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Enjoyment is Breaking News - Jennifer Hoewe ***

Something that struck me very early on when reading this book was the statement 'The evolution of the new media environment, particularly in the United States, has encouraged a shift for consuming news with the goal of becoming better informed to turning to news for enjoyment.' Only a day or two before I had been listening to a discussion between a couple of friends about how they hated the news these days because it was so miserable. Hardly a source of enjoyment.

There is, without doubt an age factor here. These were middle-aged people who, like me, would never think of going to TikTok or Instagram for news. Personally, I've abandoned TV news for news websites (partly because you can get the information far quicker than a boring old bulletin). But given that I am neither American nor of the key age group for newsertainment (my word, not Jennifer Hoewe's) reading this book was rather like reading a sociology text about tribespeople from a totally different culture.

While I'm generally sympathetic to Hoewe's thesis, some aspects of the analysis seem to jar. She comments that in response to the entertainment focus of TV 'Many viewers succumbed to the temptation of channeling time once spent learning and becoming informed about the world into time spent consuming media content designed to entertain.' It gives a picture of a very earnest population, cramming lifetime learning into their hours not spent working or looking after the family - but apart a quick look at a newspaper or TV news half hour, weren't most of us already finding entertainment to fill our spare time, if in different ways?

Hoewe's description of the breakdown of US news thanks to cable news channels and their successors, driven more by profit (and hence a drive towards entertainment) makes sense, and perhaps also underlines a big difference with, say, the UK, where, while TV news is certainly in decline, it's the public service news broadcasters BBC, ITV and Channel 4 that still dominate the TV-based picture.

Inevitably a major factor here is the ability of social media to deliver forms of news into a self-reinforcing bubble where we can get more and more of the input that reinforces our beliefs without challenging them. This does come across strongly in the book, though oddly elsewhere the biggest driver of such social media reinforcement is often said to be triggering rage rather than enjoyment. This didn't come across in Hoewe's analysis to the same extent.

As always with this kind of topic it's a lot easier to come up with a description of the problems than it is to provide solutions. Hoewe attempts this, though I wasn't entirely convinced by them, especially when she decided that practising mindfulness (surely as much a twenty-first century curse as is newsertainment) was a significant way that news consumers could do better. Not a book that's going to set the world on fire, but some worthwhile, if rather laboured points.

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