‘Fun’ times as doomsday beckons

A United Kingdom journalism researcher believes he has found the answer to the decline in the country’s mainstream media — more fun news.

Nic Newman says fun is what younger audiences crave, and producing traditional stories about wars, traffic fatalities and political corruption turns them off.

Newman, a Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, said there was a disconnect between old-style journalism and a “younger, plugged-in generation looking for information, entertainment and distraction”.

It is inevitable that those of us who care about the world and how it operates must adapt to the different ways it can now be reported.

The same conference at which Newman spoke discussed how the boom in podcasting could be further exploited, for example.

However, measuring the value of news by its ‘fun factor’ is simply a bridge too far.

On the same day Newman was presenting his vision on the future of news, Human Rights Watch produced a damning report on China’s aggressive attempts to spread its ideas on media censorship to the rest of the world.

Presenting the report, the organisation’s Executive Director, Kenneth Roth said China’s global threat to human rights, if unchallenged, could “portend a dystopian future in which no-one is beyond the reach of Chinese censors”.

“It could result in an international human rights system so weakened that it no longer serves as a check on Government repression,” Roth said.

The report also covered Syria and Yemen, where warring parties were accused of a blatant disregard of international rules on chemical weapons and bombing hospitals — and China’s mass internment of its ethnic Uyghur population “the largest imprisonment of people on the basis of religion since the Holocaust”.

Definitely not Newman’s idea of ‘fun’ news, and presumably topics he believes should take second place behind celebrity gossip and Four Ways to Sleep in Bed with a New Partner to attract his ‘younger audiences’.

In any case he is wrong. It is not young people, but their elders who seem to have become lobotomised on a steady diet of sensationalised pap.

At a recent UK ‘town hall’ meeting on how the country would fare post-Brexit a member of the audience maintained that once free of the European Union’s shackles, the country would once again be free to trade with “the empire” as a route to prosperity.

I was dumbfounded, this was not someone plucked off the street in a random television interview for viewers to chuckle over. He was sitting in some kind of focus group that was supposedly formulating serious suggestions for the nation’s future.   

Contrast this with the hundreds of thousands of young people around the globe who took time off from school to demonstrate in support of more active measures to combat climate change.

They are aware, more than many of their complacent elders, of the suffering and misery that is the norm for millions of their peers across the globe — and how this is only going to get worse if current attitudes continue to prevail.

As their leaders emerge they will become a force that will not be denied. 

They are the best hope this very unfunny world has as the Doomsday Clock inches closer to midnight.