Frozen in fear: Have we stopped caring about the news we watch?
It can feel like nothing.
Perhaps a tinge of hopelessness, a feeling of lethargy and despair, just not one large enough to be unmasked. They can remain hidden from you. Always welcome but never certain to arrive. In February, the news broke that Russia had launched a military invasion of Ukraine — the most significant conflict in Europe since World War II. As with most news, I learned about the invasion through Twitter. Having little reaction to the words and the headlines read, isn’t this just another day of terrible news? Admitting this to a friend, who seemed to understand the feeling, I found myself embarrassed by such a confession: How many others, if any, felt the same way? And what was triggering such a reaction?
Students on campus have seemingly come to a general consensus. “I think at a certain point if it’s something that your brain is trying to protect you from, the less reactive you are to it,” said Sara Flores, a 21-year-old student at New York University. “There’s a sort of dehumanization that happens when you get your news. News is supposed to be fast; there’s not a lot of time to see the people who are affected.”
Numerous articles and data demonstrate the effects media has on the brain as a whole, whether that is shorter attention spans, impacts on memory, or just an overall decrease in self-confidence. What we view — and how we view it — impacts our daily lives. So is it improbable that the amount of news and tragedy we see also alters our reactions and responses to it? And what type of media might cause these changes?
“There’s fight, flight, and frozen. So flight is when people are just desensitized and don’t care, frozen is do nothing and just hope this ends, and the fight mode is do whatever we need to do to fix it right away,” said Mary Joye, a licensed mental health counselor and certified trauma professional in Florida. “Everybody is in a trauma response, a fear, which releases adrenaline and cortisol. Everybody is in this fear mode so people are becoming frozen or desensitized.”
COVID-19 is a pertinent microcosm of this concept. Researchers have conducted recent studies on the correlation between desensitization and Covid-19 articles on Twitter, concluding that early in the pandemic the level of anxiety increased while reading Covid-centered articles. However, as death tolls rose news articles lost their ability to elicit anxiety from the readers.
“We were not surprised to find that people are becoming desensitized to the impact of scary news,” said Hannah Stevens, one of the authors of the study. “We see this frequently with research investigating desensitization to violence in media, including death.”
But for Angelina Ayad, 20, another student at NYU, it was the opposite. “My mom would rattle off crazy statistics and the more she would tell me the more it became apocalyptic,” said Ayad. She noticed a pattern in the news cycle: “an issue is raised and gains a lot of traction and then it fizzles out. It’s almost like it has become a trend, which is unfortunate.”
Tragedy becoming a trend is not uncommon in the Internet age. Often people are consuming violent media of some kind. Most recently there has been upheaval about Netflix’s new ‘Dahmer’ series, which gives another interpretation of the life of famed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. A Daily Beast article mentioned the upset of the victims’ families after the recent uptick in Dahmer Halloween costumes. The families begged the public to refrain from dressing like the killer.
Another topic of discussion has been the impact of true crime podcasts. A recent article discusses the debate the public is having on the medium’s morality, listing podcasters who have sponsorships throughout their videos and YouTubers who narrate tragic events while applying makeup. Media has seemingly blurred the lines of what we can morally enjoy.
Joye warns people to beware of crossing the line between information and entertainment. “Especially if someone is depressed, I’ll ask them what they are watching on TV. If they tell me there watching anything with crime or murder, I tell them to lighten it up. We are what we watch, not just what we eat, so watch what you watch,” explains Joye.
A decrease in empathy occurs amongst those exposed to high levels of violence, according to a study that had participants watch 11 minutes of high violence on television testing their emotional and physiological responses. Interestingly it was not the repetitive television violence itself that led to the participants’ decrease in blood pressure; rather, it was if the participant had previously been exposed to violence in real life.
How and what should we be allowed to interact with? Social sites like Twitter have regulations that prohibit certain content or create content warnings. But is it enough?
“I remember seeing a video of a beheading in middle school,” said Flores “I didn’t even want to. A kid in my class just showed it to me.”
Back in 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, there became a growing exhaustion from those outside the community. It was referred to as ‘allyship fatigue,’ or tiredness from fighting injustice. An article in BlackYouth Project explored the concept: “What we feel is beyond bodily fatigue, it’s spiritual collapse. We have no choice but to feel it and to keep pushing through it for our own survival and with hope that we can one day thrive.”
What solutions exist, if any? According to Stevens, there is no one size-fits-all to a problem as vast as desensitization.
“ We need to think of new ways of communicating with the public. Desensitization is an emotional process; not all appeals to change behavior are rooted in emotion.,” she said.
Perhaps we can start by acknowledging that the news we see is real human stories.
Don’t watch the news for entertainment, Joye said: “It’s not entertainment. It’s people.’.