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I recently watched a one-hour news program out of
Boston, and by the end of it, I was convinced of two things:
nothing good ever happens in Boston, and I didn't ever want to watch
the news again. People dying, crime, hatred, anger, and sports
and weather and entertainment. Was there no uplifting news
that day? Nobody accomplished anything new or different?
I swore off the Boston Globe one Sunday morning, when
the front page--the main story--featured a detailed article about a
gory murder that had happened one year earlier. The
one-year anniversary was nothing more to them than an opportunity to
drag out old news and display it as something new, sensationalizing
a brutal, disgusting, horrible act and its consequences in order to
get a rise out of their readers--playing with their emotions--under
the guise of "journalism." Not only did it not seem
like news, but the fact that they made it a front-page story was
appalling.
The journalists will swear by their old story, the one
they fall back on whenever anyone criticizes them and their
practices--they're just giving people what they want. But I
can't believe that they know what people want--people have never
really been given much of an option, much of a chance to give
feedback. And if they do criticize, they hear the old story
again. I know that USA Today makes for interesting
reading because of the diversity of the stories that they offer;
it's also been quite successful. They also spent a lot of time
researching what people wanted in papers. Readers Digest
has been extremely successful while focusing on uplifting stories
about everyday people and their lives. Unfortunately, it seems
that our news media are unwilling to follow suit and focus on the
positive.
How many names make it into a major newspaper each
year? Even if the number reaches a million, that's still fewer
than 1/2 of 1% of the population of the United States. And how
many column inches have been devoted to Bill Clinton's affair with
Monica Lewinski, to O.J. Simpson's trial, to the Columbine tragedy,
and to other "major" stories of the last few years.
What percentage of the "news" did these stories take
up? Think of the number of individuals directly involved, and
then think of whether or not that number merits the time given.
If just half of the time and energy that went into
covering the Clinton debacle or the Simpson trial had been devoted
to positive, uplifting news and "human interest" stories,
how much might we have been uplifted and encouraged by stories of
people who have succeeded in making a real difference in the lives
of others? And we certainly wouldn't have missed anything
about the other stories--even at half the amount, we still would
have learned more about both than we needed to, than would help us
in the long term as human beings living our lives.
Another question I have to ask is what percentage of
our population murders or attempts to murder, and how much of our
news is dedicated to people like that? I know that if I'm ever
able to do the story, I'll find that they receive a disproportional
amount of coverage, which may even be a partial cause of further
violence--many people are so desperate for attention that they'll
take desperate measures in order to get it. And if someone who
already feels isolated and alone sees the amount of attention given
to someone who's committed a violent act. . . .
Thoreau wrote a century and a half ago that he didn't
feel papers were worth reading, and that if we want to live full
lives, we'll give up reading about strangers. In "Life
without Principle" he wrote: "the news we hear, for
the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest
repetition. . . . Such is the daily news. Its facts appear to
float in the atmosphere, insignificant as the sporules of fungi. . .
. We should wash ourselves clean of such news." His basic
premise is that if the news doesn't help us to grow as human beings,
if it doesn't enrich our lives, then it's useless.
You see, we're being fed information, not
news. Reading about yesterday's car accident was just the same
as reading about the one three months ago, and the one four months
ago; only the names and locations have changed. This year's
mass murderer isn't anything new, yet the media want you to think he
is--that will sell more papers. Even monsters like Dahmer are
not without their predecessors who did even worse things than they
did.
But what does that mean to us in the context of this
website? Why write a column like this in an encouraging
setting? Mostly for awareness, I believe--what we pour into
our brains stays there and helps to determine how we feel.
Reading about murder and crime tends to keep us focused on those
things, and tends to keep our perspective dark and grim. I
strongly believe that we can help make this world a better place to
live only by encouraging and helping each other out to find out who
we are and what we want out of life, and to help each other
accomplish what we wish to accomplish. If we fill our minds
with the violence and anger and deception, we get a false view of
humanity, and we lose a bit of our ability to focus on those
positive things--the neighbors who helped you out, the family
members who have been there for you, the woman in the store who went
out of her way to help you with something. Our lives are full
of positive, loving experiences, and we can't let our media mislead
us about human nature by focusing on the abnormal. Think your
thoughts, and develop your perspective--don't see what you read as
the norm, because it certainly isn't that.
Of course, don't ignore the bad and the evil--we have
to deal with that--but let's deal with it to the degree at which it
occurs, which is far less often than a newscast would lead you to
believe. The next time you watch the news and see all the bad
things they focus on, ask yourself this--how many people aren't on
the news who did something great today?
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