Is everything really this bad? Really? It’s true that all those things are happening – flooding in the Midwest, high gas prices, home foreclosures and so on – but when they throw it all together that way doesn’t it make it seem worse than it actually is? Or is my family just one of a lucky minority of families that are doing okay?
It is the job of the media to get people to pay attention to them. Maybe you think their job is to inform us but what do you think happens if everybody stops watching a particular network or stops reading a particular newspaper? If the situation can’t be corrected quickly somebody gets fired. Their job is to get as many people as possible to pay attention to them and the easiest way to do that is to create drama.
There’s always something bad going on somewhere in the world and it’s good to be aware of it as we go about our generally comfortable lives but it’s not good to be in a constant state of panic and despair. We all need to take a deep breath, take a good look at our own lives and what’s going on in our communities, help our neighbors as much as we can, then relax and just live. The sun still rises, flowers still bloom, children still play, kittens are still cute, music still moves us, books still take us away. Take time off from worrying to enjoy some of the good stuff.
June 25th, 2008 - 9:51 am
Periodically I go on “news fasts” where I avoid all the news channels, only watch the local news enough to know what the weather’s going to be, and avoid a lot of the commentary websites.
Because you know, it’s almost never as bad as the news claims it is.
I think part of this is that bad news sells. I’ve even been known to cynically quip, “Nothing’s going on in the world!” when the news features some kind of human-interest story about a dog that learned to get his master a beer out of the fridge or something.
I blame the 24 hour news channels for this in part. When I was a kid, there was news first thing in the morning, at 6 pm, and that was it, unless there was some kind of MAJOR thing (like a president getting shot) that merited a “we interrupt this program…” Now, so often, the news IS the program.
I don’t like paranoia. I don’t like it when I get to feel freaked out and sad because I listen to what’s going on in the world and think it’s bad.
But then I think of how the world was in my great-grandparents’ day – things like assassinations or natural disasters, unless you were right where it happened, you maybe heard about it weeks later in the newspaper. Probably as much bad stuff happened back then, but there wasn’t the push to tell everyone about it.
There was an interesting survey that I heard about on the radio the other day – something like 2/3 of the people asked said that the economy was in the tank, things were bad, etc., etc. But then when they were asked about their own personal status, 80% of the people responded that they and their family were doing pretty well.
Which I take as evidence that things are not as bad as they seem…that the news may be using anecdotes that illustrate the worst possible. And it may be partly what you go out looking for, you find. And anything can be spun the way you want it to – increased college enrollment can be “Wow, look at all the folks who want to try to better themselves” or as “Oh noes! People not in the workforce not contributing to the tax base!”