I’m sure most of you have observed that the news media daily provide a steady torrent of bad news: tornadoes in the Great Plains, wildfires in Colorado, floods in the northeast and Great Lakes region, suicide bombings in the Cradle of Civilization, mass demonstrations in Istanbul, ethnic wars in sub-Saharan Africa, vanishing species in the oceans and on land, vanishing glaciers everywhere, nuclear weapon proliferation in unstable nations and home invasions in suburbia.
If you continually read all the newspapers and listened to all the news, whether local, national or international, you would soon be sitting on your bed with a loaded revolver at your temple or gambling your life’s savings at a crap table in Vegas. Thankfully, most of us don’t allow ourselves to overdose on the deluge of calamity. If we’re working hard daily at the job of taking care of ourselves and our families, we don’t really have the time to suck it all in. But even with time limitations or a firm commitment to stop dieting on disastrous news, we are soaked in the milieu of madness as surely as if we ran through a thunderstorm in our pajamas.
The good news, however, is that there is good news. Lots of it. We just don’t get to hear much of it. Because bad news sells better. You can capture the eyes and ears of the public more readily if you appeal to what they are afraid of, rather than what they are happy about. Media exist on advertising dollars. Advertisers don’t pay for the medium unless they can be assured of a sizable audience who will be exposed to their messages. Fear-mongering is a proven attention getter that increases mindshare of the market for public attention. Bad news is profitable, therefore.
Depressing as that fact may be, it remains a fact. Test it yourself, however. Pick up a newspaper (or view its online equivalent) and count the number of stories that are negative in content. Then count those that highlight positive events or information. I think you’ll find the ratio to be at least 8:2 in favor of the Dark Side. Some media studies have shown the ratio to be 17:1. What is the effect of this constant barrage of negative news?
One impact is that if we take in the negative flow of information continually, we may reach a psychological state of “learned helplessness”, which is an adaptive response to threat. It’s the submission to threat, in order to survive. Your dog does the same thing when it flops over onto its back and exposes its belly. It’s saying to you, “You’re the master, I am helpless and I give my fate to you, because if I don’t represent a threat to you, you’ll let me live. And you’ll pet me even, or give me treats. So I’ll learn to be helpless because I get rewarded for it.” In the human case, we learn helplessness because it relieves us of the hard work of creating our own positive future. “What’s the use?” we think. “We’re all going to get snuffed out in a nuclear firestorm (or earthquake, or suicide bombing, or fill in the blank) anyway.”
Another potential result is depression, the existential angst that begs the question of whether to live. Escapism is also an adaptive reaction to constant negative information, exhibited by indulgence in mood-altering substances like methamphetamines, alcohol, marijuana or chocolate cream pie.
What to do? Luckily there are some steps one can take to protect our minds and bodies from the damaging erosion of black rain coming from the news clouds daily. First, we can turn off the rain. Don’t watch the news. Don’t read the newspaper, or limit it to once a week. Don’t listen to people who want to tell you the latest horror story or scandal they just heard about.
Next, you can actively seek out the facts and evidence for what direction troubling trends may actually be going. For instance, since the late 1960s, environmental pollution in the United States has been steadily diminishing from the horrible state we were in at that time. I was reminded of how bad Los Angeles smog was in 1970 when visiting Shanghai earlier this year. We’ve come a long way. And violent crimes have steadily declined for the last twenty years, along with reduced incidence of “hard” drug usage. Lots of data are encouraging, even though a number of trends are going in the wrong direction. Take the time to go find the good news. It will help balance the weight of the bad.
Finally, I recommend you subscribe to “Soul Food Fridays”, a blog created by Neville Billimoria, Senior Vice President at Mission Federal Credit Union. He began this labor of love a few years ago to specifically combat the onslaught of negative news. His blog contains lots of inspiring, amazing and, best of all, true news about what’s going right in the world. It’s about the indomitable human spirit. It’s about how love and light is in us all, if we would only look for it more often.
If you want to avoid learned helplessness, depression and emotional decay, log into Neville’s blog: http://soulfoodfriday.wordpress.com/
It’s my antidote to the poisonous, dank gruel we’re fed daily in the name of advertising ratings.