An economic reality is that without reliable viewership, the professional media would cease to exist. In this sense, the media's job is to sell a “news product,” and so they implicitly cannot be trusted to communicate hope, and there's a biological reason for this. The reason is that the nervous system's fight-flight response is hardwired to respond rapidly to fear of threat, and so the news is biologically weighted to favor fear, for fear reliably keeps people's attention to the “news product.” It is an unnoticed biological fact, but the news survives on a chemical dependence on adrenaline.
Hopeful news doesn't retain viewership steadily or reliably, and that is largely because the parasympathetic “rest/digest” nervous system response is slower to respond than the sympathetic “fight/flight/freeze” nervous system response. If the media relied on the slower parasympathetic nervous system response, time would run out and no one would wait around long enough to maintain the news company’s necessary viewership. Therefore, as long as one listens to the news, for that long one will be exposed to their consistent intention to rapidly stimulate fear’s fight/flight danger response in order to chemically hook that person on their product.
That being said, news agencies must use facts, but it must also be understood that facts are only necessary as tools that the media must use in order to frame fear stories, i.e. in order to stimulate the fear response. If the stories were not rooted in facts, the fight-flight response would not be reliably activated. Thus, in order to survive, the news maintains a reliance on fact as a vector, or carrier, of fear. Of course, anger may also be elicited, and this is often used in order to stimulate loyalty to the news product, that of joining together in defense against an enemy. This is why the media typically aligns with either one political party or another, for the sake of consistency of fight/flight response. If they kept changing “sides” in a metanarrative then they would confuse their audience and interrupt the activation of the body’s fight/flight response. That kind of confusion does not sell a news product. Confusion only maintains viewership when it can be associated with threat and so used to stimulate fear.
Patrick Henry once said, "Fear is the passion of slaves." In light of the above, it is clear how biology plays into such a passion, and why the media would use fear to bind its audience into an indefinite, quasi-loyal viewership. The news survives on producing a chemical dependency in their audience. The fight/flight/freeze sympathetic nervous system response is the body’s rapid attention-grabbing defense and survival mechanism that floods the body with adrenaline. Alternatively, good news and happy stories do not equally arrest the attention, and stimulate a much slower parasympathetic nervous system response of rest/digest/enjoy. This is the biological grounding of the media’s motivations. The news will therefore predominantly and exhaustively occupy itself with stories of fear and threat, and so in order to protect oneself, one must be attentive to this phenomenon, limit exposure to it, and take any necessary precautions to mitigate its influence on the soul, for God does not want us to live in slavery to fear:
For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, "Abba! Father!" (Romans 8:15)
-Fr. Joshua Schooping
1 comment:
Excellent analysis . Thank you. The economic incentive is to keep people in a constant state of anxiety, if not outright fear, and as you point out to create an addictive dependency . This is a difficult point to get across because you'll be accused of trying to "downplay" the seriousness of something like the spread of a dread disease
Post a Comment