Think about your exposure to the news of the day. Some still get it from newspapers, TV, and radio news on the hour. But more and more people now are getting their news filtered, through podcasts, radio talk shows, phone apps, social media feeds, and websites friendly to their point of view. When your news comes through these sources, it feels a lot less lonely and a lot more lively as it keeps you informed. That’s what they are doing FOR you, but do you know what they are doing TO you?
Just as with the food and medicine we take in, we need to examine the nutritional value and side effects of the news we get. To live the good life, we have to set healthy boundaries for ourselves, to guide what news we put into ourselves. So what kinds of filters do you use for the news?
Nutritional value: we all need to take in enough news to understand what is happening, but that doesn’t feed our deeper longings. We also need to know why, who it’s going to help or hurt, and maybe even what we can do to improve the world, or at least our part of it. If it moves us to connect with others we can share or respond with, that is even healthier.
One major challenge is how to identify the accuracy of the news being reported. Toward this end, we all need to know how to use the website, www.allsides.com. From the MEDIA BIAS tab on the home page, you can get the degree and direction of filtering slant to the left or the right for virtually any news source, regional/ national/world, or radio/TV/ newspaper/ blog or website. From other tabs, you can type in a news topic and get a sampling of news or opinions from the left, right, or center. You can get fresh news reports from current events from left, right, or balanced sources. Everyone asks if AllSides is biased, and at first, I suspected they were. When I looked into how their ratings are made, I could see they were unbiased, as they are carefully cross-checked from many different sources. They look at where revenues come from, at ratings submitted by the public, and ratings submitted by professional journalists from “all sides”, which they publish. I also wondered of course where their money comes from, to AllSides. I found it comes in the same way as their ratings: many different cross-balanced sources. It made me want to take their test and find out how biased I was, which I did. That was a bit painful, which is a good sign that it carried truth.
From going there, I have learned to read news as they give it, presenting the news and opinions from all sides at once on one page. I’ve also learned to get my news reviewed every week for lies, at the unbiased source www.factchecker.org. Their weekly email summary gives the veracity of not only public statements from political candidates and leaders, but the most widely circulated and disputed new “facts” from social media and news outlets.
I like to get my news from sources they rate as neutral: The Week, USA Today, NPR, PBS News, and the Wall Street Journal. I avoid far left and right news sources like MSNBC, HuffPost, and Breitbart, and the clearly slanted opinion feeds. Some of these strongly slanted opinions come from news sources that are only mildly biased, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Fox News.
Toxic side effects. Producers of news reports know how to hook us with excitement. They design their news reports to titillate us, arousing our pleasures and desires. Some of the desire and pleasure is innocent enough, like humor and gratitude, which flavor a little bit of the news. That’s good.
But to protect ourselves from psychological infection, we all need to ask ourselves with each news story we take in: What is this arousing in me? What will this do for my confidence and contentment, for my blood pressure? Can my serenity and healthy relationships handle all the raw horror, fear, anger, hate, and entitlement I am absorbing?
The news that doesn’t arouse laughter or gratitude usually arouses an attitude of arrogance: “I’m better than these other people. We should just rid of the bad guys, the low-lifes, the fat cats, the foreign element, the criminals, the politicians, and we’d be fine.” We like to think nothing is wrong with us. Compared to the villains on the news, we feel like innocent victims. To avoid this self-deceit, a good boundary is to realize that under their circumstances of genetics, childhood trauma and neglect, poverty, and poor role models, education and peers, we might have done the same as the worst of the newsmakers. Without this, we run the risk of getting our vain virtues all vexed by their villainous vices.
In addition to arrogance, beware if your news provokes hatred, envy, resentment, greed, laziness, lust, gluttony, or fear. (If the news you’re taking in doesn’t incite enough of this for you, the advertising that pays for it will give you some more.) These attitudes breed habits that are bad for our bodies, our bank accounts, and our relationships. So you may want to consider limiting or filtering out news that turns on these unhealthy attitudes.
To experience faith (confidence and peace) over fear (worry and stress), one helpful boundary to use is “so what?” When you ask “what if” you experience a tornado, earthquake, war, disease, burglar, rapist, or something tragic happen to a loved one, you can ask yourself, “So what if . . .?”, and start imagining and praying for something good that could come out of such a tragedy. For extra peace of mind, imagine how you could help to create that silver lining.
Why is it so hard to get the news and its implications given in a calm, factual, and unbiased way? There’s no money in it, because we are now in a time the Bible described this way:
“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth, and turn aside to myths.” 2 Tim 4: 3-4, NIV
In short, take care what goes into your three news gates: your eye-gate (the screens on your phone, TV, computer), your ear-gate (podcasts, radio, and hearsay), and your thought-gate. That last gate is where you let people teach you what the news means, whether you’re going to worry about it, or how you can bring something good out of it. That makes all the difference.
Dr. Paul Schmidt is a licensed psychologist in Louisville (502) 633-2860; visit him at www.mynewlife.com.w
Dr. Paul Schmidt is a psychologist life coach you can reach at [email protected], (502) 633-2860.