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Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Feeling Stressed??????

In addition to the normal stress we encounter daily we have the on going news soap opera events. I recall when I was young we could go to a movie on Saturday mornings for 10 cents admission. They would have a brief serial before the main attraction that always ended with the star in peril to get you to anticipate the next segment next Saturday. It seems to me that today we have the same technique from the various news sources which we get 24/7.

With social media and smart phones, Twitter, Face Book, and other social media venues we get bombarded with news and the vast majority is biased and misleading or outright distortion - no exceptions regarding the source. I'm sure there will be disagreement on the news sources but I have tried to analyse each of them objectively so feel free to defend your news source.

We listen to it on our radios as we sit in traffic, get automatic notifications on our smart phones, get news alerts on our computers and it is 24/7 on television. I don't see much difference between what we are bombarded with from the talking heads and news venues and the old serial episodes at the movies. It is all designed to get us to be vicariously involved in what the latest ridiculous scandal might be or some other headline breaking event that is really not a headline at all. I have ceased calling it entertainment because it fails there also.

We never as citizens trusted the media but now days they make no pretense about how and who they are. As we go about our daily lives and the stress builds from normal events we have the added influence of the news media telling or rather brainwashing us to believe what "they" want us to believe. It is no longer reporting the news but now it is analyzing every event from a very biased viewpoint. We are left to decide based on what others tell us and not the facts.

And we wonder why we are always stressed over matters that actually don't concern us in the first place. We used to have sports as conversation points but now even sports have gone political. I know people who when they are home have Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN on all day long and when they are away they have apps to notify them of what is happening on their cell phones. And we wonder why our country is so divided.

Whether you like President Trump or not he deserves credit for bringing the true virtue or lack there of regarding the news to the forefront. As for me I plan to have news time reduced to a very minimum. No need to add stress to myself and there is nothing I can do about all these "breaking news" stories anyway....

So if you seem especially stressed maybe it is because of all the propaganda you are being fed on a constant basis. 

2 comments:

Bea said...

I could not agree more, even as a Canadian.
Luckily WE have no TV, stopped having one 10 years ago and never missed all that crap. Radio is mostly on the French channel, they have lots of nice music at times and I don't understand the babble when they talk. When I need news I go to all kind of news channels online, also abroad ones, to get a broader picture.
News has become a tool to make money and to bend people to your will. One has to be careful what to believe nowadays.

CAPEMAN1 said...

Bruce,love your cabin and your blog...you are so right about the media.
hope all is well,Merry Christmas and have a happy 2018
Bruce from Cape Cod MA