I’m not sure exactly when journalists decided that the only shitty things that can make the news, but it’s wrong. I know a place that’s trying to fix it.

I remember in journalism school way back in the 80’s my instructors lamented that good news was not news.

“News is usually about what went wrong or who screwed up,” I sort of remember one of them may have said. You can see how well that has stuck with me these past 40 years.

It may have been something from Marshall Mcluhan, who they all seemed to treat as a philosophical god of media. You know the Global Village guy who touted journalists as the “gatekeepers” and the “medium is the message.” We may be able to start by blaming him for screwing up several generations of journalists.

But what do you expect when you listen to a fucking Canadian.

McLuhan’s thinking did highly influence what I saw as a “big story” when I wrote for a little weekly newspaper in Arizona in the late 80s to early 90s. I was focused on our one unsolved murder, our one story of international gun running (the accused was acquitted in an hour and it sure looked like an ATF sting went wrong) and scandal on the school board when a former gym teacher accused of abuse got elected to be on the board that supervised the people who fired him.

That was fun.

But “community journalism” was spending a lot of time on new baby pictures, high school sports and local businesses (opening and closing). Looking back 30 years later, the stories with the most impact were: building a new high school, incorporating as a town and building new roads, improving the water and sanitary system and creating large public parks. Those are the things that bound the community together and survive to this day.

Many of the people in those stories from 30 years ago are dead. The bad things they did mostly forgotten; the good things are still in use every day.

In the baby boom generation, I was not the only naive rabbit getting sucked down the news shit hole. Rupert Murdoch was buying up the NY Post, creating Fox News and the internet was changing the business model from papers sold to internets clicked.

Long before social media algorithms put AI to work, Murdoch learned that “outrage and fear” were the only two things that drove clicks. “The news” focused on its catalog of crime and rage-filled political opinion to get people clicking on the outrage and fear. He took at least two generations of “journalists” down into the “rage hole” with him.

That’s what you get for listening to a fucking Australian.

In the past decade, the corporate masters of all the news organizations have put different political slants on their “news product” but the goals are the same. Fear and outrage. Outrage and fear. 24/7 almost every day of the week. (Sometimes they fill in with murder mysteries on the weekend).

Ask most Americans if things are getting better or worse, and they will quickly say “worse” and think you a fool for disagreeing.

But the real stories of the past 30 years have been about how much better life on earth has been getting for the vast majority of humans. Drastic reductions in early deaths. Incredible increases in life expectancy. Eradication of diseases like Polio and Measles. 250,000 people a day are lifted out of poverty. Compared to what it was 100 years ago, wars hardly exist.

Future Crunch

How do I know any of that is true? I had read a few stories, but then my brother the fruit farmer/plantation owner gave me a clue.

“There’s a website that collects “good news” stories from all over the world and compiles them into one list,” he said. “Read it. You will feel better.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

He sent me the link. Future Crunch.

Future Crunch image from website
If this looks familiar to you, I stole this image from Future Crunch website.

Started by a different group of fucking Australians, it is the exact opposite of Murdoch and his minions.

First story I saw — the murder rate in the US has plummeted in 2023. Overall crime is in an historic decline. If you saw that on the corporate news, it wasn’t there for long and probably didn’t stick in your brain. It seems we are built to brush “good news” aside and focus on what is driving us to hell in a hand basket.

I’m a fan of history. Many stories about what former generations thought about their children and grandchildren’s generations are a litany of laziness, irresponsibility and immorality — dating back to Socrates.

Much of what they and our generation worries about for the future, seem to disappear over time. It’s the things we don’t worry about that often bite us in the ass.

Corporate news is great at building up the worry. It sucks at showing us the solutions.

Remember when we worried that war in Ukraine would starve people in Africa, drive up energy prices in Europe and create a new round of empire building through conquest in Russia (and China invading Taiwan). It looks like none of those things are going to happen.

Did you know that the global price of wheat is now lower than it was before Russia invaded Ukraine? Did you know that the EU has reached its target of filling 90% of gas storage facilities 70 days ahead of schedule? Did you know that the counter-offensive against Russia by Ukrainian forces is going a lot better than most media outlets are reporting?

Future Crunch report 17th August 2023 – 23rd August 2023

Reading Future Crunch for a few weeks, it’s obvious that people at all levels are working on solving the problems we have in front of us.

I’m not saying we worry about the wrong things. I’m saying that “worry” leads people to act. Those actions have good effects over time. Sometimes it takes a long time to reduce war, poverty or complex problems like crime and climate change. But if the past 100 years are any indication, we can overcome those problems, and people need to hear that’s possible.

After your spend 15 minutes on Future Crunch, going back to the NY Times feels like you are reading about a bunch of spoiled rich kids fighting over fashion (like switching the TV from watching the Wimbledon final to backyard pickleball). It’s moving from a long view of what’s right with humanity and zooming in on stupid people having a pointless fight.

The long-term trends are generally good. But our overlords in the corporate media are too busy using outrage and fear to see it. If we can escape the fear machines, maybe we can learn to avoid the factionalism and fanaticism that seems to have infected our politics and social discourse.

Future Crunch says it is dedicated to “good news.” But I see it as the “real news.” We should all get our weekly dose of reality to bring balance into our lives and help us break the for-profit fear and outrage machine disguised as “the news.”

I did not get paid and have not connection to Future Crunch. I’m just a new free subscriber who should have thought of this idea myself a long time ago.