The Current - 2025 in good news stories

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Last year was a bit of a whirlwind when it came to the news. From ongoing atrocities around the world in places like Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan to stories closer to home like the catastrophic fires that ripped across Canada this summer and the ongoing fallout of the U.S. trade war. Matt Galloway talks to Angus Hervy, the editor of Fix the News, about the good news we might have overlooked and why these stories are so important.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. We are just a few days into the new year. And the news is already a lot. Thus far, today, we've already talked. about the turmoil of the world order, a Canadian healthcare crisis. Looking back on 2025, it felt like a roller coaster when it came to news in that year passed from ongoing atrocities around the world to extreme weather. The ongoing followed from a U.S. trade war.

But that is not the end of the story. My next guest says that in the midst of all of that, we are overlooking some significant good news stories. Angus Harvey is a journalist and founder and editor of FixTheNews.com. It's a platform that aims to spotlight things that are going right in our world. world. Angus, good morning. Matt, hi. Thanks for having me on the show. It's good to have you back on the program. There are a lot of people who were very pleased to see the back end of 2025. How did that year feel to you? Yeah, look, I spent hundreds of hours in 2025, mainly lining all the corruption and cruelty. And it was a lot. I can't ever remember, I think, feeling more angry at the

news. And I certainly don't think that we should ignore any of that. It's genuinely pretty scary out there. But what is strange is that Gallup does this poll. It's the largest poll in the world where they survey 1,000 people each in 142 countries. And in their most recent survey, which was conducted last year, a record 33% of people around the world say that they're thriving, which is the highest proportion ever recorded. And the share saying they're suffering dropped to 7%, which is the lowest level since tracking began. Economic optimism is at its highest point since the financial crisis. More people in more places report feeling optimistic about the future. then at any point since they started doing this poll. So you've got this kind of really huge gap.

The headlines are all screaming collapse, and billions of people are reporting that their lives are actually getting better. And I think we're just missing half the ledger. And that disconnect tells you something important about how our information systems work. Square that for me, because you write this retrospective every year, which is fascinating. And in the retrospective of this year, you say, and you've hinted at this. These are your words, we've built the safest civilization in human history while convincing ourselves that we live in the most dangerous. How do we do that? The answer is complicated. I think what's happened is that the way that our information ecosystem is now set up is that the news doesn't tell us what is happening in the world. It tells us what's

going wrong in the world. And to some extent, that's always been true, you know, if it bleeds, it leads, but it's gotten a lot worse in the last 20 years. And in the last five years, it's kind of, you know, it's now out of control. To give you just one example of this, There's the great saying that Canada is the apartment on top of the meth lab. And I think that was Robin Williams. And in 2025, that might have sounded or felt true. But in 2025, the United States recorded its lowest murder rate ever. Property crime down to its lowest level ever, violent crime down to its lowest point since the early 1960s.

So the United States is safer than it ever has been. And that feels really strange when everything is. else is telling us the opposite. How do you square that with the sense that a lot of people have that they are really struggling right now? Yeah, look, I don't want to sound like some kind of bloodless bureaucrat. You know, I understand that for a lot of people, the world is a very difficult place right now. And for hundreds of millions of people, it's really tough. If you're a democracy activist in Hong Kong jail or a single mum in Ottawa, you know, struggling to pay the rent or a cobalt miner in the DRC, I don't think me sitting here telling you that the world's getting

better is going to really matter. The point that I'm trying to make is that the collapsed merchants have definitely gotten carried away because nuance doesn't sell. Pessimism does. And Doom is just dramatically satisfying in ways that incremental progress never can be. But what the data showed us repeatedly last year while we were all looking at the headlines is that in most places, most people's lives are incrementally getting better. And that's across health, you know, welfare, human rights, even to some extent, climate and the environment. Let's talk about some of those areas. Global health. You start your report with the story of global health. What did you see in global health that led you to believe that things are actually improving? Well, global health

is always kind of one of my favorites. There's this great saying, you know, when you're healthy, there's a thousand things that matter, but when you're sick, there's only one thing that matters. And last year in 2025, 17 countries eradicated a disease. We've never been able to, never done that in history before. Egypt eliminated trachoma, which has been blinding people there since before the pyramids. The Maldives achieved the world's first triple elimination. No babies born with HIV, hepatitis or syphilis. Ten million children got malaria vaccines last year. And a really an astonishing statistic. This one flawed me. The Lancet reported that humanity's total burden of illness and early death has dropped by 12.6% since 2010. So human suffering overall has dropped by

12.6% in just over a decade. It's an astonishing achievement, but one that gets almost no recognition. And it's not just health. Nearly a billion people have gained access to safe drinking water in the last decade. In 2025, global hunger fell for the first time since the pandemic. We produced record harvests of rice, wheat, grains using less land than we've ever used before. And in 2025, China's emissions fell, not because of recession, but because their energy system is transforming. Do you want to talk a bit more about energy? Because energy is a huge part of this as well, right? In terms of energy production, and it's not just China. I mean, it's here in North America as well. Energy is so tricky because in 2025, we saw a lot of headlines about

kind of things going into reverse in the United States. And to some extent, I think that that might have been true in Canada as well. Certainly that's what the news was telling us. But the most important country for climate change in the world is China. It accounts for a third of emissions. And China is now undergoing structural decline, which is really, really important. It means that China is now reducing its emissions, not because of an economic downturn, but because it is changing the nature of its entire energy system. And I think it's easy to get distracted with the headlines when it comes to energy, but the trend lines are pointing the right direction because China has accounted for almost all of the world's extra emissions in the last decade. And now it is finally changing course. And I think

that was the big energy story of 2025. Certainly far bigger than anything Trump said or did or any wind farms that were cancelled in the United States. Why is a story like that not getting attention? One of the things that you say in the piece is that the news is not the report. It is not an account of what's happening in the world. It's what Jennifer Machia calls a misery machine. Tell me more about that. Well, those are her words. She's a professor in the United States.

