Good news..

No, this is not about GEICO. A Recent exchange among friends:

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person A

These days, almost all headlines are tragic.. I wonder if we are
getting numbed by only negativity..

Right now, my headlines read
- At least 100 feared dead in N. Korea floods
- Israeli pounding continues
- ~400 dead in Indonesian Tsunami
- Iraq civilian toll at ~6000 in May and June alone
- Bombay pauses to remember train bombings
- Soldiers reclaim Afghan town from Taliban..

this is just way too depressing for anyone who thinks they can make a
change in this world.. they can better people's lives..

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person B

It's just that we hear about these things now. If you were there in the middle
ages, what about "Thousands more die from bubonic plague", or during the
tsunami over a hundred years ago, "Starvation plagues thousands stranded after
tsunami". Or, three hundred years ago, "Hundreds of African slaves feared dead in
trans-Atlantic voyage."

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Person C

Further support for B's point. We are almost never told about this in schools

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Person D

Echoing B, this just seems like the cost of getting global news and of being able to learn more** .

For people who have concern for others, this is definitely depressing. I find on forums here and there (esp. liberal ones like Salon) people who are clinically depressed from bad news.

Here's a tangent -

Other types of people find TV etc. depressing for other reasons. Body image is an example. Everyone on TV seems so beautiful that for a person who spends most of his/her time indoors it would seem that he/she is the only one who isn't gorgoeus. Similarly for the super-thin body ideal.

A lot of incredible "winners" on TV - the sort of person that you might meet once or twice in a lifetime - we see them everyday. Of course, this comes with an overdose of "losers" like criminals as well. So, it might not be that the media has an obsession with bad news. It's could be just that it's the the ordinary that's routinely censored. Incredibly tall , short people. Fast speakers, charmers, excellent sports stars, great scientists, super wise people and Jerry Springers, tiniest dog in the world, largest dog in the world, everyone seems to have a place in the media.

On the good side, we get entertained like never before and can see the most splendid places and events from around the world - the kind that we might see only once in a lifetime otherwise.

**(Learning seems to always lead to misery :-) as in Voltaire's story that C sent us - The story of the good Brahmin)

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Person E

I agree with everyone that there is selective amplification. There were two kinds of tragic headlines in the list that A sent us - one contained natural disasters and the other kind was related to war. And I am sure the effects of war were much worse in the past than they are now. In spite of factoring in the fact that we are getting to know about more events, it is still depressing to see war leading to death and misery. Humans cause it, so one would expect them to develop a better system for resolving matters.

[The emphasis is mine]