Like many, arguably all, mainstream journalists I am wary of criticism that the news output of newspapers and broadcasters is relentlessly doom-laden. Bad news gets reported while good news is ignored.
I seem to recall that this debate sprang up first in the early 1990s when the former newsreader Martyn Lewis outraged his BBC colleagues by arguing that broadcasters should report more good news.
He always stressed that his nuanced argument was misrepresented, not least for the reasons I’ve just outlined. It was not a case of replacing the bad with the good. It was about redressing the balance.
But the argument against the negative content of papers and news bulletins on TV and radio has not gone away. Indeed, it has broadened by gaining proselytisers and making converts.
One of them is Jodie Jackson, a young woman who tells me she is convinced of the need to change conventional reporting and the resulting news agenda in British newsroooms. To that end, she has composed a poem and posted it on YouTube, as above. Here are a couple of stanzas:
“So what we’re asking for, as I said before, is rigorous journalism reporting on progress, reporting on problems, but not ignoring success. It may sound idealistic, it’s been labelled naive, but let me assure you this is not an ignorant plea”.
It was some four years ago that she became concerned about the news she was hearing on radio. “I had a strong emotional reaction to it. As a consumer, I found it depressing and cynical, even paranoid, with its relentless focus on problems.”
So a disheartened Jackson began to cast around for possible alternatives. Realising that there was a systemic problem with news, whether broadcast on TV and radio or published in newspapers, she set up a British Museum event, inviting Martyn Lewis to speak.
What struck her forcibly was a need for what she calls “solutions-focused journalism” and she found that she was far from alone. There were others who had similar views, notably the Constructive Journalism Project, founded by Seán Dagan Wood, editor-in-chief of a magazine called Positive News, and Danielle Batist.
So passionate was Jackson about the need for a new news paradigm that, aside from writing articles for the magazine, she went back to university to take a post-grad degree based around research on the virtues of “positive news.”
An abstract from one of her papers, Publishing the positive: exploring the perceived motivations for and the consequences of reading solutions-focused journalism, is on her website.
She stresses that bad news must be reported but believes it is possible, through rigorous reporting, to present a fuller and more balanced picture of the world.
I see similarities between the arguments of Jackson, Wood and Batist with those advanced by the advocates of peace journalism, who have argued that the reporting of conflict would benefit from journalists adopting a solutions-focused approach.
*This posting was amended on 19 April to carry Seán Dagan Wood’s full name.
