I’m one of a dwindling number of Americans who still gets a daily newspaper. I still enjoy the feel of a real, print-and-paper newspaper in my hands, and I enjoy the opinion pieces and doing the puzzles. But recently — not so much the actual news. Though there are some good and necessary stories, there’s also a lot of fluff and depressing or frustratingly repetitive information.
Just today, I found it very hard to finish several of the (depressing) articles, and I found myself thinking “All this continual bad, frustrating news is driving us all crazy.” For many years now, commentators and psychologists have warned of the dangers of constant exposure to bad or frightening news, and we’ve all heard that creepy old newsroom adage “If it bleeds, it leads.”
But since the advent of 24–7 news programming and news networks like CNN and Fox ‘News’ — and especially since the rapid growth of the Internet and the insanely fast spread of smartphones and social media — most us are literally inundated with torrents of news, ‘fake news,’ opinion pieces, and rabid partisan crap. Constantly.
Every. Single. Day.
What is ‘newsworthy’ — and why?
My so-far-unanswered question is: In today’s media environment, how can we stay informed about current events and trends without getting so immersed in all the negativity that we go numb, or go a bit crazy, or both?
An even bigger question, perhaps, is how we can maintain a balanced, empathic view of human beings and our societies when the vast majority of the ‘news’ focuses on crimes, disasters, wars, cruelty, abuse, and selfish, greedy behavior.
To me, this appears to be a structural problem at the heart of our ‘news’ media: namely, that they are businesses first and foremost, and thus choose to focus on the most attention-grabbing, frightening, and/or titillating stories in order to sell more papers or magazines, or to attract and keep peoples’ online attention. “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Back in the last century — up until the 90s, at least — the news was a much smaller and less pervasive part of peoples’ lives; most people did keep up with the news, but it didn’t obsess and consume them like it does today.
Back then, we had newspapers, magazines, and radio and TV news, but today we have all those plus the Internet plus smartphones plus social media — with all of them running and babbling at top speed, endlessly.
A devastating, catastrophic impact
So I’d say we’re dealing with two major problems here: first, this 24–7 immersion in (mainly bad) news is overwhelming many of us and starting to drive us crazy, and second, the lopsided emphasis on all these negative events, social issues, and ongoing problems is causing us to have a very warped and negative view of human beings and society at large.
Each of these problems is quite serious, taken separately, but acting together they are having a devastating, even catastrophic impact.
The second of these problems is especially concerning, because when we develop a warped and negative attitude towards our fellow human beings and our society, it easily overflows into excessive harshness and judgment, and can lead to increasing rage, hate, racism, ‘other-blaming,’ and overall paranoia about both our present and our future.
Of course, this is exactly what we’ve been seeing more and more over the past decade, as ‘fake news,’ social media news feeds, and our omnipresent 24–7 news cycles keep people constantly on edge and riled up.
Changing our relationship with ‘the news’
Clearly, our current relationship with ‘the news’ is both unbalanced and highly dysfunctional. It’s quite unclear, however, how or even if we can somehow change it or at least dial it back some.
One solution, of course, is to go on a strict ‘news diet’ and avoid watching or reading the news very often — which is not really a great ‘solution,’ since it just ensures (blissful and/or harmful?) ignorance of current events.
But staying enmeshed in our frantic, quasi-hysterical 24–7 news and ‘fake news’ cycles is proving disastrous, both for our hearts and for our sanity.
I wish I had a brilliant solution to offer here — but I don’t. These are very thorny issues — and there may not BE any wonderful ‘solutions.’
Developing our sense of balance and open-heartedness
Perhaps the best way to ‘solve’ these problems involves us, as news consumers, developing our own sense of balance and our own inner ‘bullshit detectors’ — and knowing when it’s all too much, or too corrosive, and it’s time to step back for a while.
Being constantly immersed in negative, painful information and views of humanity simply CAN’T be good for our mental and emotional health, nor is it conducive to seeing our fellow humans in a balanced, open, neither-negative-nor-positive way.
In other words, if we want to have an open heart and a balanced view of humanity, we have to learn to see through or see past the incessant negativity of the 24–7 news cycle — and also remember that most of the good, praiseworthy things that people say and do on a daily basis never make the news, since they’re not ‘problems’ and thus are not often ‘newsworthy.’
For our overall mental health, that’s a big oversight and a big mistake. The news we see and hear is not ‘reality,’ it just gives us information — sometimes slanted or ‘fake’ information — about problematic aspects of our reality. Today we all need to step back a bit, and find ways to create a much better, more balanced relationship with all the news we’re constantly exposed to and busily ‘consume.’
We’ll very likely be much happier and more balanced if we can do this — and can effectively revamp our ongoing relationship with ‘news’ and news media.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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