Keeping Up With The News And Not Loose Your Mind

With more than 70,000 newspapers and over 500 satellite channels in several languages, Indians are seemingly spoilt for choice and diversity. But the fact remains, that most of the channel owners have not come to the space to serve the people but to protect their business interests as well as to make more money through paid news, ad revenue which can results in skewed reporting 

India is already the biggest newspaper market in the world - over 100 million copies sold each day. Advertising revenues have soared. In the past two decades, the number of channels has grown from one - the dowdy state-owned broadcaster Doordarshan - to more than 500, of which more than 80 are news channels.

You might remember that 71-page Press Council investigation named many leading newspapers received money for publishing information disguised as news in favor of individuals, including senior politicians. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, an independent journalist who was one of the investigators, says a lobby of big publishers pushed the Press Council to water down the report. 

In such a  situation, sometime as an alert citizen you feel deceived and cheated, you suddenly feel your blood pressure is boiling up. Now you ask what to do.  

Remember how you react to the news is not just about what the news is, but how you get it. The internet and breaking news channels report news in ways that make us feel disoriented. It is easy to believe things are getting worse, when they might just make us feel worse. The medium is not just the message, it is the emotional intensity of that message.

Limit the amount of times you look at the news. As one of my Facebook  friend recently commented ,' Remember that in 1975, we typically got our news twice a day : morning paper and Samachar at Doordarshan . And we still got rid of Smt Indira Gandhi.'

Realize the world is not as violent as it is made us to believe. Better way if to travel as much as possible and interact with the local people. This will help you to understand the ground situation.  Many writers on this subject-such as the famed cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has pointed out that inspite of all its horrors, society is less violent than it used to be.  Modern  day historian Yuval Noah Harari says,'There is definitely still violence. I live in the Middle East so I know this perfectly well. But comparatively there is less violence than ever before in history.Today more people die from eating too much than from human violence, which is really an amazing achievement.'

If you feel angry seeing the baised reporting on TV, try to be close to animals. They are therapeutic for all your emotional disorders. One reason is that they do not have news ! Dogs, cats, antelopes and goldfish literally do not care. The things  that are important to us-politics and economics and all of those fluctuating things-are not important to them. And their lives, like ours, still go on. A A Milne very aptly wrote in Winnie-the-Pooh :'Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That is the problem.'

Do not worry about things you can not control. The news is full of things you can not do anything about. Do the things you can do stuff about-raise awareness of issues that concern you, give whatever you can to whichever cause you feel passionate about, and also accept the things you can not do. 

Remember, looking at bad news does not mean good news is not happening. It is happening everywhere. It is happening right now. Around the world, in hospitals at weddings, in schools and offices and maternity wards, at airport arrival gates, in bedrooms, in inboxes, out in the street, in the kind smile of a stranger. A billion unseen wonders of everyday life.