We live in a time when the sun and moon and the stars, not to mention our economy, our climate, and our politicians have all converged and coalesced into a negative, stomach-churning stew. With the unending stream of more bad news—more bad news about the economy, more bad news about climate change, more bad news about healthcare costs, more bad news about unemployment, more bad news about the Iranian nuclear program, more bad news about political polarization, more bad news about pretty much everything—all of us can be forgiven, I think, if we sometimes want to turn off our TVs and computers, and cancel our newspaper subscription.
As an inveterate news junky who is being inundated—like everyone else—in an onrushing tsunami of incoming bad news, I struggle oftentimes to find even a single particle of something to be happy about. But I have found that a bit of perspective lets me cope with the bad news.
How do I get this sense of perspective? The short answer is, but analyzing how we get news, and how the media profits from reporting it us in negative ways.
Media outlets who bring us bad news have found that bad news sells more newspapers, it gets better TV news show ratings, and it gleans more internet hits than good news. As a result almost all news anymore, even if it is good news at its core, is generally reported in the most negative, scary terms possible.
The most recent fad in news reporting is to focus on emotion more than facts. If some poor person is murdered, notice how the focus of the news broadcasts is far more on the anguish of the grieving family of the deceased, and far less on the facts of the case.
Today we live in a time of near instant news: cell phone video cameras, and the ability of almost anybody to upload a video they just shot to YouTube videos in hopes that it will go ‘viral’. Pictures of any form, and especially video, are more emotionally charged. Print magazines and newspapers are almost obsolete (and also almost out of business).
If I read in a newspaper about some tragedy—say a nightclub fire—then I take note of the fact that it happened, and maybe how many were killed and injured, and whether the fire marshal thought that arson was or was not involved. Overall I’m sorry to hear about it, but I’m not especially involved in emotionally.
However, if I see a video on YouTube that shows patrons of this night club running screaming from the burning building with their hair and clothes on fire, that it makes a much more visceral impression.
And my last point; the 24 hour news networks—CNN, Fox, MSN-NBC, etc—have a lot of time to fill. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, in fact. So, when we have news content being created by ‘citizen journalists’ in the form of uploaded videos or digital still shots of current events, followed by endless hours of supposed experts on the 24 hour news outlets endlessly replaying the same clip and feeding us a news diet that is 95% speculation, rumor, and innuendo and about 5% actual fact.
There is a reason there is so much bad news today. Bad news is as bad as it is in large part because that is the kind of content that media has found keeps them in business.
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