I’ve just spent the past few days in deepest, rural France without TV, internet, newspapers and only a few minutes of the BBC World Service as it faded in and out of interference from another noisy, crackling station. It was a curiously refreshing experience being freed from the mixture of incredulity and incoherent rage that has marked so much of my recent encounters with the media as I desperately search for some sense among the Orwellian noise of so much that is presented to us. It make me wonder whether an austere diet of news consumption might be better for my mental health than the media gluttony I too often indulge in.