NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS?

I thought about this old saying recently in light of recent events that have caused a lot of people to feel anxious when watching or listening to the news.  I try to help people who come to me to let go of their worries about things that they hear on the news and often will suggest that they not watch or listen to news, especially news on TV.  I have previously blogged about this and freely confess that I am biased when it comes to this as I have not watched TV news since three-forths of the way through the Vietnam War [about 1970].  I stopped watching because I had friends who had been drafted and were fighting in the war and I did not want to see news about their being wounded or killed.  I had a deferment because of medical school and yet I felt guilty that my friends had to fight in the war or leave the country [I had a friend make this choice].

After the war, I decided to continue not watching the TV news as it was frequently focused on violence and negative things that were stressful to watch and listen to and I did not think I gained anything from watching and listening to it.  It did not seem to directly motivate me to do something about what I was witnessing on the news and would instead lead me to feel stressed and then be less able to do something to counteract what appeared to be happening.  It was not as if the negative news was balanced with positive news.  Even if it were, I believe that the negative news would have more influence over me than the positive. I have joked with people that I don't know what country I live in or which state, etc. Of course that is not true. I get my news from radio [unless it is a negative focus or is describing violence] and print sources that includes reading news on the internet.  However, I avoid looking at photos depicting violence, etc.

Avoiding TV news and references to violence would be difficult for a lot of people. Since watching the TV news makes a lot of people anxious and feel stressed and pessimistic about the future, why do they watch it?  I had several people who watched the air planes flying into the Twin Towers in New York City thousands of times. They couldn 't stop themselves.  It seemed to represent a hope that the next time they watched it they would find out it wasn't real after all.  Maybe the same desire keeps many people watching TV news in hopes that it will also turn out to not be real. Well, that puts control over stress in our lives directly in the hands of those who control the news that is shown.  

I encourage people to take back control of their lives and the stressful events that they expose themselves to. To me this means no TV news and no violent shows and no overwhelmingly painful commercials about dogs and cats being mistreated or children suffering from cancer.  It is vey hard to erase those sad faces from our brains and yet having them there does not help those animals or those children.  It can keep us from being more active helping those in need as we are preoccupied coping with the stress of remembering these events and the hopelessness that often comes with it.

So, no news is good news!