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News is a money-making industry. One that doesn't always make the goal to report the facts accurately. Gone are the days of tuning in to be informed straightforwardly about local and national issues. In truth, watching the news can be a psychologically risky pursuit, which could undermine your mental and physical health.
Fear-based news stories prey on the anxieties we all have and then hold us hostage. Being glued to the television, reading the paper, or surfing the Internet increases ratings and market shares — but it also raises the probability of depression relapse.
In previous decades, the journalistic mission was to report the news as it actually happened, with fairness, balance, and integrity. However, capitalistic motives associated with journalism have forced much of today's television news to look to the spectacular, the stirring, and the controversial as news stories. It's no longer a race to break the story first or get the facts right. Instead, it's to acquire good ratings in order to get advertisers, so that profits soar.
News programming uses a hierarchy of if it bleeds, it leads. Fear-based news programming has two aims. The first is to grab the viewer's attention. In the news media, this is called the teaser. The second aim is to persuade the viewer that the solution for reducing the identified fear will be in the news story. If a teaser asks, "What's in your tap water that YOU need to know about?" a viewer will likely tune in to get the up-to-date information to ensure safety.
The success of fear-based news relies on presenting dramatic anecdotes in place of scientific evidence, promoting isolated events as trends, depicting categories of people as dangerous and replacing optimism with fatalistic thinking. News conglomerates who want to achieve this use media logic, by tweaking the rhythm, grammar, and presentation format of news stories to elicit the greatest impact. Did you know that some news stations work with consultants who offer fear-based topics that are pre-scripted, outlined with point-of-view shots, and have experts at-the-ready? This practice is known as stunting or just-add-water reporting. Often, these practices present misleading information and promote anxiety in the viewer.
Another pattern in newscasts is that the breaking news story doesn't go beyond a surface level. The need to get-the-story-to-get-the-ratings often causes reporters to bypass thorough fact-checking. As the first story develops to a second level in later reports, the reporter corrects the inaccuracies and missing elements. As the process of fact-finding continually changes, so does the news story. What journalists first reported with intense emotion or sensationalism is no longer accurate. What occurs psychologically for the viewer is a fragmented sense of knowing what's real, which sets off feelings of hopelessness and helplessness — experiences known to worsen depression.
An additional practice that heightens anxiety and depression is the news station's use of the crawl, the scrolling headline ticker that appears at the bottom of the television, communicating "breaking news." Individuals who watch news-based programming are likely to see one, two, or even three crawls scroll across the screen. The multitasking required to read the crawls and comprehend the actual newscast comes easy to some viewers, whereas others report feeling over-stimulated.
One could easily change the channel to interrupt the transmission of such information. However, crawls are not relegated to just news channels. Unlike the viewing experience of the past, crawls are now more prominent during entertainment programs and often serve as commercials for nightly newscasts or the upcoming weekly news magazine show. The crawls frequently contain fear-driven material, broad-siding an unsuspecting viewer.
It's been said that fear-based media has become a staple of popular culture. The distressing fall-out from this trend is that children and adults who are exposed to media are more likely than others to
- Feel that their neighborhoods and communities are unsafe
- Believe that crime rates are rising
- Overestimate their odds of becoming a victim
- Consider the world to be a dangerous place
News media needs to return to a sense of proportion, conscience, and, most important, truth-telling. Until that happens, help inoculate yourself against feeling overwhelmed by doing the following:
- Consider limiting your exposure to media. Give yourself a set time once or twice a day to check in on local and global happenings.
- Consider choosing print media for your information gathering rather than visual media. This can reduce the likelihood that you get exposed to emotionally laden material. Home pages on the internet can give you an overall sense of what's going on, as can headline news channels that update stories on the hour.
- Remember that you have the power to turn off the remote, leave a website, or change the radio station. Don't let yourself be passive when you feel media is overwhelming you.
- Know that other people will have a different tolerance for media stories and their details. If someone is expressing too much of a story for your own comfort, walk away or communicate your distress.
- Consider having an electronic-free day, and let your senses take in the simpler things in life.
References
Altheide, D. (2002). Creating fear: News and the construction of crisis. New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Gerbner, G., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1999). Profiling television violence. In K. Nordenstreng & M. Griffin (Eds.), International media monitoring (pp. 335-365). Hillsdale, NJ: Hampton Press.
Glassner, B. (1999). The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things. New York: Basic Books.
Kovach, B., & Rosenthal, T. (2001). The elements of journalism: What news-people should know and the public should expect. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Serani, D. (2008). If it bleeds, it leads. The clinical implications of fear-based programming in news media. Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, 24(4), 240-250.
