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When I was a kid there was nothing on television before lunchtime. I don’t mean there wasn’t anything worth watching but there was literally nothing on, no programmes, nothing. Maybe a testcard so you could check that your tv was properly tuned but that was about it. There were only three channels, and the only thing that you might find on in the mornings where programmes for schools or Open University lectures.

News was delivered via the Radio until lunchtime and obviously there was no internet so if you wanted to read any news you bought a paper.

As I got older we got more channels on the telly box, and then early satellite TV. News on the early satellite services was essentially the same news bulletin repeated endlessly until something new happened, normally around half-an-hours worth.

Skip forward to today and we have 24/7 news and in my opinion it’s the worse for it. Supplying a constant stream of news means that there isn’t time to properly prepare a story. If the government puts out a press release it is often repeated verbatim with very little checking of the facts until perhaps later in the day. This means that gaslighting, spreading false stories or just downright lying and getting this out to a wide audience is much easier.

When news was restricted to an evening bulletin and perhaps one later on at night, journalists had time to properly research and write their stories, they weren’t beholden to what they were told by one party, they could actually report on the facts. The same for newspaper stories. There wasn’t the rush to get the story up on the internet before the competition, there was time to write the article for the morning edition. Of course they would still want to get the scoop on their colleagues on other papers, but at least what you read was more likely to be true – at least in the serious papers, stories about well known entertainers eating pet rodents notwithstanding, and papers weren’t owned by proprietors who had ulterior motives in their editorial oversight.

After the internet of course came social media, Twitter and Facebook in particular and the option to go ‘viral’ with your news. It wasn’t always like that of course, when Twitter was new it was quite a nice healthy place to be. There were no smartphones, so tweeting on the go was done by SMS. Granted the functionality was simpler but there were less trolls or people happy to leap to the wrong conclusion and start calling you all sorts of things just because they disagreed.

So what’s next? Who knows, neural news interface perhaps, have the latest news beamed directly into your brain?

In the meantime, I spend less and less time reading the news these days, mostly because I’m not sure that I can trust it and because frankly it’s pretty depressing most of the time. The urge to report on the most shocking seems to override the option to tell a ‘good’ news story. The same with social media.

I admire journalists, it’s not an easy gig and can be one that can cost you your life for reporting on the ‘wrong’ story, or reporting from somewhere inhospitable. There are still plenty of good journalists out there and still some sources that are relatively unbiased, but it is a dwindling pool. We’ve had opportunities for reform in this country but it has never really been very successful, so for now at least choose your news with care.

Thanks for reading.