Bad News

A little more John Ralston Saul today, this time, from his Doubter's Companion (A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense) - the definition of 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 quickly moving on the next right answer. Bad news is the citizen's only available substitute for public debate