How to Deal with Media Negativity
Tuning into the news can feel like taking in an endless cycle of suffering. Breaking news about school shootings, disease, nuclear threats tend to fill the columns of online news outlets faster than those of births, medical cures, and world peace.
Inundated with wave after wave of media negativity can be emotionally draining.
Is there anything we can glean from news like this? — other than the fact that there are so many people in world who are suffering in ways unimaginable to us.
Why bother listening to the news if it’s going to contribute to hopeless thinking?
After another wave of the confusion, I realized something about media negativity. And I learned it from watching my mom watch the news.
In the government shutdown of 2019, which saw the pause of government operation in the White House, restaurants across America offered federal employees free meals and deals every day they worked without pay. Places like New Orleans’ Ruby Slipper gave federal employees and their immediate family members free meals during the shutdown.
During one of these broadcasts, my mom just shook head.
She said, “How are these people going to pay their bills? How will they support their families? I hope they’ll find a way to survive.”
