forward, and there is, by hook or crook, a way forward.