I love this expression, a misery machine. As you said there, the way I like to think about it is the news is not the report. It doesn't tell us what's happening in the world. I think the problem gets worse because 90% of the world's England. language media comes from the United States. And so what we are all reading as an analysis of global collapse is often just kind of American psychodrama mistaken for planetary diagnosis. I think what we're all consuming are some really big feelings by a lot of American

journalists. And the feelings in question kind of belong to people whose material circumstances, and I say this, you know, understanding that this is pretty punchy, but people's material circumstances is would that remain comfortable enough to afford the luxury of existential dread? By contrast, you know, there are millions of people out there in the world working to make things better, people who are vaccinating kids, people who are building, you know, installing solar panels, people who are, you know, protecting the forests from loggers, you know, they kind of got on with the job in 2025 and the world did improve one vaccine, one kilowatt

hour at a time, even though those stories didn't make the headlines. And so you say, these are your words, this gap between the world as it is and how we're told to see it comes down to a choice of what we do with our attention. If these stories are happening, and I mean, me, I'm in the media as well, so I have a responsibility here. But more broadly, what is our responsibility? How do we go about paying attention to those things that might not be screaming from the headlines, but are actually unfolding in our world.

I think it's, you know, it's the classic line by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which is, you know, the sign of intelligence is to hold two ideas in your head at once. One part of it is to understand that there are a lot of things that are really scary out there. You know, we are seeing the collapse

of the international rules-based order, the predators have stopped pretending, and, you know, cruelty and corruption seem to be the order of the day. Temperatures are going up. our environment has been destroyed in many different places, I think it's really important to look at those things, to be clear-eyed about them,

and to understand their contours and to fight against them. At the same time, I think it's also really important to understand that there is a hidden half of the ledger and that we are missing all of the progress that is happening for systemic reasons. And the reason that that is happening is because our entire media apparatus is structured towards what I call grievance-based attention farming. our attention is being grabbed with stories of doom

because doom is satisfying and because it gets our attention in ways that incremental progress just can't. And so I think as a consumer of news, as someone that listens to news, if you think of yourself as a concerned citizen or an engaged activist, whatever it might be, I think it's just really important to understand

that there is a huge and vast story of hidden progress out there that is invisible and that you need to understand that that story is also true alongside the scary headlines. Tell me one more story of Hidden Progress, something that screams to you from the 1,932 stories from 170 countries that you published last year. My favorite story every year,

over the last two or three years, has been the rise of school meals around the world. I don't understand why this story doesn't get more attention, but essentially what's happened is that humanity has decided that feeding kids at school is a really good idea. And so since the pandemic, about 100 million extra kids, are now being fed at school around the world.

And that includes Canada, by the way. And that's a really great idea, because when kids get fed at school, that improves their security. They perform better at school. They can learn better. Families don't have to worry as much about how to put food on the table.

It's an incredibly socially progressive idea, and it's happening not just in Canada. It's happening in hundreds of countries around the world. People have kind of gotten onto this. And it's one of the most encouraging trends in the world right now. You used to do this work thinking that you could convince people that the world was different than the way that they saw it in the headlines. Why do you do it now?

I've said this at the end of my big piece this year, and I don't know whether it's because I'm getting older and uglier. But I think what I've started to understand is that it's very difficult to convince people of anything. People don't believe what they see. They see what they believe. And then for a while I did it because I kind of wanted to point out the bad guys. But what I realized is that there isn't anyone in charge.

The system of media isn't been run by anyone. It's the result of billions of choices made over decades, you know, editors chasing clicks or radio hosts trying to make an engaging show. No offense intended. Code is optimizing for engagement, audiences rewarding outrage, reporters following incentives. It's not malicious. The reason I do this work now is to pay tribute to these millions of people that do all this work.

The activists who spent years fighting to stop child marriage in Bolivia, that's something that happened in 2025, the nurses who travel for days to distribute vaccines in Pakistan, the Rangers in Zimbabwe who ran anti-poaching patrols around the clock for rhinos and rhino populations are on the rise there. All of these people are out there and they don't care who's in the White House, but they don't care who's going to be in the White House in 26 or who's going to be in Downing Street or who the next Canadian Prime Minister is. these people are going to keep on doing this work and they did it in 2025 and they're going to do it again in 2006 and I like to try and highlight some of those stories and the fact that they're all out there gives me qualified hope I think for the future I'm a big fan of the work that you do I think it's really important and I'm really glad to talk to you as always thank you very much

thanks so much for having me on Matt I love coming on every year and and yeah I really appreciate it we'll bring you back at the end of this year to tell us what we missed angus thank you Cheers. Angus Harvey is a journalist and founder and editor of FixTheNews.com. His retrospective on the year just passed is long, but it's also excellent and worth your time. And you can find that at FixTheNews.com. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.