Sensationalized News and Emotional Wellbeing

5-minute read — by Stephen BE, M.A. D.Div.

Suppose someone, like a neighbor, came to your door one evening and said, “Hey, your cows got out of the pasture. They are crossing the road. I’ll help you gather them, if you’d like.” Their message was clear, their demeanor matter-of fact and helpful.

You would undoubtedly appreciate their informing you of the situation and the offer to help. You understand the urgency of the situation, so you immediately put on your coat and boots, get your rope, and head out to take care of the herd.

Now in scenario two, a different neighbor comes to your door and says, “Hey, all of your cows got out and they are all over the road. Drivers will never be able to see them in time. You’re gonna cause a major accident! You’d better get out there quick!” Their message is alarmist, urgent, and somewhat critical.

Your adrenaline just spiked. You feel a confusing mix of responsibility, annoyance, anger, fear and failure. You know that cows just do that sometimes, and when they do you just take care of it. But this time is different. You begrudgingly put on your coat and boots, and grab your rope, and stomp out the door, muttering obscenities about the cows, the drivers, the weather, and anything else that comes to your awareness.

Notice that how a message is presented invites a different response in you. When the message is responsible and clear, you might not like the content but you accept the facts and move on fairly quickly. When the message is loaded with drama and blame, you must first confront your own internal reactions before you can begin to think about a useful course of action, action that is still fraught with ambivalence and internal conflict. You might be rounding up the cows in scenario two, but what you really want to be doing is throttling the neighbor.

If you are sentenced to home confinement because “all the cows got out,” the natural inclination is to seek more information. You might be watching 24-hour news, or flipping through several different news channels. You are checking all your social websites for word-of-mouth information. Or perhaps you are just leaving the news playing in the background while you clean house or rearrange your furniture.

The news industry, you must realize, is calculated in how they deliver the message. They do not want you to get the facts and go calmly about your life. The news industry wants to create greater dependency so you keep coming back. Their “body count” is one way they are doing it right now. It is much more dramatic to cite the number of dead bodies, “140 people have died in Colorado,” than it is to put it in perspective, “3% of those who tested positive in Colorado.”

We do not mean to be callous to the danger involved in this virus. We do however, believe that how it is presented has a huge effect on the general well-being of everyone. And how it is being presented is clearly an effort to fan the flames of fear, rather than offering clear, concise and helpful information relevant to a situation we must face. A 3% death rate from a virus does not even come close to the normal death rate we encounter every year from whatever flu virus is predominant. So they report their body count in the most sensational way possible. Or as they have always said in the news industry, “If it bleeds, it leads!”

They know that stirring human emotions through the delivery of information is addictive. Sensationalism sells. Like a good Saturday morning serial (it’s a thing from the early days of film and TV), they first sound the alarm and then tell you to come back to hear the resolution. “Come back next week, same place, same time, and find out if Molly escapes being run over by the train!” The tease continues with each new presentation.

The masters of the tease, the 24-hour news services, have created a way to alarm and tease at the same time. It’s all done through sensationalizing otherwise mundane information. If the information is particularly threatening, like a rapidly spreading virus, the news industry will maximize the sensationalism to take advantage of emotional confusion already in play. Governments know that news services operate through sensationalism, and will take full advantage. They refer to it as the “news cycle.” They play the news cycle for their own purposes, which are often covert and self-serving.

During this coronavirus pandemic nearly everyone is ripe for this sucker tease. We hunger for information. We can only hope the information is reliable. We believe that the more information we gather the better equipped we are to average out the disparate statistics and prescriptions we hear. We avail ourselves to the constant information feed, and consequently the inherent tease.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to know more, especially about something that presents us with an imminent threat to health. But continuously subjecting yourself to the news services certainly does not help you to retain your inner calm.

The more you subject yourself to the sensationalism of this drama, the more you end up in scenario two, above. You feel a myriad of emotions, all of them swirling into a tarpit of confusion and ambivalence. In this immobile state of confusion, you become even more dependent on the flow of partial information. It is a true addiction. You need more and more, all the while falling deeper into a state of powerlessness and paralysis.

The first step to regaining any sense of personal power is to break the addiction. Turn off the TV, the computer, and your smartphone. Or at least severely restrict your screen time to one short period a day, like a half-hour newscast. Immersion in the flood of information is the root of your paralysis. If you want to free yourself, if you want to reclaim your inner calm, you must stop imbibing.

We all enjoy a well-spun tale. We like to have our emotions momentarily manipulated when it occurs in a safe environment that allows us to suspend disbelief. But when drama invites us away from the state of being where we are most capable of making wise choices, our inner calm, we must first eliminate the drama. Otherwise, everything feels confusing, frightening and as though it is an emergency. Wouldn’t you rather just go about the business of rounding up the cows calmly and deliberately?