Letter: Good news: why the media should record achievements as well as failures

Sir: Thanks to Martyn Lewis for his serious questioning of the news selection by our media people.

Between 'not wanting to know' on the one hand and going to the extremes of outrage on the other, so often it is difficult to remember much of the in-between after some of our news programmes. I meet folk who live in depression and fear - it's not caused by the news but it isn't helped by it. The intriguing paradox of 'not believing what you read in the papers' (or see/hear on television and radio news) is often not lived out by those who offer the advice so glibly.

News is not what happens - it is what journalists choose to write about. It is an edited, partial, selected view of what happens - there is no such thing as uninterpreted fact - but the time is ripe for a different selection and a philosophy that has the nerve to ignore viewing figures.

It would be good to see a wider appreciation of news-sense in those who decide what is finally broadcast. It has become frighteningly narrow - a strange thing to say about journalists]

Yours sincerely,

DENNIS TINDALL

Stanley, County Durham

26 April