Mark Pack - Bad News: What the Headlines Dont Tell Us

I used to read a newspaper every day. Now that I dont, Im better informed. The change happened thanks to how I get to work.

Until the start of 2020, I was a member of an unusual minority (rather more than one, people who know me might add), in that I had a reasonably long commute to work and liked it. The reason? Podcasts. I got in around an hour and a half of listening to them every day. This was time spent being entertained and informed, which, even with the best of intentions, I would never have managed to find elsewhere if Id had a shorter commute.

It also gave me a somewhat different perspective on the news. Back in the last century, I would typically read a printed newspaper on my commute. Then I switched to listening to podcasts about the news. Not news podcasts, but rather the sorts of podcasts such as Planet x Money from the US or More or Less from the UK that dont try to be first with the news. Instead, they pick topics related to the latest happenings and take a more reflective approach, deploying expertise to understand the trends and facts behind the headlines.

This switch has, therefore, also given me a very different perspective on the news. When much of your news consumption is not the stuff of bulletins, daily front pages or breaking tweets, but rather slower-moving, more reflective content, you can see much more clearly the weaknesses of the former format. Even the more newsy-news I consume, in the form of the weekly round-up magazine The Week, is more reflective because, even when reporting very fresh news, its selling point is to give multiple angles on the stories. The Week is far from flawless its list of interesting quotations leaves the impression, time after time, that its almost exclusively men who say interesting things, for example but it does give a better perspective.

The fast-paced chase to tell us the latest news right away often involves brilliant, brave and smart journalists. The sort of people who, seeing news of a deadly virus outbreak spreading fast and killing people, grab their passports and rush towards it rather than grabbing their family and rushing away.

But these dramatic chases are much like a sugar rush of chocolate in our diet: life is better for a little bit of it, not too much. Just as chocolate isnt really sustenance, so too the constant intake of breaking news isnt the way to understand what is going on in the world. Different forms of news newspapers, television, radio, websites, social media and more come with their own specific features and risks. Whats more important are those issues that are common to them all. As this book explains, the very nature of what makes for a gripping news story means the news itself is a tool very often ill-suited to understanding the world around us. xi

What news can be, though, is a jumping-off point if, that is, you learn to understand what it is really telling you, what it might not be telling you and what its likely to be getting wrong.

That is what this book will do. I hope you will find it a useful and enlightening guide, because understanding what is going on around us in the world is not only fascinating, its also necessary necessary so we can make the right choices in our own lives and essential so we can make the right choices in our society at large.

Reports about the news industry itself are often grim. Whether these are stories about struggling to make a profit or battles with waves of fake news, accounts of the news industry in all its forms, from traditional newspapers through to the latest social media outlets, are far from pretty. But the real problem with news across all these formats is much bigger indeed, its very structure is ill-suited to understanding what is going on around us. Appreciate that and you can start making sense of the news.

Current stories about the state of the news are overwhelmingly negative. There are rightful plaudits for the bravery of journalists covering conflicts such as those in Syria or the investigatory zeal of those who exposed the Panama Papers. Such award-winning moments are, however, more the exception in a tide of worries. Worries, that is, about the financial future of news outlets, anxiety over the rise and believability of fake news and concerns over a wave of governments introducing restrictive press laws, sometimes using fake news as the excuse.

Much can, and has, been written about each of these trends. there is much you can learn to spot about how a story has taken shape and how much you can trust it to be a true and relevant account of events.

There are certainly guides out there about how to be media-literate, about how to apply a sceptical and inquisitive eye to stories, but they tend either to be very brief or rather dull. Or perhaps, to be fairer, they are often just short guides trying quickly to catch the attention of digital audiences that do not pay much attention to news on TV, radio or in printed form; or, alternatively, they are long, detailed, academic ), of which, even if you read widely and deeply, it is hard to find mention.

That is the gap this book seeks to fill. I am not a journalist, but I have been a lecturer, teaching would-be journalists, a press officer, the occasional subject of news stories, a pundit and interviewee in the media, and an adviser to organisations from small charities through to large multinationals on their communications strategies

You can, if you wish, view the take of this book laying out, as it does, a whole further set of problems with the news as a cause for xiii pessimism. For me, however, it is a cause for optimism: there is much that can be improved about the news just through understanding, and, if you are producing news, making sometimes very simple changes or, if you are consuming the news, by knowing how to spot the flaws within the stories in front of you. Some of these issues are deeply ingrained and yet also remarkably simple to fix. Merely using quote marks differently, as I will explain in , would be a boon a trivially easy thing to change and one that would noticeably improve the news. We can fix the quote marks problem!