World news on the TV and internet makes life seem a mess Wasnt it always a mess?

[missgoogly45]

We just didnt know what was happening in the past, So we dinna worry about it.

But you cannot put the clock back. What you think?

Sorry, but it is worse now. For a start, what's happening overseas has a far greater impact on us now. And weaponry is far more damaging. Eg we could suffer a nuclear attack wiping out half the population. Even terrorists could cause a great deal of damage, eg with a dirty bomb or biological attack. And global warming is a totally devastating problem. I used to read the paper and feel that nothing in it really affected me. It's very different now.

I think it's worse now too, though I don't know if that just comes with getting older. What makes me think it's worse is the erosion of rights to protect people that we've built up over the last 50 years or so. Working class people are now much more vulnerable and have fewer rights. Legal aid is severely restricted.

It feels to me like the last 2/3 governments have tried to reproduce a pre war society based on workers having few rights and a huge gap between the wealthy & the poor.

What's worse is that we are living through it and we worry about our kids growing up in this world..........as did our parents before us and theirs for them.

Re the Charlie Brooker reference, Bill Hicks done a similar thing years before based round the CNN founder.

Re stuff about a nuclear attack........seems a lot less likely now than in the 80's. even a terrorist nuclear attack seems less likely than the all out thermo niclear war that seemed round the corner. The regular IRA bomb attacks had their place aswell.

I'm not convinced the world is, on the whole, any worse today than it was when I was a boy in the 70s. The specifics of the threats have changed but there are still threats.

What, for me, is different is that I simply didn't pay any attention to the news in the 70s. In the 80s the fear of nuclear war affected me quite deeply. The 90s had so much hope with the fall of the soviet union then it all fell apart in the Balkans and so much other shit. And then there was the Sept 11 attacks in 2001...

A couple of years back I realised that having Radio 4 on in the morning with its litany of problems was genuinely depressing me. These days, instead, I have a quick scan through of the BBC's headlines every now and then to catch the highlights and make sure I haven't missed the death of the Queen or whatever and I ignore the rest.

Yes that probably makes me an ill-informed self-centred ostrich who prefers to stick his fingers in his ears while gleefully mixing his metaphors but fuck it. There's a practical limit to the number of things I can usefully worry about and, frankly, I have reached it.

Global warming isn't comparable to anything that's gone before (talking about recorded history here). And it's permanent, not transient.

wraparound news does make the world look a mess imho.

We worry about leaving the TV on News 24 when the kids are up. It's not a balanced view for a developing mind...

24 hr rolling news channels are required to hit 'ratings' so as such they aim to keep you / them gawping for as long as possible. Often using nothing more than conjecture.

I've been personally involved in dealing with a few major incidents in the past and the news 24 / sky coverage has been appalling, no facts, lots of sensation, lots of bollocks.

85 million dead from WW2, including civilians and war-related famines and disease. 500 million dead from Spanish flu at the end of WW1. Things were pretty bad back then too. I think rolling news coverage spreads fear and panic as much as it informs, tbh.