“Bad News: Those who have power always complain that journalists are only interested in bad news. ‘But if the newspapers in a country are full of good news, the jails are full of good people.’
Elsewhere, bad news comes as light relief from the unrelenting rightness of those with expertise and power. They insist that they are applying the correct and therefore inevitable solution to each problem. And when it fails they avoid self-doubt or a public examination of what went wrong by moving on to the next right answer. Bad news is the citizen’s only substitute for public debate.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
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