The next best thing would be watching some boring bbc news coverage, but even that would be mildly sensationalist by comparison to normal life.
The same is true of the US. The difference is that Americans have a lower tolerance for “government doing bad things to other Americans”, whereas your attitude seems to be “it doesn’t count unless it happens to someone I personally know”.
There’s a difference in the magnitude of the sensationalism and the professionalism of the news between the two countries. The UK is rather lucky in that regard.
My attitude is that the magnitude of the individual wrong has to be multiplied by the number of times it actually happened to be properly understood. The actual physical threat of terrorism, for example, is largely irrelevant in my reckoning of the country. Last time I did the math it turned out to kill less than 10 people a year on average in the UK. I had a look down the NHS data for death rates and found multiple diseases I’d never even heard of that killed more people, so I decided that terrorism itself was largely unimportant. The reaction to terrorism is the only part that has relevance. I have a similar attitude about most overblown societal problems. The news may be attempting to convince my lizard brain that the world is spectacularly unsafe but the actual statistics suggest I live in one of the safest countries in the safest period of human history.
Edit: Forgot to specify that it was the TV news that was good. The papers can be pretty variable, from good to terrible.
The same is true of the US. The difference is that Americans have a lower tolerance for “government doing bad things to other Americans”, whereas your attitude seems to be “it doesn’t count unless it happens to someone I personally know”.
There’s a difference in the magnitude of the sensationalism and the professionalism of the news between the two countries. The UK is rather lucky in that regard.
My attitude is that the magnitude of the individual wrong has to be multiplied by the number of times it actually happened to be properly understood. The actual physical threat of terrorism, for example, is largely irrelevant in my reckoning of the country. Last time I did the math it turned out to kill less than 10 people a year on average in the UK. I had a look down the NHS data for death rates and found multiple diseases I’d never even heard of that killed more people, so I decided that terrorism itself was largely unimportant. The reaction to terrorism is the only part that has relevance. I have a similar attitude about most overblown societal problems. The news may be attempting to convince my lizard brain that the world is spectacularly unsafe but the actual statistics suggest I live in one of the safest countries in the safest period of human history.
Edit: Forgot to specify that it was the TV news that was good. The papers can be pretty variable, from good to terrible.
Is there, really?
Apologies, I meant the TV news. The papers can be pretty terrible