During our recent holiday in Rarotonga we saw no television, listened to no radio, and read no newspapers. We were extremely happy. When we got home again, we turned on the television at 6 o’clock each night to watch the network news and collected the Herald from the letterbox at 6.30 each morning to read in bed. (We’re not great radio listeners.) We were noticeably less happy. I came to the same conclusion that I come to after every news-free holiday overseas. Mass media news has an insidiously corrosive effect on happiness.

The simplest explanation of this is the inherently depressing nature of the news itself. Good news is not considered “sexy” by the mass media and a diet of murder, mayhem, tragedy and disaster is unlikely to raise the spirits. The picture of ourselves and of our world which we get from television, radio, newspapers and the Net is therefore essentially negative and gloomy.

As a reflection of our lives it is also inaccurate. Crime news provides an excellent illustration of this. It is the commonest form of news, yet most of us will go through life without being murdered, assaulted, or experiencing a home invasion. Similarly, we will have no contact with P, heroin or cocaine. We will not be involved in war, genocide, terrorism, military coups or torture. Natural disasters will be the exception rather than the rule. Corruption in government and the public sector will be virtually non-existent. But if you remove these topics from news media coverage on an average day you will have very little left. What we call “the news”  in fact offers a distorting mirror on the world of our day-to-day experience. 

Nor has the proliferation of news sources made us wiser or even better informed. There is simply  too much information, too many voices producing nothing more than babble, a persistent and inescapable white noise ringing in our ears, polluting the environment, disturbing the peace.

For a time I though this might be just my own personal view of the news, my own perhaps atypical experience of the effect of the news on my state of mind.

But a recent ‘Happiness Survey’ conducted by UMR Research revealed that the consumers of television, newspapers and the Net in New Zealand are among the least happy people in the country. No news, as it turns out, really is good news.