Why is Ultra-Processed News REALLY so bad for our media consumption?

Stories about the food we eat are never far away from the headlines and the current flavour of the month– pun intended – are tales of ultra-processed foods (UPF), writes Simon Burch ???? .

These are characterised as convenience foods that have a long shelf life, are cheap to make and buy and fill our plates as quickly as possible but which, when you look at the ingredients label, owe more to their creation to the science lab than to the kitchen worktop.

UPFs are everywhere, and the topic is likely to come up at the Derby Book Festival this month, when food writer Henry Dimbleby takes to the stage at QUAD to talk about his latest book, Ravenous, which looks at the food industry and the detrimental role it plays in our kitchens, stomachs and society.

His point about UPFs – which is shared by the author of the much-publicised Ultra-Processed People, TV doctor Dr Chris van Tulleken – is that they are causing a huge health crisis, but we who eat them are increasingly powerless to resist them, or, indeed, find easy alternatives, because of the extra time and cost this involves.

Why is this relevant? Because the situation we see with UPFs is replicated across other industries, such as fashion, where profit-making companies create high demand among consumers and meet it with products that appear to look good but are cheap to make, low in quality and, arguably, have a variety of detrimental effects.

As in food and fashion, so it is the case increasingly in mass media, which makes its living by creating enticing and easy-to-digest stories which are specifically designed to grab the attention of as many people as possible and keep them hooked.

This what I would call Ultra Processed News is presented to us on our social media feeds, on websites and firmly embedded in the traditional media, as platforms scrap for our attention by selling impactful content that grabs our attention and attempts to keep us engaged.

This isn’t a lament by an old hack bemoaning the old days, but merely a joining of the dots: seeing how the phenomenon we call progress might be seen from a different angle, which suggest that just because something is new and fills an immediate need doesn’t mean that it is particularly good for us, even if it tries to convince us that it is.

The hallmark of UPF is that it is soft to eat and highly flavoured, often has a healthy eating claim, such as low-fat, low-sugar and added vitamins, and is cheap in terms of money and time.

There are huge parallels with media here. Although we look to the media to inform us, it is also a commercial operation with a profit motive. Media publishers need to get as many readers as they can and keeping them loyal so that they sustain their financial model, either through a subscription or by selling advertising.

To do this it carefully created news that echoes what they know consumers like by processing the news input and, to use the cooking metaphor, adding the correct editorial flavourings, news colourants and creative additives that have worked before and that its consumers look out for.

And it’s soft, in that it’s designed to be as easy to consume as possible, with just the right amount of detail to make it believable and minimal content to challenge the reader’s beliefs.

And what flavour groups does ultra-processed news give us? Gossip, animals, consumer news, people doing stuff that’s amusing or outrageous and biased stories that resonate with our beliefs and get our pulses racing, provoking cheap emotional responses such as disgust, pleasure or anger, all of which make us pick up our phones and get personally involved with the online debate.

All of this is easy to produce and put easily in our reach so that we can now snack on news throughout the day, with each news story followed by another formulated in a similar way to keep on consuming mindlessly, like we’d reach for another crisp or highly processed biscuit.

This isn’t to tar all news with the same brush, but as the internet age has opened up the choice of platforms it has certainly created a wealth of titles that, it is fair to say, lacks the journalist rigour of traditional and regulated media.

In essence, this is fine, and, just as with food there is nothing wrong with a doughnut every now and then, there is a danger that news at the cheaper end of the spectrum starts to drive the media agenda, lowering the standard across the board because of the need for everyone to make savings without losing consumers.

Gone would be the need to inform people, to look at niche topics or to launch expensive investigations in order to hold the powerful to account, or to look in depth at issues with balanced coverage. Instead in comes generic topics, uninformed debate, wild opinions and one-sided (and often fake) coverage, all in huge and unescapable quantities.

So perhaps it’s time that we regulate our news intake in the same way we control our diets. We need to understand where the news comes from (and why) in the same way we read a food label, we need to reduce our intake and eat a mixed diet, investing in quality journalism just as we would buy more fresh fruit and vegetables.

And add fibre into your diet by consuming content that makes you challenge your own beliefs and made consuming the news not quite so easy.

Just as the awareness of UPFs is growing, so is the awareness of the nature and extent of the media that we consume, while the advent of AI-written content is encouraging many people who hitherto welcomed progress to question whether things have gone too far – and if the mass-produced media we’re given is bad for our health.