No News Is Good News Day

What the day is

No News Is Good News Day is observed on September 11, built on the old saying that silence usually means nothing has gone wrong.

Origin and background

The saying holds up better than it sounds, for a structural reason rather than an optimistic one. News reports events, and an event is a change, so the things that improve slowly almost never qualify. A disease that becomes gradually rarer over thirty years produces no day on which something happened, while a single outbreak produces a week of coverage. The result is a picture systematically weighted toward sudden bad things, without anyone deciding it should be.

Attention pushes in the same direction. Negative information is processed faster, remembered better and weighted more heavily than positive information of the same size, which is a robust finding across psychology and a sensible arrangement for an animal that needs to notice threats. Anything competing for an audience therefore drifts toward the alarming, because that is what gets picked up.

Researchers now track what they call news avoidance, and the share of people who say they actively avoid the news has risen substantially across many countries. The reasons given are consistent: the volume is relentless, the tone is unremitting, and people feel there is nothing they can do with most of it.

The evidence on harm should be stated carefully. Heavier news consumption is associated with more anxiety, but association is not causation and it plausibly runs in both directions, since anxious people seek information. What is better supported is that repeated exposure to distressing coverage of a single event is associated with worse outcomes than a single exposure, which argues against continuous monitoring rather than against being informed.

The practical distinction is between knowing what is happening and watching it happen all day.

How to take part

• Read the news once at a fixed time instead of checking all day.
• Choose longer pieces over live updates, which carry more and repeat less.
• Turn off breaking news alerts. Almost nothing needs your attention that minute.
• Remember that slow improvements never make headlines, by construction.