Discriminating between bad and good news is a must for sanity

You turn on the evening news and hear it every day. Bad news again. Nineteen killed in a bus accident in Bangladesh. Shootout in Detroit leaves three dead, nine wounded. Tornado flattens church in Kansas.

Or take these real-life examples of “news” briefs that recently ran in the local dailies:
“Police detain suspect in dog beheading—(Minneapolis) A man suspected of cutting the head off a teenage girl’s dog and leaving it at her front door in a gift-wrapped box was in jail Friday on suspicion of terrorist threats. The 24-year-old man, who was not immediately charged, used to date Crystal Brown, the girl’s grandmother said.”

And:
“Teen found dead in school bathroom—(Hyrum, Utah) A 14-year-old girl who had talked about suicide died in a hospital a day after hanging herself in a school bathroom, school officials said. A classmate had found Kailey Mathews unconscious Wednesday in the bathroom at South Cache 8-9 Center.”

Isn’t news supposed to inform you of things that may affect you? How does either of these items affect anyone in the Lehigh Valley, excepting the vague possibility that the alleged animal abuser, Crystal Brown or the poor suicidal teen is related to someone in Pennsylvania? And if that is the case, how does putting either of these items in the paper inform anyone of anything they need to know?

Are we supposed to feel relieved that our dogs are safe from some twisted maniac in Minneapolis? Was he headed east? And maybe I’m incredibly unhip, but who is Crystal Brown, and why should I care who she is? A Google search turned up very little on her. Apparently she is a poet, but having a dog that was a murder victim recently is probably her bigger claim to fame at this point, which is pretty sick. Not quite as sick as a person who would behead a dog, but still pretty sad commentary.

The second “news” item is just worthless, in my opinion. Reporting something like that so far away serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever, unless there was some mitigating information that makes it locally newsworthy, such as a sudden nationwide rash of teenagers with an urge towards suicide in school bathrooms. There is nothing anyone in the Lehigh Valley is going to do about this particular sad incident—it only serves to depress and to distract one from more relevant issues.

That is a big problem with some “news” these days.

There seems to be more and more of a trend towards what I call “non-news.” These are items that have absolutely no chance of having any bearing on your life, yet are played continually on the mainstream news scene. When it came to be that an entire industry seemingly got together in some big conspiracy to waste newsprint, ink and airtime, I’m not sure, since they didn’t send me that memo, but it does seem to have come to pass.

The worst of “non-news” items are the negative briefs. Too short to actually flesh out the story with any useful information that would allow the reader to make sense of whatever issue is at hand, they basically drop a bombshell and move on to the next “story,” inevitably leaving the reader feel both unsatisfied and uneasy.

It also wastes the reader’s time. Why bother reading about something that has no bearing on one’s life, that one can do nothing about, that only serves to depress? Most people wouldn’t, but most “non-news,” especially the kind that comes in brief, sneaks up on the reader—by the time one realizes one doesn’t care about the piece, that one would really rather move on to something else, something more worthwhile—it’s over.

There are several nasty effects of this. This first is that the reader begins to approach news with some caution and trepidation. Is this news worth it, or is it just going to depress for no apparent reason?

When people tell me they’re “not into” following the news, I often suspect this is the reason—they’ve been stung by irrelevant, bad “non-news” so often they are numb to the difference and just shy away from the entire arena out of fear of getting depressed about something they can do nothing about.

That is the biggest danger of bad “non-news.” It’s disempowering, and being swamped with it day in and day out is even more disempowering. Being showered with negative information one can do nothing to change eventually gives one the impression that one can do nothing about anything negative, regardless of where the problem originates.

“Non-news” is also a bit confusing. In this Information Age, we’re literally flooded with information at a rate never before seen. More may be defined as better, but is it really better if the more isn’t quality stuff? There may be an endless stream of information, but there’s still only so much time in which to absorb it.

The “news” these days requires the a new set of hyper-developed skills in order to filter the “good” news, the kind with useful information, from the “bad,” or useless, kind of non-news, in order to keep oneself from drowning rather than surfing in the “news” world.

(Originally published in The Easton News, April 5, 2007)