Source: Good News Network
Many people are grappling with this year’s depressing and disturbing news—meaning, they want to turn away, but they just can‘t.
The constant focus on partisan politics—as well as murders and mayhem—is taking a real
toll on peoples’ psyches.
The surgeon Dr. Christiane Northrop says our nervous systems simply weren’t designed to handle a daily barrage of bad news which contains the worst of humanity, brought to you from every corner of the globe.
The inundation is too much for most people.The trend toward sensational bad news on television began in the 1990s. At the same time as the U.S. homicide rate was dropping in that decade by 42%, television news coverage of murders skyrocketed—rising more than 700%, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs.
During that time, TV network news audiences and newspaper circulation began to fall. We can only guess that this was due to the increased focus on crime coverage.
Instead of gorging on an endless media diet of conflict, some people have taken drastic action, by closing their eyes and turning off the news altogether. (They are also unfriending their angry brother-in-law or friend whose partisan posts contaminate their Facebook feed.)
Completely tuning out the news, however, is not a great solution. To be an informed citizen and voter, we need to know what’s going on. Instead, I recommend that people become “selective sifters”, choosing what kind of news they take in daily. Headline news from the BBC or NPR, or perusing newspapers and magazines is enough to provide the basics.
Most people will need to make a conscious effort not to get sucked into the rancorous trivial debates of the day, like how much Melania Trump’s jacket costs when she travels into a poor neighborhood—and the inference that it should make anyone angry if they are a Liberal.
It’s not enough, though, to just sift through the bad news.
Norman Cousins, a political journalist and 30-year editor of the Saturday Review said, “If news is not really news unless it is bad news, it may be difficult to claim we are an informed nation.”
There is another crucial step that people can take to relieve some of their anxiety around current events. They can write themselves a prescription for a daily dose of good news. Like a “Vitamin G” in their media diet it can provide some balanced nutrition beyond the negative news menu.
I look at it this way: If a child is only given junk food, then that’s all he knows and wants, but if he is given some sweet carrots, watermelon or apples, he learns to appreciate them, and gets the benefit of an enriched diet and healthier body.
Thomas Jefferson said the job of journalists was to portray accurately what was happening in society. As a former TV news freelancer, I created Good News Network (GNN) because the media was failing to report enough of the positive—and it was simply too hard to find good news in large enough quantities to make a difference in one’s mental health.
An overabundance of pessimistic, depressing stories can create a perception of a crime-and-greed-filled-world that is out of proportion with reality.
Benefits to Physical Health
According to letters from GNN readers, the…
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