Published on 12, July, 2020
Since the Palestine/Israel conflict began, I've stopped reading the news (I don't watch TV or listen to the radio, anyway).
This is to protect my mental health as my responses to the various conflicts in the world tend to either be anger or distress.
I've never done this before but for several decades of my life news wasn't so readily available.
The internet changed all that.
I don't know how long I will be able to isolate myself in this way, but I had become rather addicted to the BBC news website, constantly updating it to see the latest.
Does this resonate with anyone?
The world is a difficult/horrendous place for lots of people - we don't need to be constantly reminded of this. The news outllets choose what information to give us. We are by being constantly frightened at every turn by things which we have no control over and it's getting worse as we are getting more and more desensitised to what is given to us. In my mind, we are fed things based on some sort of priority but I won't go into further on an open page. Our brains are not equipped for so much emotional information. We can choose what to engage with and in not consuming the news I think if there's anything that we REALLY need to know, we would find out anyway. There was something recently which was a complete non-story that my local news website had rolling coverage of. A lot of local news isn't even news but clickbait. A lot of the media is stirring things up so "we" click on it, get outraged, share it on social media, get even more outraged and divided then it becomes forgotten about to be replaced by something else. So "we" are constantly in a cycle. And that one off Ch5 and BBC Radio2 is the worst!
Russell Howard sums it up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U26-D-7Ey2w
And the other thing I have a problem with is for the past 20 years it's been acceptable for politicians to become celebrities on TV shows. This sort of thing should be BANNED.