Bad news in the media is what sells, and it has become ubiquitous, such that we are inured to it. We can listen to the details of a triple-homicide and go on eating lunch. We sometimes seek out footage that the announcer warns “may be disturbing,” a practice that psychologists call “doomscrolling.” The media are filled with every form of violence, including violence against children and the elderly, and every sort of corruption, yet we suppose that exposure to such material will have no corrupting effect on us. And yet with every week that passes, assuming we spend the U.S. average of five hours per day on screens, we may become more callous and less likely to see the goodness in the world.
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The truth is that what the media present in the way of murder and mayhem is not real. Yes, the violence that gets reported is factual, but the overemphasis on negative reporting misrepresents the true nature of life in America and in most other countries. The impression left by the media that most of life is ugly, violent, and corrupt — and that’s the impression we get from 24/7 reporting of bad news — is totally false. The truth is that there is goodness all around; it just doesn’t get reported, because it doesn’t attract eyeballs.
The good news that the media distort is that there are hundreds of millions of good people in our country, and billions around the globe, whose days are filled with small acts of kindness, and occasionally with heroic acts that are not small by any measure. It would be refreshing to hear CNN or MS-NOW fill their broadcasts with reports on the lives of ordinary people who go to work each day, come home to care for their families, honor their parents, love their spouses, and look to God for guidance and support. People like that exist all across America, but not on the mainstream liberal media.
The repercussions of this emphasis on bad news are great. For their own purposes, financial and otherwise, the media are spreading a negative view of life that ends up indoctrinating and demoralizing all of us. It requires a conscious effort to break through the fog of negativity and make our way into the bright light of God’s love and the happiness and confidence that come with it. It’s not as if those in the media — and the universities, politics, and corporations — don’t have an agenda; they want the public to be robotic consumers of bad news so that the citizenry can be more easily controlled by an elite spread across our institutions. They want the public to be uncertain, doubting their instincts for kindness and responsibility and common sense. And the endless stream of negativity in every public forum is their means of demeaning faith and integrity and keeping the public in its place.
On a personal level, bad news has been shown to be harmful to one’s health. The horrific stories that are featured every day in the media trigger the “fight or flight” response and the release of cortisol, leading to inflammation. At the very least, this inflammation promotes anxiety and depression, but often it results in physical damage leading to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other serious diseases. Clearly, a steady diet of bad news is toxic and should be avoided.
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The solution to the bad news media is simply to tune it out. It’s not necessary to stay informed about every mass shooting, every scandal, every rape, and act of terror in the entire country or even in our own counties. I don’t need to watch the media to know what is happening in the worst sections of Chicago, Portland, or L.A., or even in my relatively peaceful community. Human nature hasn’t changed for thousands of years, and anyone who has read Homer’s Iliad or Dante’s Inferno knows all there is to know about human beings at their worst. Achilles’s mistreatment of Hector’s body violated all the norms of warfare and of religion at the time, as it would today. Homer would not have been surprised by today’s acts of violence, of corruption in Minnesota and elsewhere, or of teen “takeovers.”
I can predict what will be on the news tonight, and I don’t want to hear the tawdry details. It is better to live within the goodness of one’s family, friends, co-workers, and church — not to bury one’s head in the sand, but to embrace the goodness of Creation and enjoy the happiness and health that come with it. One can know that there were some 15,000 murders and 70,000 drug overdoses in America last year, both down from recent numbers, and that children are abused every minute and the elderly are harmed, without surrendering one’s happiness and freedom to a national culture that would have us submit to the idol of negativity and godlessness — and turn our lives over to a cynical class of elitists that seeks to control us. The truth that is everywhere around us there exist the unconditional love of parents, the kindness of neighbors, the positive values inscribed in our Constitution and traditions and on display in the 250 years of our nation’s history. The truth that should be reported is that, despite our flaws, which are considerable, we are still children of God — noble, caring, and loving toward those around us.
It is destructive, at the public level and the personal level, to allow our minds and bodies to be controlled by a national media establishment whose intent is to demoralize and confuse us so as to exploit and control us. The media would have us believe that there exists one crisis after another, each crying out for more “protection” from government. The reality is much more hopeful and wondrous: We live among people who, for the most part, are decent and caring, and we enjoy the fruits of an abundant land and miraculous technology. We are surrounded by goodness, a fact that can be obscured only if we kowtow to the “authority” of the media and the false teaching of schools and colleges. As long as we retain our faith in the goodness of life and the goodness of others, we will continue to live unintimidated and free.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, most recently Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
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