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Showing posts from July 23, 2018

Must the News Be New? -- a modest journalistic proposal

It is a commonplace that, in order to boost circulation, the (so-called?) news media tend to emphasize cloud-pleasing stories which – given human nature? – tend to the violent and seamy. It has been suggested that an appropriate response would be to balance this reporting with positive news as well. As German economist Max Roser put it (here I am quoting from an article ["The Big Question," by Joshua Rothman, July 23, 2018, p. 27] that quotes a book [Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now ] that cites Roser), a truly evenhanded newspaper “could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years." However, I think this does not really redress the imbalance because even the bad news is distorted … and not nearly bad enough! So let me make a modest journalistic proposal (although this could also serve as a personal philosophical or ethical exercise): Each day (perhaps one week later in retrospec