By Steven Pinker
Every day the news is filled with stories about war, terrorism, crime,
pollution, inequality, drug abuse and oppression. And it’s not just the
headlines we’re talking about; it’s the op-eds and long-form stories as
well. Magazine covers warn us of coming anarchies, plagues, epidemics,
collapses, and so many “crises” (farm, health, retirement, welfare,
energy, deficit) that copywriters have had to escalate to the redundant
“serious crisis.”
Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news
will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is.
News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We
never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a
country where a war has not broken out”— or a city that has not been
bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things
have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be
enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of
smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and
war correspondents.
And among the things that do happen, the positive and negative ones
unfold on different timelines. The news, far from being a “first draft
of history,” is closer to play-by-play sports commentary. It focuses on
discrete events, generally those that took place since the last edition
(in earlier times, the day before; now, seconds before).
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Source: The Guardian
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