Modern Media's Penchant for Bad News

[olger]

Addicted to Bad News? Try Fasting from the Media

By Nataliya Schetchikova, ACA News Associate Editor

"Feeling anxious lately, and you’re not sure why? Jan Chozen Bays, MD, recommends trying a “media fast” by deliberately staying away from TV and newspapers for a few weeks.

Dr. Chozen Bays, an author and a pediatrician specializing in the evaluation of children for possible abuse and neglect, believes the media contribute to the “pervasive level of anxiety” in modern society, which is especially disturbing among the young. To turn that anxiety down, people need to tune it out.

She recalls talking to a senior high school student in Anchorage, Alaska, who, to the great surprise of her parents, said that she worried about someone breaking into the house and hurting her. “To me, the only place the child in a safe town would [get such an idea] was from the media,” says Dr. Chozen Bays.

When she started talking about such cases with colleagues, Dr. Chozen Bays realized that others noticed similar trends. “The media are bombarding us—not with heart-warming stories but with alarming things,” she says. The mind, she explains, is striving to guard its owner by being vigilant for negative news.

The mind, of course, has performed this function since the dawn of humankind. The difference is that people have transitioned from listening to news about their co-inhabitants in communities of 30 to 100 people to being exposed through the media to the misfortunes of millions. Dr. Chozen Bays believes the brain simply hasn’t adapted. “The mind is not designed to take in that much negative information. We are compassionate people—it worries us when there’s an earthquake in Indonesia,” she adds.

Changing Children’s World View

By age 11, elementary school students in the United States will have viewed images of 8,000 murders, according to the American Psychological Association (APA). As a result, says APA, children may lose their sense of sympathy for the suffering of others, become more aggressive, or start perceiving the world as dangerous.1

Not only reports of violence can damage children’s psyche. Watching disasters on TV is also associated with anxiety and worry—albeit to a lesser degree—as direct exposure, says Robin H. Gurwitch, PhD, a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and a well-known disaster recovery specialist and researcher. She adds that it’s unclear, however, whether anxious or worried children seek out disaster coverage—or whether watching the coverage causes anxiety and worry.

Children’s age affects their level of comprehension. Younger children may assume, for example, that Hurricane Katrina flooding happened over and over again—because of the repeated coverage; older children understand the events better, explains Dr. Gurwitch. The age also impacts their reactions. “Younger children are concerned about themselves, their close friends and family. Older children and adolescents expand their circle of empathy, worrying about people they may not know, like the Louisiana families after Hurricane Katrina,” she says.

Dr. Gurwitch explains that children who watch or read a lot of disaster coverage may have intrusive thoughts about the event, become more irritable and worried, and have difficulty sleeping, focusing, learning, or completing chores at home. The more exposure a child has had, the greater the risk for more significant reactions.

For this reason, monitoring—and limiting—exposure is important. Dr. Gurwitch recommends limiting younger children’s exposure to human tragedy, and watching and discussing news with adolescents."

Selected by olger

[olger]

Uh.

Thanks Bro.

[Gregory Matthews]

The question is: What do people feed upon.

Some people feed upon the supermarket tabloids.

Some people look for ways to positively intervene.

In a recent post I made here, one of the CA members contacted me privately and asked how he could be of help. I placed him in contact with the right people so that he could be of positive help.

A lot depends upon the person and what that person is looking for.

Possibly some people should not read the morning newspaper. If so, they should be adult enough not to do so.

There may be some threads here in CA that some people should not read. If so, they should be adult enough not to read them.

I ask again: What do you (I do not have a specific person in mind.) feed upon? Why do you feed upon that?

[olger]

The media has a penchant for bad news, and you have one for too many words, in my observations.

I think you are a decent guy, and no doubt mean well. Yet generally everything you write is full of disclaimers which make your posts vague and less coherent.

All the best,

g

[olger]

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

"News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether.

