Restoring Faith in Humanity

The World Is Not Falling Apart: A PSA From Your Friendly Neighbourhood Reporter

by Al D.

Sometimes people tell me they don’t read the news. “It’s too much,” they say. “Too dark, too heavy.” I can’t blame them. I don’t ride rollercoasters, I don’t eat durian, I don’t talk to certain family members. Why voluntarily feel like shit? We’re hard-wired to avoid discomfort, so why read the news when all it will do is hurt you?

Here’s the thing: if all you’re seeing is terrible news, it’s not because that’s all that exists. What you’re seeing is terrible curation. 

Social media is the people’s leading  source for news today, greatly overtaking traditional mediums like print newspapers or broadcasters. In many ways this is a good thing. The feeds democratize information, bringing credence to activists at protests and the unfairly persecuted. People can document injustice to audiences previously unheard of. Movements like Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, the Sudanese revolution, and most recently the Hong Kong protests all rose to prominence thanks to platforms where anyone could share anything. 

But the way these feeds bring you news is reliant on algorithms that don’t know how you feel and what you need. They’ll show you several tweets that make your stomach lurch and 20 articles that promise death and of course you’ll read the comments. You always read the comments. 

These algorithms won’t show you our 9-5s and that’s a damn shame. Because when the feeds get too toxic, the antidote isn’t less news. It’s more news. 

Listen, journalists are living, breathing people who love other people. We eat at restaurants and argue with our parents and get married and bury our family pets. We drink too much coffee and badly need therapy and share dumb memes in group chats. We take nudes and believe in astrology and get pretty bad tattoos. We have kids and get institutionalized and love Carly Rae Jepsen and get manicures with our friends. We get high and we sober up and we go to meetings. We live in condos and suburbs and apartments and sometimes nowhere at all. 

We see all the sad statistics and the family tragedies and the brutal regimes and the systemic failings. We see all that and we react just like you do: maybe horror, numbness, anger, maybe nothing at all. And then we report on it because it speaks to what’s happening in the world right now and god, wouldn’t it be awful if no one knew? We speak to the affected and we agitate the right people and we put it to press and we pray to fuck that something changes.

So yeah, we know how terrible this barrage is. Trust. And that’s why you get Baby Yoda meme compilations.