Severally, right?
Welcome to the world of news.
For eons, media houses have broadcasted news on occurrences
they deemed relevant to millions of audiences over the globe.
This is not good. News is not good.
I know that this stance in social media jargon would pass as
“the first shot,” justifying counter attacks, some with the potency of
poison-pen letters. It is worth it.
News is the most
boring media product. At least features, documentaries, commentaries, and shot
stories do not come any closer. For quite some time, I have found that news on
radio, TV, newsprint, and Twitter do not satisfy my needs for information. If
anything, news has been boring. And, thanks to insights by Rolf Dobelli in his
book, The Art of Thinking Clearly, I
have been right.
For starters, news entails reporting on occurrences that the
media perceives to have news value to the mass media consumer. Metrics of news
values include proximity, prominence, currency, timeliness, bizarreness,
conflict, human interest and impact. The implication is that the
media-journalists and editors-are obsessed with occurrences that meet a number
of these criteria to broadcast to the media consumer.
What is bad in that?
Everything.
In an article appearing in the Guardian, Dobelli writes that
news has cancerous on the human mind. Not in the literal sense though. He goes
further advancing the standpoint that “news is to the mind
what sugar is to the body” using anecdotes and vivid illustrations.
From the article, Dobelli asserts that
news is laden with trivialities, “that don't really concern our lives
and don't require thinking.” The fact that news are easy to digest confirms its
toxicity to the mind. Dobelli goes ahead confirming that news is both useless and dangerous.
News is misleading. The media cover events with utmost
biasness. News has never been able to bring the whole picture surrounding a
given occurrence. Instead, the media would only rush to broadcast small bits of
the otherwise huge story. This creates a misleading picture on the minds of the
audiences. “News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in
our heads. So terrorism is over-rated.”
Importantly, news stories do not contribute in any meaningful
ways to the lives of the consumers. They do not make the consumers make any useful
reasoning. “The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you.” Media
houses would stop at nothing in making audiences believe that what is new adds
value to them. But this is nothing compared to what news does on the minds of
the consumer.
News makes the consumer accumulate facts, passively. News
stories have a shallow approach to phenomena and in turn fail to develop the
desired understanding. This is the explanation for the fact that news do not
have a transforming effect. Worse still, news is toxic to the body, literally.
Panicky stories, Boston terror attack types, inhibit the release of growth
hormones, sending the body to a state of chronic stress. Fear, desensitization,
and aggression are some of the side effects of news consumption.
Worse still, news demotes thinking. News is quite successful
in making its consumers shallow thinkers. News pieces distract concentration,
frustrating comprehension. This is worse in online media where studies have
shown that presence of hyperlinks is further distracting. News developed a
condition known scientifically as “learned helplessness.” Here, the news
consumer is exposed to events he cannot influence. Eventually, this makes him
passive.
News siphons off creativity from the news writers. Popularity
of the inverted pyramid format of delivering news should confirm this
assertion. Consumers are addicted to news that make them passive besides
exposing them to old solutions.
I should have written this article 10 years ago, especially
following the downing of Looking for a
Rain God and Other Short Stories. Those days, I found novels by such
literacy icons as Chinua Achebe informative. But when I started making money
and with the advent of information technology, when I could access company
newspapers daily, immediately I procured my Samsung Galaxy tablet, and TV, my psyche with
information has been spiraling down.
At some time, I was certain that news was boring. And with insights from Dobelli, I can say with confidence that news is bad.
At some time, I was certain that news was boring. And with insights from Dobelli, I can say with confidence that news is bad.
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