Did there used to be this many “bad things happening” dd asked and i honestly can’t remember!

[Wowijustgiveup]

Dd(17) was watching the news with me - polio, monkeypox, ukraine, taiwan, drought, fire, potential power cute etc etc. She asked if things were this unstable when i was a teenager.

I remember there being individual news items - Iraq, terrorist attacks but i honestly cant remember them all coming at once like this.

I told her that i think its always been like this (she is a worrier) but actually has it?!

Yes, it has. We just didn't have the 24-hour news cycle. Even when that started, we didn't have the wealth of data on how consumers engage with that cycle and how it drives purchase behaviour that we have now. We knew "bad news sells" but now we know exactly how to manipulate it into consumer marketing.

Its been a tough decade so far with the pandemic and the economy. Usually you get some good times in between the bad but it seems 2 major bad events have come on top of each other.

So there's an over abundance of shit imo.

There were quite a few in the early 80s - recession, football hooliganism, IRA bombing, riots in Brixton and Toxteth amongst others, earthquakes in Italy an Mount St Helena eruption, record unemployment , various man made disasters - throughout the 80s, miners strikes plane crashes, and lots more man made disasters than we get now due to better h and s

It's reported on more now as people have to the means to record and show things as they happen whereas before we relied on a couple of news bulletins and stills in newspapers (if you chose to buy them)

When I was growing up we had Cold War/nuclear war threats, ira bombs, strikes, pit closures, poverty, sky high mortgage rates so yeah always been a bit shit.

I said this to my dad, expecting him to reassure me that this was normal. Sadly he agreed that things have never looked so bleak!

I'd reassure her that news comes from across the world now, not just our own little corner of it. That there are serious issues, and we can all play our part in addressing them by behaving responsibly and kindly.

It is feeling bleak at the moment, but terrible things have always happened. Look back just over a century - we had the First World War, then the Spanish Flu pandemic, followed relatively quickly by the Wall Street Crash and Great Depression, and then the Second World War. All in one generation! So much suffering and pain. The difference is that then it might have taken days for news to make it to ordinary people and even then it would either have been via a daily newspaper or the radio news, or perhaps a cinema newsreel. Now we have a 24 hours rolling news cycle. Look at any newspaper website and you’ll find several stories being given live updates. Do they all merit this? Are they all really moving so quickly that we all need to know each and every update as it happens? Probably not. But the news cycle demands to be fed, so all that detail bombards us all the time. It’s not good for us.

I’ve just finished listening to the British Scandal podcast series on the Hitler Diaries forgeries - it’s pretty illuminating about how the media got to a place when filling space was more important that what you filled it with (hint - a certain Aussie media baron may have had something to do with it). We also have a government that is too busy navel-gazing to actually do anything to help people deal with the impending crisis, while at the same time the media fills all that space with huge amounts of detail, because they have to fill it with something, all off the back of a pandemic that shook us all up (to say the least!). So that doesn’t help either.

I’m not saying it’s all rosy and lovely, but that we have to bear in mind the way that information reaches us and affects us. And we can’t lose hope.

How depressing

Used to be worse TBH. Says me who remembers the early 70s...

I think there was a brief period in the late 90s when it was quite nice and then 9/11 happened and it all went down hill. I remember people talking about the possibility of nuclear war erupting as a result of our intervention in Iraq. The bank runs in 2008 etc. I remember my Dad struggling to have enough money to feed us in the early 90s.

I also watched the Crown recently and they covered the Cuban Missile crisis which was a terrifying moment in history and I thought as I watched it how it seems that we always lurch from one crisis to the next.

In the 90s there was always one terrible war or genocide or famine, but I don't recall much that had a direct effect on us. In the UK at least I think the 90s were a pretty bouncy decade. The 80s however...

I think it's always he the case but just that younger people are more aware of the news now. When I was 17 I honestly wasn't aware if anything that was going on, I was very ignorant. I always watch the news now but never did when I was younger.

That was tougher for my parents I found rolling power cuts quite interesting. Mind you 1963 snow was fun too. Everyone coped though. I'm not sure we're as resilient these days as a nation

I don’t think we’re less resilient. I think it’s the 24 hour news cycle again - when you have a few tv bulletins and maybe one or two editions of a paper each day, and little in the way of pictures and footage, you have to pick and choose. When you have to fill the air 24/7 and you have competitors from the entire world available to your customers, then you’ll use anything, and you’ll choose the most dramatic and negative stories because that’s what sells.

My Dad always tells me about the time when mortgage rates hit 17% and the building trade wasn’t looking and Mum and Dad had just had their first baby.

Plus it's not just news outlets, it's all over social media too and people discuss it over WhatsApp groups instead of waiting til the cooler or lunch break

Agree about the comments on 24hr News.
We used to get told at 8.00am for 10/15 minutes on radio whilst getting ready for work or school then nothing except 2 minute headlines until 15 mins at 1.00pm. TV at 6.00 and again at 10.00.
So not the repeat and reinforcement there is nowadays.
Much more detailed local news including features at 6.00pm bulletin.

Social media and the many news channels are the issue. Bad things did happen back in the day, but much of it wasn't reported on and we didn't have the dreaded internet to inform us of many things. The world is sadly a scary place x

You can add the Ethiopian famine, the Aids epidemic and the Cold War to the 80s list too. There was some grim, ongoing news.

I think the difference now is that in the past even with bad events the overall direction in the long term seemed more positive. Now it feels like everything is very suddenly getting rapidly worse as we have reached the tipping point for the environment.

I still hear about the 1963 snow. My sister was a baby, you had to get water from the standpipe down the road, yet mum still washed her wool vests every day. Baby had chilblains on her hands.

In the 80's, constant threat of nuclear war (99 red balloons), AIDS, Live Aid Ethiopian famine, miners strikes.

No, this has been an unusually bad decade.

before that it was probably a ‘big event’ every 2 years or so.

2000-2010:
9/11
Iraq war
Boxing Day tsunami
credit crunch

2010-2019
Brexit
Can anyone think of anything else?? I suddenly can’t but I’m sure there must’ve been!

I agree it’s down to 24 hour news. It didn’t used to be like that, if the news didn’t report it on the scheduled channels then you were oblivious to it.

Twin towers, 2000?

I've just remembered the 70's- IRA and active local bomb threats and terrorism. Unemployment. Toilet roll rationing, bread rationing. Power cuts. Strikes. Bins piling up.

We could do a history in pop music thread- 99 red balloons, UB40, Ghost Town etc.

As well as the above in the 80s we had the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, Chernobyl, the US bombing Libya using UK airfields, the printing strike and house prices rocketing when they started to get rid of MIRAS.

What depresses me is that the response to world events from our government always seems insufficient. So although the events themselves may not be objectively worse, they seem more difficult due to the lack of action.