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That's the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it's dramatic, it's a person (non-abstract), and it's news that's cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.

We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.

News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what's relevant. It's much easier to recognise what's new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we're cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.

News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists' radar but have a transforming effect. The more "news factoids" you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. If more information leads to higher economic success, we'd expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That's not the case.

News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.

News increases cognitive errors. News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact." News exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. It also exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that "make sense" – even if they don't correspond to reality. Any journalist who writes, "The market moved because of X" or "the company went bankrupt because of Y" is an idiot. I am fed up with this cheap way of "explaining" the world.

News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it's worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory's capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a certain amount of slippery data. The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must pass through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension. Online news has an even worse impact. In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an intentional interruption system.

News works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists used to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It's not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It's because the physical structure of their brains has changed.

News wastes time. If you read the newspaper for 15 minutes each morning, then check the news for 15 minutes during lunch and 15 minutes before you go to bed, then add five minutes here and there when you're at work, then count distraction and refocusing time, you will lose at least half a day every week. Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind?

News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can't act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is "learned helplessness". It's a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if news consumption, at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression.

News kills creativity. Finally, things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas. I don't know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don't.

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.

I have now gone without news for four years, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first-hand: less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, more insights. It's not easy, but it's worth it."

This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk

[Gregory Matthews]

Olger: I am very restrained in my posting here. You have no idea.

When I believe that it is necessary, I can write documents that are extensive, but cover the issues in detail. And, I do. E.G. I was recently asked to provide some material that would be reviewed by a consultant. I supplied that consultant more than 100 pages. That one was not the largest number of pages that I have supplied, by any means.

At the same time, when brevity is required, I can often sum an issue up in less than one page. I do all of that.

However, no one in this forum is required to read what I write. Don't read it if you do not want to spend the time. I do not read some things in this forum because I do not want to spend the time reading them. I suggest that you do the same. But, if you do read them don't gripe about their length and acknowledge that you read them because you were interested in them and involved.

[Gregory Matthews]

Quote:

Yet generally everything you write is full of disclaimers which make your posts vague and less coherent.

I regularly write in situations where I am expected to make disclaimers when appropriate.

I am often commended by people who are reading what I write and do not consider me to be vague and incoherent.

[olger]

You must be bored today. But, on the bright side, every minute that you spend on here responding/reacting is a minute SAVED FROM READING HORRIBLE NEWS ON THE MEDIA THAT COULD MAKE YOUR HEAD SWELL AND BURST OPEN AND THEN GET REALLY BAD !!!

This is not to say that that all reading is bad. Some reading is good and some people like to read things. I have also read that some reading is not so good and I therefore suggest that you read over your reading before reading it, and do not read the riot act.

I also do not mean to claim that all heads will swell and burst after consuming media bad news. There may be some heads that will swell and not burst, and some heads that will not swell but they will burst anyway. By acknowledging this I am not making statements on heads that are discriminatory in any way. Some may see it that way someday and think something, somehow.

[olger]

Why we love bad news

Published on December 30, 2010 by Ray Williams in Wired for Success

"Many of us frequently complain about the negativity of the news, particularly now in the economic downturn. The conga line of bruising news blankets consumers in a headline bombardment that is probably making the problem worse. Why do we have this attraction for bad news?

Jim Lehrer's NewHour economics correspondent Paul Solmon did an interesting piece on the cascading effect that consumer pessimism has on our willingness to spend. He said that we are in a state of "learned helplessness". At the worst, continual bad news can even stimulate a state of depression, and people who concentrate on all the bad news work themselves up emotionally and become much more likely to make unwise decisions, like selling all their investments at a huge loss or halting their consumer spending entirely. Even people who don't watch television or read newspapers are getting hit with nuggets of negativity through social networking and informal conversations.

