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Good morning. T.S. Eliot said humankind ‘cannot bear very much reality.’ A new report from the Reuters Institute suggests the number of people in the UK avoiding news doubled in the last five years, to 46%. There can’t be many listeners who at some stage in the pandemic didn’t say, ‘I’m not sure I can bear another report about the R rate and dangerously full hospitals.’ My mother used to assemble all the house clocks and sit in front of the TV each night at twenty to six and prepare to check the time and watch the news. It was almost a religious ritual for her. But such a way of meekly receiving news is rare today. According to the stats, only 17% now read a physical newspaper daily. Only 53% watch TV news bulletins. Increasingly people graze and scroll and get notifications. But what actually is news? When the editors of the Today programme are planning their content, I imagine they’re looking for what’s important to a lot of people, what’s changing for the better or the worse, and something that’s happened that’s dramatic or shocking or remarkable. That’s what makes for the rich and varied programme we’ve come to love. People often say, ‘The news is so depressing.’ But I tend to think, if news reports the unusual, then depressing news is subtly indicating the miserable stuff is unusual, and most things are more positive. I’d personally start to worry if the news were full of happy stories – because I’d begin to think our sense of normal was shifting and we no longer regarded depressing things as unusual and thus worth reporting. People worry that smaller percentages are engaging with professionally produced, politically neutral news, and ceasing to distinguish it from passing entertainment or editorial comment. But to scrutinise the notion of news a bit more, how much is news itself a distraction from the real things that matter about existence? The word gospel means good news. When the first evangelist, Mark, starts his new kind of book, he writes ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ The start of the good news. His book addresses suffering, tragedy, in-fighting, crop failure, occupation and political intrigue. But that’s only the setting for what he regards as the real news, which for him is about why we’re on this earth, who God is, who we are, what will become of us beyond death, and how to live in the light of such things. Sometimes the intensity and hurly-burly of what we call news is our insight into such questions. Sometimes it’s an escape and a distraction. Maybe we all need an occasional break from the news – to rediscover what the real news is.