‘Negative news publications should come with a health warning’

Imagine. You heard the on-the-hour radio news bulletin while you got dressed that morning. You glanced at headlines on your phone on the way to work. You read the paper while you waited for your coffee in a cafe. Each encounter was, typically for the mainstream news, filled with death and doom – and accompanied by a familiar feeling. Of being slightly on-edge. Anxious.

But after each snippet, you also heard or read a warning: ‘Too much negative news may cause a distorted view of reality and harm your mental health.’ It was enough of a reminder to try to balance things out. So you sought out some constructive news that evening. A few hopeful headlines online as the kids had their bath, and later, an uplifting current affairs documentary. Things felt steadier. Calmer. More positive.

Since the mandatory health warnings for majority-bad news media outlets were introduced, you’ve been much more aware of balancing your media intake so that you get a wider perspective on problems and progress. For the first time, you’ve really thought about it. Less doomscrolling, and more conscious solution-seeking. You’re surprised at how much you accepted negative news to be normal, and how much better your mental health has felt as a result of the shift.

This is the vision of Seán Wood, CEO of Positive News. While the idea of health warnings on news outlets is tongue in cheek, the principle of such a measure is the need to help people to more consciously manage their media diet. “It might help us grow our understanding of how our brains are compelling us to consume the news because it triggers, essentially, our survival response – our desire to know about threats.”

Netflix's lackluster management team embraces enshittification

Netflix's "freedom and responsibility" culture once set it apart from the competition, allowing it to attract the best talent; but under the leadership of Ted Sarandos, it's rapidly falling into line with every other large corporation as it rolls back the ground-breaking policy of unlimited parental leave during the first year of a child's life it implemented a decade ago.

Ever since Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings stepped down as co-CEO in 2023 to make way for the former employee of a video store chain, the company has steadily backtracked on its parental leave policy, using vague and sometimes contradictory internal guidelines to make the point that taking more than six months of parental leave is a bad career move.

This regressive cultural shift is part of an explicit refocus at the company from subscriber growth to profitability, in other words, or as Cory Doctorow would put it, full-scale enshittification: the only stakeholders that matter are the shareholders. A company that once attracted the bright and the best because it treated people like adults, and saw them to respond in kind, is now just another place to work.