During my childhood and teen years, whenever I would watch the news, I would personalize every single story without thinking otherwise. I would presume that every tragedy was bound to happen to me. My biggest fears as a kid was fire and kidnapping, mostly kidnapping. I was an anxiety filled teenager, so much so that a therapist advised me to avoid the news entirely. For the past year or so, I've been watching the news from a different perspective, feeling something else with every story I keep up with. I no longer personalize everything. I'm now left with with a different kind of negative, unhealthy thoughts. The current administration has left me in shock. Whenever I watch the news, I feel as though I hear the same conversation over and over again. Our news media in America has turned into a reality show. And the scary part is that this is our actual reality, this is really happening. There's no one writing the words or developing the plot lines. This is real and this is terrifying.
It's terrifying for different reasons than I feared as a kid. For one, the man currently in charge of the country love the power of being on top. He lives off ego and thoughts without thinking. He's a dangerous man because of his ignorance of not seeing the weight of his words. Then there's all that FAKE NEWS has to offer. What is real becomes a matter of which news network you prefer to view. Some news is too conservative, others are too liberal. The news is supposed to be unbiased but that's rare at this moment in time. Most news anchors cannot leave their opinions out of it. It's a very difficult task these days but it's not entirely impossible. Watching the news day after day is exhausting. I realized that the more I watch the news, the less I feel informed. Like I mentioned, hearing the same conversation with details added when leaks are shared to the public is tiring. We're learning more but nothing is changing.
It's not the media's fault change isn't happening. The media is trying to report the truth while consciously or subconsciously sneaking in their opinions. Everything is a process but the administration distracting the media by sparking up controversies to focus on anything other than the investigation that could change anything. Where there is so much smoke, there has to be fire. Eventually what is being hidden will come to light. Then change will happen. It's not the media's fault there having the same damn conversation day after day. But because I'm tired of hearing the same words in different order variations, I have decided to avoid watching the news. I found myself spending hours trying to figure out the mystery that is the current state of humanity, seeing clues underneath the same words consecutively spoken. My findings were conclusive: everything is biased and everyone is trying to save themselves. The media is trying to uncover the secrets/truth and the administration is trying to use alternative labels to name truths with lies and fake.
Now that I no longer watch the cable news, except for using it as background noise while I'm trying to take a nap and the occasional breaking news headline that cannot be ignored like the other ones, I listen to a podcast to get the news. At first, I tried to listen to several podcasts but then I realized I was hearing the same conversations had by different voices. My friend who is studying journalism told me that she likes the New York Times because they try to be unbiased as possible. So I'm listening to the NYTimes new podcast The Daily, that informs me on what I need to know without going on and on like the news on TV. I also read online articles from the NYTimes, The New Yorker, Atlantic, and CNN. As well as scrolling through Twitter to see what's happening in society and mix of sarcastic and concerned comments coming from people all over the world. Since I stopped watching the news for hours on end, I found there's a calm feeling that comes along with not getting caught up in listening to conversations that continually loop day in and day out. Change will lighten up some of it but until there's real movement, the conversations won't change drastically.
I avoid the cable news because after a while it becomes white noise and it does the opposite of relax me. We're living in uncertain times. We always are but this moment, the uncertainty is much more apparent. And to be clear, I know this post of biased. It's biased out of concern and fear for the present and future. The difference between watching the news now as opposed to when I was a kid is the lack of personalization. Although I no longer personalize the news stories, I imagine the future that is very much unknown. Where I will be and how I may be affected by it. I don't think about when things happen, I think about if they will happen. And that thought is most terrifying. A lot of what could happen could be either regression or progression. Time is not infinite, though we like to tell ourselves it is. How long does it take to repair damage? To change the conversation? To switch off the news?
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