The Overconsumption of News; It’s Killing Us
Remember Saturday morning cartoons? It was a long time ago, but I remember it as a child of the 80s. Back in the day my sisters and I absolutely adored Saturday mornings. We could not wait to wake up on a Saturday morning and be entertained, to relax, to laugh. In fact, I am pretty sure we all got up earlier on Saturday mornings just to watch our favorite cartoons than we did on regular school days. Saturday morning cartoons were a little slice of happiness. Occasionally, Dad would even bring us home donuts after working an overnight shift at Snap-On Tools so we could indulge in a fun-filled sugary breakfast along with our fix of Saturday morning funnies. Sometimes Mom & Dad would watch with us (Dad loved Bugs Bunny) and sometimes they would sit in the kitchen, have coffee and chat while we all lay on the living room floor with our pillows & blankets in front of the television set.
Today sadly, there are no more Saturday morning cartoons (unless you Google them on your iPhone or watch You Tube…and you can do that anytime, not just on Saturday mornings). News programming fills not only Saturday mornings, but Sunday mornings as well where religious programs would typically air “back in the day”. Present day, we simply cannot get enough news, or do we consume too much news? News programing takes up almost every hour of every single day. There is absolutely no break from it. The news is hard to avoid, with notifications and headlines bombarding us everywhere, whether it is on television, streaming news on our mobile phones, or perusing countless news apps.
Back in the days of Saturday morning cartoons, there might have been one or two hours of news available each day. You had your evening news and maybe a mid-day news program. Now news programming airs on local stations four to six hours every single morning, Saturdays & Sundays included. There are 4:00 a.m. newscasts “to be first on” & “to start your day”, noon newscasts, 4:00 p.m. & 9:00 p.m. newscasts “to be an hour earlier than the other guys” and there are extended late newscasts that run past 10:30 or 11:00 p.m. at night. Not to mention the 24/7 cable channels that provide regurgitated news literally every minute, of every day, 365 days a year! AND… back in the days of Saturday morning cartoons, your television stations signed off at midnight, giving viewers a forced break from too much TV time.
Local news programming is the most profitable programming to produce because every commercial break is owned by the local TV station. There are no network or syndicated advertisers that need to share the commercial inventory. 100% of the ad revenue belongs to the TV stations. And news programming is fairly easy & straightforward content to produce. If you sample the various TV stations in your market, have you ever noticed that they all follow pretty much the same playbook? There is a male and female anchor, the weather person and a few reporters who are “on the scene” and “live” in front of what was a shooting or fire the day before. But “they are live on the scene” even if it is just standing in front of boring caution tape that symbolizes what happened hours before. The playbook is the same, the headlines are the same, the stories are the same, the formats are the same. And every fifteen minutes (unless there is breaking news or severe weather) it all repeats itself pounding the doom & gloom into our brains over and over and over again.
I jotted down the descriptive words in just the first segment of a national newscast a few months ago. If there were any positive words at all; they were smothered by these negative words: deadly, outbreak, massive destruction, violent, threat, dangerous, damaging, rough, battle, restrictions, delays, allegations, mishandled, unstable, killing, collapse, violations, fatal, defects, hazardous, neglected, demolition, mayhem, injury, wrongdoing, warnings, urgent…
And we wonder why depression and suicide rates are at all-time highs. If it bleeds; it leads. Good news doesn’t sell. We are all consuming too much news and it is affecting our overall wellbeing. Too much of anything is not good for your health.
Ask yourself these six questions: 1) Am I any smarter for watching the news? 2) Am I a happier person after reading or watching the news? 3) Did any of the news I consumed impact my life in a positive way? 4) Were all sides of every headline & every story genuinely represented? 5) If I wasn’t consuming news, what else could I be doing with my time that would be more productive? 6) Could I have effectively gone about my day without watching the news?
Take my advice and find something else to do with your time: go for a walk, call someone you have not talked to for a while, fold laundry, read a book, do an art project, write a poem, workout, send hand-written cards to loved ones, join a club, learn to cook, give the dog a bath, do some housework… The time you spend with “the news” could be invested into accomplishing something way more meaningful, which will greatly improve your day & your overall wellbeing. And I promise, you will find yourself a much happier person.
