News Irradiation
Watching the news can be anxiety inducing. "Focus on what you can control." That seems to be a common response. When you feel like there's too much in your head, or you're worried about things that are bigger than you, just put it to the side and focus on what you can control. It gives you agency, pushes you into action, and distracts you. It might even give you permission to not care. For the last nine years that's pretty much how I treated the news. In 2025 that feels lacking.
What if that thing you're worried about is in your control? How do you define something as being in your control? How much action can you take toward an initiative for something to count as being in your control? Where is the room for contribution, where the expectation is not in you individually achieving something, but rather in you joining others to push something across the finish line? What about the times when a situation demands more from you than what you can control - that you have to act despite the odds being stacked against you?
Yes, we focus on what we can control to get us on a more productive path, but sometimes we also use it as an excuse to dismiss news that we shouldn't. Because something is not in our control, we tell ourselves that it doesn't matter for us to know or care about the issue, and wash our hands of it. We relegate certain topics to be leagues beyond us. We buy into the impossibility of affecting change.
With how uncomfortable it is to watch the news, can you blame us?
In 2023, Wendover Productions crystallized one of the well known attributes about the news today. It is awfully negative, isn't it? While making an evolutionary argument for how our brains are wired, the central idea comes down to the fact that focusing on the negative protects us. When there was danger in the wild, we needed to be able to assess the threat. If you did not respond quickly enough, you died. Send that fight or flight response into the 21st century, first-world lifestyle where comfort abounds, and now you are worried about anything that could end that comfort despite the lack of danger. Even in cases that don't involve you, your brain will be drawn to the potential threat of something unrelated over positive news that could benefit you.
It's not just that there is more negative news that is highlighted. I would go a step further and say that there is more bad news highlighted than we can reasonably do anything about. Flip the TV to your local news channel and you might learn about a flood warning, the suffocating housing market, a murder that happened one county over, and a local political scandal. Then you start the work day. What are you supposed to do with that? All of that negativity is poured into your brain and it has no outlet or resolution. It just sits and festers in you.
Add to that the way that ideas evolve over time. In 2015, after our first decade with social media, CGP Grey made a video on how thought germs develop. Today, the idea of memes is more constrained, but it was a term originally coined by Richard Dawkins to describe how ideas evolve. Per the video, a funny cat meme will permutate as it gets shared, becoming a version that is so funny it gets shared everywhere. Similarly, bad news will become the worst news in the world as it gets shared because that makes it more shareable. All of the detail and nuance of a news story will be reduced to a negative headline that somehow indicates danger or disgust to us. Then that idea runs against a competing idea with its own tribe. Before you know it, you have bad news brewing factions to fight online and in person across all areas of life. It's hard to escape the 'hyper polarization' as we call it today.
A third dimension to consider: bias. There are probably books written all about bias in the media, but I want to boil it down to two main biases. There's the unintentional bias we have as viewers and the intentional bias that media outlets may have.
As consumers, we have our own beliefs, preferences, and limited knowledge we bring to any piece of news. Our interpretation of the events are colored by our perspective. Yes, you can work toward having an objective sense of what is happening in a given story, but that takes effort and awareness. Instead of doing research into why something is happening in politics, with all of the appropriate context, getting multiple viewpoints, and correctly weighing which views are more valid, it's easier to just emotionally interpret the news and move on. Bad headline confirms my belief that the other tribe is my enemy, or that they're stupid, or that they're trying to hurt me. That's that. This is the path of least resistance. With all the busyness of every day life, how can you blame someone for not doing research on every bit of news they hear? Without proper education on critical thinking or media literacy, how can we expect folks to handle all of this information? How can we expect anything other than the unintentionally biased passing glances we can afford?
Then there's the bias in the media. I will not say that all media is biased liberal media that is full of liars. That is a common conservative complaint that is not true. There are reasonable, opinionated and unopinionated sources of news that you can rely on for information. However, there are tremendously biased outlets out there as well - outlets that lean so far into their bias that I don't know if it's intentional or a byproduct of everyone's unintentional bias within the organization. Probably a bit of both. Fox News and MSNBC will always put a spin on the news for the right or the left. 24 hour news channels turn the same news over again and again hoping to engage you one way or another. The influencer landscape will feast on news like vampires, giving viewers a reduced and potentially spun interpretation of events before you've even heard the details for yourself. Lots of opinions to be shared while they leave more and more facts behind in there reporting. While some folks are trying to be intentional in how they consume news, others are working against them.
What effect does this have on people? We're talking about media that you are wired to perceive negatively, is coming in such high volume, will contain ideas that make you angrier, by some media outlets or influencers who want you angrier, all while you're trying to live your life without any training for how to deal with this.
This is why I refer to news as irradiating. It's like handling plutonium. News is radioactive, and if you grab it you are going to get cancer. If news is not treated with care, it will hurt you. The longer you are exposed to it the longer it will hurt you. News is unfortunately dangerous for your mental health.
When I think about what is happening in America in 2025, I feel compelled to act. In order to act, I need to be informed. Out of all the things that get in my way, it's deeply unfortunate that I have to also battle with a mentally radioactive substance in order to fight battles. It's fighting a battle before you even get to the real challenge. While I can't be hard on people for not wanting to wade in the muck in order to do something, I also think that correctly identifying what news is will help in learning how to handle it. News may be radioactive, but if you handle it appropriately you can hopefully make a difference.