Diary – 22 February 2018

Everyone’s mood is affected by the news, especially bad news. A recent review found that heavy news-watchers show ‘misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, desensitisation, and in some cases … complete avoidance of the news.’ As someone who has written one book documenting the historical decline of violence (The Better Angels of Our Nature) and a new one documenting progress in every other dimension of human flourishing (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress), my emotional fortunes are even more tightly yoked to the disasters of the day, I am apt to take episodes of violence and oppression not just as depressing developments but as personal affronts and professional rebukes. To make news consumption bearable, I remind myself of my own advisories. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough to fill the news. Only datasets (which sum the boring peaceful places with the photogenic disaster zones) provide an accurate picture of the state of the world. Indeed, the annual reports are more heartening than the hour’s headlines: the upticks in war, terrorism, and homicide of the mid-2010s are being reversed, and even the apparent retreat of democracy looks different in historical context. Notwithstanding the backsliding in Russia, Turkey, and eastern Europe, the number of democracies has increased from 31 in 1971 to, at last count, 103. And as the economist Max Roser points out, news outlets could have run the headline number of people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000 since yesterday every day for the past 25 years.

I have tried to avoid any assault on the ‘mainstream media’, but I do call out its habit of presenting every unsolved problem as a crisis, epidemic, or existential threat.