It’s hard being a news junkie right now when every bulletin just brings images of horror from Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine, while national politics is dominated by watching the Labour party tie itself in knots over freebies and its messages of gloom, and locally it’s been Sinn Fein demonstrating what happens when a party only talks to itself.
It’s not normal to watch the BBC News at Six, followed by local stuff on Newsline, then switch over to Channel 4 News at 7pm and catch the 10 o’clock bulletin before bedtime. But at least BBC cuts have cured me of also watching Newsnight, which has now turned into a talking heads panel show.
Being a journalist probably instils habits that are hard to break and sometimes you forget that news is not as crucial to many other people’s lives. But I’ve still been surprised at the number of people who are saying they’ve completely switched off from news programmes now.
Some say they are disgusted by the “bias” they perceive if it doesn’t align with their own views, and nothing is more polarised than the Middle East conflict.
The appalling scenes of devastation that we see in Gaza every night are indeed hard to watch. But the problem is that they are not being shown to Israelis, who instead get a narrative of their own country being under constant threat from Lebanon and Iran.
They do not see babies being pulled from wrecked buildings and children being wrapped in white shrouds after bombardment from their own army.
Without the reality of what is being done in their name, it is easy for them to see Israel’s growing isolation as evidence of anti-semitism.
The switch-off from the news is not just anecdotal. A recent global survey by the Reuters Institute found that four in 10 people said they sometimes, or often actively, avoided the news which they found depressing, relentless and boring. They cited the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East as the main reason for their avoidance.
Audiences for traditional news sources like TV and newspapers have fallen sharply over the past decade, with younger people preferring to get their news online or via social media.
But it is worrying when people swap news for the confirmation bias that is available on outlets like Twitter, which has become increasingly dominated by rabid, right-wing views promoted by its new owner, the billionaire Elon Musk.
The platform has become a toxic environment full of misleading stories and disinformation on a huge scale, so it is comforting to see that Twitter – ‘X’ really hasn’t caught on – has lost millions of dollars in advertising revenue.
Musk is responsible for its decline. He has publicly called for judges to be arrested in response to people being jailed for online activity which incited some of the riots seen last summer following the murder of three children in Southport.
He is currently fan-boying Trump and posting as much negative coverage of Kamala Harris as possible, with the promise of a prominent role in the orange one’s administration, if he gets elected.
But like watching news bulletins, breaking old habits is hard. I don’t much like the alternatives to Twitter. Mastodon sounds like something a doctor would say you were suffering from while pointing to an X-ray with a concerned face. And Bluesky sounds dangerously like the sort of “thinking outside the box” language beloved of advertising executives.
That other tech billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, has also launched Threads, which is linked to Instagram, and while it’s already hit 200 million active users in 12 months, experts have complained that it’s deadly dull.
Twitter has become increasingly dominated by rabid, right-wing views promoted by its new owner, the billionaire Elon Musk
****
Belfast City Council missed a trick in their haste to take down the portrait of former Lord Mayor Niall Ó Donnghaile.
It should have kept it there in a new “Rogues Gallery” with guides explaining the reason for his disgrace. I’m sure there are a few others who could join him.
