This view assumes that news that cultivates conflict and dwells on catastrophe is the natural way of things. Every news source chooses what to cover, and most o

This view assumes that news that cultivates conflict and dwells on catastrophe is the natural way of things. Every news source chooses what to cover, and most of them currently choose in a manner to maximize viewership. It's important to know that bad things are happening in the world, but there's a big difference between hearing that a number of murders happened and reading an hour long story about each individual murder. Whenever we stay with the in-laws and watch a lot of local news, I am always blown away both by how negative it is, and how uninformative it is. I think we could replace a lot of news with news from 10 years ago and no one would ever know the difference because almost none of the news affects them personally, but they carry around anxiety with them constantly because they learned implicitly from the news that the world is a scary place. That seems at least as much like propaganda as this.