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

Sir: Martyn Lewis's comments about television news are both apt and welcome. As a one-time addict of the Nine O'clock News, I find myself increasingly flinching at the prospect of either switching on or continuing to watch the entire programme. Partly it is because it has now become so predictable. Partly it is guilt. I confess to having a limit to how much unrelieved horror, gloom and pain I feel able to let into my life by way of someone else's choices.

I do not wish to be shielded from reality. Yet neither do I wish to be continuously assaulted in my own home with an incessant diet of other people's disasters. Like Lewis, I detest the tokenism of tail pieces which try to reassure me that something, after all, is right with the world. If it has reached a point where even the newscasters are finding the news choices questionable, it must surely be time for policy-makers to act.

Yours sincerely,

ANDREW LEIGH

London, SW19

26 April