By D'Arcy Closs
The international situation is desperate, as usual. The national situation isn’t far behind, as usual. Or at least so says the international and national news spews, as usual. Since the inception of the telegraph (1844), news organizations have been desperately scouring the globe for situations — preferably desperate — to capture the public’s attention, the assumption being that train wrecks draw far more eyeballs than perfectly functioning trains.
While you’d much rather be on the latter, you’re more likely to pay attention to the former.
The first message Samuel Morse sent over that telegraph he invented was, “What hath God wrought?” Today, the answer to his question is clear: bad news. Humans are cursed with a morbid fascination. We can’t turn away from the horrible and often seek it out, as the success of countless horror movies prove. News organisations have always been acutely aware of this and exploit it and us. News outlets quickly realized that bad news was good news, and good news was no news at all.
In less the cluttered media landscape of pre-internet times, when the news was delivered via a daily paper, or a half-an-hour to hour-long broadcast once a day, it seemed tolerable. The ratio of bad news to good news, though, has always been the same, with bad news dominating, and perhaps a small sip of good news at the very end to help wash the bitter medicine down.
But today, with news feeds inundating us at all times, the sheer amount of news can overwhelm us. Our response to this over-saturation is to create a new category of news: “fake news,” which allows us to tidily ignore any bad news we aren’t particularly comfortable with.
But the news has always had a shade of the sham about it. Despite rigorous attempts to ensure its objectivity, the news is investigated and written by that most subjective of creatures: humans, who are nothing if not tellers of tall tales.
So as much as the news tries to tamp down reporter’s opinions, quash the first-person voice, and sail the windy straights of Truth, it is ultimately, in the words of The Big Lebowski’s the Dude, “just, like, your opinion man.” News stories are just that: stories. Almost always these stories are based on real happenings, but how those happenings are reported, and which happenings get reported, are shaped and decided with a certain amount of subjectivity.
What’s a poor consumer to do then? It is a delicate operation indeed to excise all news out of one’s life. Perhaps just shrinking the size of the news consumed to local news only — the 100-mile diet of news consumption — is the way to go?
For one, the local news tends to report on matters that you could actually do something about. As horrible as some tragedy or injustice in some faraway place may be, the average person can do absolutely nothing about it, and so consumes those stories as a kind of low-budget, morbid entertainment.
But local stories report on matters that do allow the consumer to be involved. “Soup Kitchen In Need of Volunteers,” while not titanic news, does offer the reader the chance to act. Participation begets meaningfulness, which begets a sense of satisfaction, which begets a sense of pride, which begets fulfillment, which begets further involvement, which begets a healthier community.
To ignore intentionally many of the great problems around the world the news would have us invest in is not ethically incorrigible; rather, it may be necessary to hang on to one’s inner equilibrium (see: sanity), and place one’s limited mental resources where they more rightfully belong: nearer to home, which is, after all, where the heart is.
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