In 1993, the television news presenter Martyn Lewis suggested that people didn’t want to hear all the bad news they were fed daily by newspapers, radio and television. He was derided for his remarks – not all news can be pleasant and palatable, his critics said – but later said he had been misunderstood.
But he had a point. Most of the news is bad, for the simple reason that good news is not news. Who wants to read a report saying that every plane landed safely yesterday (again)? Details of a conference painstakingly thrashing out the terms of cohabitation between two obscure communities somewhere in the world would make us yawn. And “nameless stranger does something kind for another nameless stranger” is not the sort of headline that hardboiled editors get enthusiastic about. The news spreads the impression of a world on the edge of disaster. If we hear of a country in conflict, we assume the whole country is chaotic whereas the truth is almost always that civil war is confined to certain regions. If we’re told that there’s a drought or famine or serious floods, we find it very hard to localise it, to confine the affected area on the map without extrapolating to the whole of Ethiopia or eastern Africa.
One survey in 2002 found that 80% of the British public believe the ‘developing world’ to be in a permanent state of disaster. The impression had been formed by well meaning and balanced media reports from the African famines of the 1980s and retained in folk memory. We like to generalise and we find it hard to allow diversity;
to believe that most people across the world live in unspectacular normality most of the time.
Editors and journalists insist that they are only meeting demand by chasing sensation and dredging the dirt out of each story but they could probably still sell newspapers and bring in viewers if they upped the content of cheerful but dull news or spent more time explaining the nuances of complex situations.
Or do readers, listeners and viewers see through it all? “Paradoxically, one of the biggest reasons for being optimistic is that there are systemic flaws in the reported world view,” says Chris Anderson, curator of TED Conference. “Certain types of news – for example dramatic disasters and terrorist actions – are massively over-reported. Others – such as scientific progress and meaningful statistical surveys of the state of the world – massively under-reported. Although this leads to major problems such as distortion of rational public policy and a perpetual gnawing fear of apocalypse, it is also reason to be optimistic. Once you realize you’re being inadvertently brainwashed to believe things are worse than they are, you can... with a little courage... step out into the sunshine.”
But if you prefer the good stuff to the bad stuff you can always read Positive News or one of several websites which aim to redress the balance in reporting.
Sources
Positive News: www.positivenews.org.uk.
Nukes
The theory was insane: they knew that we knew that they knew we’d only use them if they did first etc. The fact that there was no nuclear war between the USA and the Soviets in the 50s, 60s,70s or 80s, say the Cold War theorists, is proof that MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) worked. We just had to live with the Damoclesian feeling that the logic could break down at any moment and we’d have four minutes before the last and best firework display we’d ever see.
I was never convinced by the logic of deterrence but the first thing we have to be grateful for is that there have only been two relatively small (!) nuclear bombs used in anger. There have been scary moments – the Cuban Missile Crisis and the bellicose Cruise Missile era in the 1980s – but they passed and most of us don’t wake in a cold sweat wondering whether a seagull crossing a radar is going to cause someone to panic and trigger the Third World War.
But now what? The best news would be to hear that all nuclear weapons have been dismantled, never to be assembled again; because even one primed nuclear warhead in existence is too many. But let’s be realistic. Here’s how the teams in the nuclear division stand: • There are five states which officially possess nuclear
weapons and which have signed up to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China.
• Israel, India and Pakistan, have developed their own nuclear weapons outside the provisions of the treaty.
• South Africa had a nuclear arsenal for a while but announced it had scrapped it in 1991.
• Three states of the former Soviet Union, the Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, also had nuclear weapons but have now either sent them back to Russia or scrapped them.
• North Korea, controversially, claims to have nuclear capability and it is alleged that Iran’s nuclear power programme is a front for the development of weapons. Several other countries operate nuclear reactors for research or to provide power and could thus go nuclear if they wanted to, but they have chosen not to.
Nuclear weapons have not, therefore, spread as much as they might have since 1945 and there are large areas of the world – including southeast and central Asia, the South Pacific, Latin America and Africa – that have declared themselves nuclear free zones.
There are fewer warheads around today than there once were. The US stockpile peaked in 1966 at 32,193 warheads and is now down to just over 10,000. The Soviet/Russian stockpile reached 40,723 warheads in 1986 and is now down to 8,500. There are balancing factors to add to the statistics such as improved technology (better guidance systems etc.) which mean fewer weapons are needed to do the same job. But, in short, rejoice: we can all still be killed several times over, but not so many times.
The Doomsday Clock, a hypothetical indicator of how close humanity is to destroying itself (midnight
representing Armageddon), is currently set at five minutes to midnight, 11.55. The best it has achieved since it was initially set by pessimists in 1947 is 11.43 when the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed between the USA and the crumbling Soviet Union; but in 1953, when both sides were testing weapons, it reached 11.58.
Sources
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament: www.cnduk.org The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist (BAS) – The Doomsday Clock: www.thebulletin.org
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