‘Negativity might grab attention, but it doesn’t solve problems’

Worldwide, there’s been a huge shift towards negative content in recent decades. Studies show that news coverage – which a couple of generations ago included significantly more positive stories than not – is now overwhelmingly dominated by conflict and pessimism.

The arrival of 24-hour rolling news in the 1990s accelerated this trend. Once the major networks began broadcasting around the clock, every issue had to be framed as urgent, dramatic, and unfolding. Calm, contextualised analysis simply didn’t suit the business model.

Then social media came along and twisted that dial even further. Platforms designed to grab and hold attention quickly learned that outrage, controversy, and sharp emotional spikes keep people engaged far longer than balance or nuance. Content creators (tech speak for people who build a large online audience through their social media posts) quickly learnt that too. Algorithms now serve us up whatever provokes the strongest reaction, regardless of whether it reflects reality. It’s not that people suddenly became nastier – it’s that the machinery of the modern information ecosystem rewards intensity, not accuracy.

This shift has gone hand in hand with another major change – people no longer need newspapers or broadcasters to reach an audience. Politicians, businesses, and public figures can all, like everyone else, speak directly to whoever follows them. That has some real benefits, especially greater accessibility. But it also creates challenges.

Traditional media has long played an important role in checking claims, testing arguments, and putting information in context. When public figures can bypass those checks, curate their own audiences, and filter out criticism at the click of a button, scrutiny can suffer.

That’s why high quality news journalism still matters. Good reporters ask awkward questions, join the dots that others miss, and help provide the robust scrutiny that a healthy democracy relies on. As someone often on the sharp end of such questioning, I think our local media still does this pretty well, in fairness, and the whole community benefits from that greater transparency – but their business models are all under a lot of pressure.

Meanwhile, the modern information environment makes it harder than ever for people to separate fact from fiction. Misinformation spreads quickly, simply because people repeat things that sound plausible. Disinformation spreads deliberately, often amplified by anonymous accounts or co-ordinated networks – sometimes seemingly even by hostile states looking to destabilise trust in democratic systems. Endless streams of confusing content erode people’s ability to feel sure of anything, which makes it easier for cynicism to take hold.

It’s no surprise, then, that even as the world has improved dramatically on most long-term measures, people increasingly believe the opposite. Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness puts this brilliantly – across countries, ages, and political persuasions, the overwhelming majority of people think global living standards, health, safety, and wellbeing are declining, even though the data shows sustained improvements. Rosling argues that a mix of human instinct, selective news reporting, and attention-seeking media has left us with a deeply distorted picture of reality. We absorb so much negativity that it becomes the lens through which we view everything.

That effect doesn’t stop at national borders – it affects us here in Guernsey too.

I’m so proud of this island, of our people and all the things that make it a wonderful place to live, but my goodness do we have a habit of talking ourselves down. Sometimes it’s humour, sometimes modesty, and sometimes it’s just because the loudest voices in the room tend to favour the most dramatic interpretation of events. As a local business leader recently reminded me, though, Guernsey’s reputation is the sum total of everything we all say about ourselves, so we should give it careful thought.

Some of the most prominent commentators online and even in the pages of the Guernsey Press seem to misjudge how local politics often works best. In my experience, collaboration, listening, and patient negotiation count for far more than grandstanding or trench digging. But the same political commentators that criticised the egos and the infighting that characterised the last term now seem critical of this more collegiate, outcomes-focused approach. Perhaps they hark back to an era when men were men and politics was, well, more of a battlefield than a team sport – or perhaps it’s just more fun to throw rocks than it is to give any credit to boring old consensus-building.

Commentary around the Government Work Plan was an interesting case in point. No one in their right mind would get too excited about the GWP, because it’s really just a bureaucratic necessity – but a necessity it is nonetheless, so we gave it a much-needed haircut in terms of its length, geared it around what was realistically deliverable, and grounded it in practicality rather than the language of motherhood and apple pie that tends to characterise such administrative masterpieces.

Some commentary made a meal of the kicking they were sure it would receive, and yet the reality was far more measured. Months of conversations had shaped it, so we knew colleagues broadly supported it, and when it reached the Assembly it passed very comfortably, with relatively minor, helpful adjustments. That is not the stuff of headline-grabbing theatrics, but it is the stuff of good governance. The quieter, more constructive truth differed wildly from the hair-wrenching commentary, and yet the version put about by commentators who have never experienced the reality of politics seemed (at least initially) to have disproportionately shaped the received wisdom.

None of this is to say that criticism isn’t necessary. It absolutely is: we have been proactive ourselves in flagging areas that need serious attention. What we need, though, is justified criticism that aims to improve, rather than commentary that simply seeks to inflame.

And it’s worth remembering that, despite some significant issues that need to and will be sorted out, Guernsey gets a lot right. We have weathered many of the big global events – like the economic crash, Brexit and Covid – with steady competence. We live in a safe and trusting community with full employment and little crime. We are a respected and well-regulated finance centre, and at the same time a hub of creative, sporting and innovative talent. These strengths are real, even if they don’t always get as much airtime.

We have a choice about the kind of political culture we want. We don’t have to follow the global drift towards outrage – we just need to look across the Atlantic to see where ever-increasing division and polarisation can lead.

Guernsey’s superpower is that we are a close-knit, connected community. We can facilitate constructive debate; we can be grounded in optimism tempered by robust scrutiny; and we can show a bit of generosity toward one another. That certainly doesn’t mean ignoring problems: it means facing them honestly while recognising progress, seeking solutions, and refusing to let cynicism become our default setting.

If we keep repeating that nothing works, people will believe that. But if we recognise what’s going well, tackle what isn’t, and work together to achieve the best for this island, then we give ourselves a far better chance of successfully navigating the challenges.

Negativity might grab attention, but it doesn’t solve problems. If we lift the tone and quality of our public debate, we will lift the whole island with it.