When everyone is talking about recession, we all feel like something has to change, even if nothing has changed, says Dan Ariely, author of "Predictably Irrational," People may be scared to spend money, scared about losing their jobs and in doing so will restrain their spending. Yet look closely. Consumer sales in entertainment, and drugs like Viagra have increased. Best practice companies with a long-term view are weathering the recession quite well. Social networking in many forms is expanding rapidly.

Is the media negative? Media studies show that bad news far outweighs good news by as much as seventeen negative news reports for every one good news report. Why? The answer may lie in the work of evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists. Humans seek out news of dramatic, negative events. These experts say that our brains evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment where anything novel or dramatic had to be attended to immediately for survival. So while we no longer defend ourselves against saber-toothed tigers, our brains have not caught up.

Many studies have shown that we care more about the threat of bad things than we do about the prospect of good things. Our negative brain tripwires are far more sensitive than our positive triggers. We tend to get more fearful than happy. And each time we experience fear we turn on our stress hormones.

Another explanation comes from probability theory. In essence, negative and unusual things happen all the time in the world. In his book, Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos explains that if the news is about a small neighborhood of 500 or 5,000, then the possibility that something unusual has happened is low. Unusual things don't happen to individual people very often. That's why very local news like a neighborhood newsletters tends to have less bad news. But in a large city of 1 million, dramatic and negative incidents happen all the time. But most people watch national or worldwide media where news reports come in from large cities at a large scale, so the prevalence of negative stories increase. Add the size of social networking communication, and we expand geometrically bad news. So from evolutionary and neuro-scientific and probability perspectives, we are hard-wired to look for the dramatic and negative, and when we find it, we share it.

What about our personal lives? Psychologist John Gottman at the University of Washington, found that there is kind of thermostat operating in healthy marriages that regulates the balance between positive and negative. He found that relationships run into serious problems when the negative to positive ratio becomes seriously imbalanced. He also found that the magic ratio is five positive to one negative.

Is there any good news in all this? According to positive psychologists we can change our habits, and we can focus on the glass being half-full. When we acquire new habits, our brains acquire "mirror neurons" and develop a positive perspective that can spread to other people like a virus. This is not about being a Pollyanna or "goody-two-shoes," it is about being able to reprogram our brains. To apply this positive psychology and brain research knowledge to our attitudes and behaviors with relation to our current economic conditions, we can encourage our news deliverers to present a balanced and multi-dimensional point of view. Giving us the bad news, so that our brains are hard-wired into a negative state, will just reinforce the current negative economic climate."

Rejoice Always,

G

[Tom Wetmore]

I don't know. I think news isn't so much the problem. And more broadly the media (not the same as news or journalism) is not so much the problem. Now more than ever there are many options to be informed of what is happening in the world around us beyond our own little corner of it. Seeking to be informed, or to learn is intrinsically a good thing. A significant function of news reporting and journalism is for that purpose.

Part of the problem is more with lack of focus, imbalance and an impatience to take the time to be well informed to seek more in depth coverage of events and understanding of what is happening and why. It is available.

One disturbing trend as a result is the lack of critical thinking about what we read and view along these lines. As a result, I think there has been a serious exploitation of that by a dramatic increase in propagandists taking over too much of our media programming. I think that is more to blame for what these two pieces are seeing as being to our ruin.

The apparent alternative to this extreme view is to avoid all news and media and move toward an isolationist focus that ignores the rest of the world. If it doesn't touch me it doesn't matter mentality. Ignorance is bliss. I just don't think that is the answer or solution.

How about balance? What is wrong with being informed and aware of life in the wider world?

[olger]

It's ok to be aware of what's going on in the world, while at the same time avoiding the repetitive burn-out described in the aforementioned articles.

We choose to not have a television in our home - that has no doubt saved us from many bad influences. I do use the internet extensively, and one has to police that too.

[CoAspen]

The articles themselves were examples of negative writing. A very lopsided view of what the writer considers 'newsworthy'. An opinion piece which the writer has the right to have, but still just an opinion. Very negative.