Dis­cussing briefly a key tenet from his lat­est book, The Ratio­nal Opti­mist, Matt Rid­ley looks at how and why pres­sure groups limit the amount of good news reach­ing the gen­eral pub­lic and those in decision-making posi­tions:

There are huge vested inter­ests try­ing to pre­vent good news reach­ing the pub­lic. That is to say, in the ruth­less free-market strug­gle that goes on between pres­sure groups for media atten­tion and funds, nobody likes to have it said that ‘their’ prob­lem is not urgent and get­ting worse. […]

This is wrong on all sorts of lev­els. First, because it shows a stag­ger­ing arro­gance among pres­sure groups about who should be allowed to know the facts — almost amount­ing to attempted fraud. Sec­ond, because the way to encour­age peo­ple to fund projects is to show evi­dence that they work, not that they are futile and ineffective.

Rid­ley also puts blame on the jour­nal­ists for their unques­tion­ing belief of claims of urgency and dete­ri­o­ra­tion: “the two things that get edi­tors’ attention”.