You’ve heard the news: after
years of overcast, cool summers with damp garden parties and drenched
concerts in the park, the British have something novel to worry about - an
unusually hot, sunny summer.
You’d think they would be grateful, but that’s not how the mind
works: for every silver lining, a dark cloud must be found. It’s been
frightfully hot in the underground, there’s insufficient air-conditioning
in shops, trains last week were running slow for fear of buckled tracks,
a 92-year-old man was found dead on a park bench.
So what else is new? It’s the hottest average
European summer in half a century, which means, by the way, that 50 years
ago it was pretty hot, too.
There is a psychological pattern in
this. We love bad news. Don’t blame it on editors: our addiction to gloom,
doom, and misfortune is as persistent a fact of the human psyche as our
love of sweetness and fat.
During the million-plus years of our hunter-gatherer evolution, we developed
more than just genetic preferences in sex and food. We also evolved universal
tastes and preferences for how we process information — the kinds of
stories that engage our interest.
It’s no use demonising Rupert Murdoch: our news tastes predate Morse’s
telegraph or Gutenberg’s printing press by a million years. Journalism
did not create them, it simply serves them. So herewith a basic diagnosis
of the news preferences of homo sapiens:
First, we enjoy good news but pay more attention to bad news. This
might have been a useful preference for Pleistocene hunter-gatherers
trying to avoid danger, but it makes for distorted understandings
today.
In 1998, much was made of the “disastrous” El Nino that caused
floods, mudslides, crop damage and at least 10 deaths across California,
as well as killer tornadoes in Florida. Anyone who followed the news of
that episode would have been aware of these terrible facts.
Later on, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society totalled
up the costs of the 1998 El Nino and balanced it against benefits: 850 fewer
human deaths from cold, lower oil use, fewer ice-caused traffic injuries,
diminished spring floods..
The costs of that El Nino were US$4 billion (NZ$6.7 billion), while the
benefits stood at $19 billion, plus the incalculable value of the hundreds
of lives spared. Few ever saw this final reckoning. The mainstream media
ignored it: they were undoubtedly pursuing their next climate disaster.
Secondly, we are more impressed by personal stories of
joy and distress than by tedious facts and figures.
Journalistic
puff pieces about alternative medicines, for instance, usually begin with
a heart-warming tale of hope and apparent healing. This always trumps
authentic medical research showing that the therapy doesn’t work. So a
joyful mother tells us how she cured her colicky baby with aromatherapy.
Did it work? Of course it did. Who ever heard of a colicky
18-year-old?
This eye for the personal — probably a heritage of having evolved in
non-literate bands where information was always communicated face to face
— is well understood by astute feature editors.
Television producers, who think the zoom lens was invented
for close-ups of tears rolling down cheeks, know how to exploit it. But it
means that important though abstract issues are not adequately reported or
understood.
Thirdly, we are persistently rational in the extent to
which we prefer to see important, unexpected news events as part of large,
coherent plans. When religion held sway weather disasters were seen as
rational acts of God, usually punishment inflicted on us.
Today, even people who’ve given up on God still like the idea of a
rational world — hence their love of conspiracy theories. That Princess
Diana stupidly placed herself in the hands of her irresponsible boyfriend
and his drunken chauffeur is hard to accept, so many will prefer to blame
it on a plot involving the Queen and MI6.
The assassination of President Kennedy
and the events of September 11 have generated equally loony theories. It
makes for a more comprehensible world.
Besides ascribing
intelligible causes to shocking events, conspiracy theories also feed our
desire to find someone to blame, or to extract a moral lesson from every
misfortune. We feel more comfortable living in a morally just
world.
The New Zealand media are particularly adept at finding some hapless soul
— usually a harried, underpaid social worker — to blame for any
violent family breakdown, or some doctor to pillory for every misread x-ray
or misdiagnosed disease.
Even the weather has become a stage on which good or evil act out their
parts. Newsweek’s Howard Fineman reports that French media are
blaming the European weather on the Americans, for not signing the Kyoto
Protocol — odd, since the Kyoto treaty would not have any effect for
years.
Of course, Fineman
says, France is not itself at fault, even though its vehicle fleet
contains millions of diesel engines and its nuclear power plants are
turning French rivers hot enough to boil mussels.
By the way, the
world is not generally more prone to natural disasters today than in the
past: there were mighty tornadoes and deadly heatwaves in the 1930s, and
dreadfully cold weather in the 17th century. What has changed is
reporting.
Years ago, a hurricane in Panama or landslide in Laos would barely register
a wire report. Today, video footage from anywhere can be uploaded through
satellites and seen everywhere. Since it is likely a dramatic weather event
is happening somewhere on Earth every day, TV will always have plenty of
footage of extreme weather. What has changed are damage costs: the same
tornado that would have merely churned up empty Florida farmland in the
1930s demolishes housing today.
We have not outgrown what were probably the tastes of our ancestors for
sexual gossip, drama and morality stories in whatever counted as “news”
in the Paleolithic age. Our ancestors needed accurate information to survive,
and you’d think we would prefer accurate news today.
But some
scientists have argued that our ancestors were none too choosy about the
truth of their myths and ideologies. Even false ideas, fervently believed,
can powerfully unite a people. The history of religion, down to the modern
era, seems to bear this out. Why do we expect that the news values of
modern media should be much better?
This is a depressing notion for
those of us who value truth and fact over delusion and wishful thinking.
But maybe we should all just relax and enjoy the weather. A letter last
week from my sister-in-law in Germany expressed pleasure in the splendidly
warm summer. And in a side-effect of the heat, French and German wineries
are predicting a spectacular year, perhaps even better than the legendary
1947 vintage.
Great weather? Superb wine? Surely the media will be
able to turn that news into tales of deadly heatstroke, skin cancer and
alcoholism. Don’t shoot the editors. They are giving us what we
want.
