One of my bugbears is the standard of information and entertainment served up by mainstream media.
If you'd just arrived from Mars and switched on the telly to suss out the locals, you'd get the impression there were only three kinds of women - young, thin, orange-skinned, wearing high heels and brainless; older, thin, orange-skinned, wearing high heels and brainless but with strangely stretchy skin; or old, prune-like and possibly suffering from dementia.
The male categories would be similar - young, buff and vain; older and authoritative with possible signs of stretchy skin, or silly old buggers. Occasionally fat people appear, but they are generally being attended to by orange-skinned specimens.
And most are greedy, nasty, stupid, or egotistical, in any combination.
You'd be forgiven for wanting to hightail it back to your planet of origin to escape this awful place where the only bright spot in the everyday mayhem seems to be a cat getting rescued or a robot that does housework.
The dreadful bushfires in Victoria last February shoved the usual headlines aside for a few days, and the stories of loss and survival were unforgettable. Like Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami, we saw real people, not manufactured images, who had done nothing to deserve what happened. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
These were people we could all relate to, and we responded by offering whatever we could to try to alleviate their misery.
What struck me were the victims' responses to this outpouring of support. "I can't believe people are so kind and generous". In almost every interview the survivors seemed genuinely shocked that anyone would be willing to go out of their way to help.
The media's done a great job. All the technological advances, the world at our fingertips, instant news as it happens, blah, blah, blah - all it's done is isolate us and convince us the world is a terrible place full of people trying to rip each other off. We forget, if we ever knew, that the news is just someone's choice about what to feature.
"If it bleeds, it leads" is the first criterion of news editors. They don't seek balance, just dramatic pictures. Their idea of balance is the 30 second feelgood "human interest" story at the end of the bulletin - the cat or the robot.
Most people are kind and generous and care about their fellow human beings. Many times I've suggested to network bosses that we do programmes about people doing fantastic things in the community, but have been told my ideas are "too worthy". I sense that the tide might be turning a little - I hope so.
People seem to be switching off the rubbish and demanding more inspirational fare. That's good news. It's time we celebrated what's good about being alive. Our kids need to know that the human experience can be rich and diverse, that there are more ways to survive and flourish in this world than just being famous or behaving badly.