Observations upon output from the Radio

Brace against more Bad News!

Somebody said to me that a major reason why holidays are more enjoyable than daily living at home was the absence of news.

For longer than I can recall, I have been glued to radio news in whichever country I have lived. I’ve fretted about its absence when living in places where world news arrives irregularly in newspapers two or three days out of date. I’m hooked. My mother, in her later years, had a transistor radio plugged into the mains electricity in nearly every room in her house. She’d go from room to room in the mornings switching them all on, so her diet of Radio 4 News wouldn’t be interrupted when moving to make coffee or fetch something from elsewhere.

When I visited, she’d express worry about the political situation in some country far away; about current interest rates and inflation, about some remote war or awful train crash which was causing dreadful suffering to people she would never know or meet. Was she well-informed about current events? Many would say she was. But well-informed generally? I’m not so sure.

I do believe that human beings are imbued with an unhealthy level of prurience – that is to say, we cannot help looking at others who are undergoing misfortune. The Police often slow or even halt the flow of traffic on a dual carriageway when there has been a crash on the other side. They know that rubber-neckers will pay more attention to the carnage in the opposing traffic than to the vehicle in front of them – which may have slowed even more to get a better look.

News editors know well that bad news sells. If they want to increase ‘engagement’, get more clicks and ‘likes’ they have only to lard their output with ‘Shock! Horror!’ Stories.

I used to have Twitting on my phone, but haven’t opened it in a long while because it fed me nothing but people being filmed as they fell over or had a fight. The phoenix replacement, Bluesky, is going the same way.

Is this some evolutionary hang over? What terrible things surrounded our hairy ancestors? Do we need to check out our fellow hominin being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger to alert us to the danger such carnivores present? What might have been the purpose of attracting us to watch closely one person beating up another who’d taken too big a piece of mammoth off the fire?

We became inured to constant news reels of starving Biafran children as a result of the Nigerian blockade during the 1967 to 1970 civil war. Charities complained of ‘donor exhaustion’. Our natural reactions were blunted. Shocking films no longer produced a visceral Giving response. In recent years, TV and Radio news has included long segments featuring destruction and devastation, starvation and suffering in centres of population in Ukraine and Gaza. Again, agencies report falling levels of concern among western populations. ‘It ain’t my problem. They should sort themselves out’.

The current nationalistic US administration has recently gutted US Aid – a soft form of power, protectionism and foreign policy ever since it was created in 1961 – leaving humanitarian disasters to turn to other countries for succour. This unfortunate move has been welcomed by some of those other countries, having a free ride into broadening their global power base.

If the information fed to us was more balanced between good news and bad, might we be more balanced people? The truth is that we should be affected by scenes of horror, especially as those scenes draw closer in likelihood and geographically. For instance, it is reasonable to posit the present conflict in Ukraine spreading into Western nations. In which case, it will be our problem.

But can we please have the stream of bad news balanced by all of the good which is happening, despite this?

The Womens’ Rugby World Cup will take place this year. It’s been expanded gradually since 1991 to include 16 teams and will be held in various locations in England. The growing popularity of Womens’ Football (helped by the Lionesses’ second UEFA European Championship win in a row this year) has begun to prompt recognition that both genders can achieve major sporting goals. This is great news.

A colossal squid was filmed for the first time in its natural habitat. These things can grow to almost 1,000Kgs in weight. Scary! Fascinating, too.

Scientists have invented a tiny pacemaker, as small as a grain of rice, which can be injected under the skin for temporary use. A brilliant break-through.

A ten year old girl made chess history by defeating a Grandmaster earlier this month.

I grew some potatoes in my garden for the first time. During July, 134 lovely people bought the first book in my Al Sharika series.

Alright – the last couple of items are Good News for me, personally, but all the others are Good in a wider sense. They are not earth-shattering, but all are positive in some way. There is so much more, but you have to seek it out. You have to consciously blank off the dire, the depressing, the awful, lest you follow in its wake in an unending downward spiral into… What? Actually, I don’t want to know.

Today I haven’t listened to or watched any news. My blood pressure and cortisol levels have not been raised artificially by a stream of untruths emanating from Washington, D.C. My dog laid his chin on my leg as I wrote this. I feel better for it. Even though I am aware this is his pointed reminder that it is time to visit the forest and the nearby fields in search of bunnies, squirrels and maybe a deer or two. Still, it’s a valuable connection between two sentient beings who understand each other.

My linguistic abilities are expanding, too. I reckon I’m grasping the rudiments of Starling speech (see previous Substack post ‘The Slugs are Back’) and for sure the Smooth Collie Mind Meld is working. I speak Smooth Collie too. (See previous paragraph).

Do you have Good News? Tell me and share it to the world. I promise to avoid naming names to protect the innocent!

Slugs reading newspapers and listening to the radio