When I was a child, adulthood was defined for me as tall people who went to work (or in the case of my mother, cleaned and cooked and worked at home), did the shopping, and watched the news and weather for half an hour every evening. Consequently, as an adult, ingrained in my mind is that watching the news and being well informed about current events is expected, essential, and responsible.
Except. When Walter Cronkite was talking to America, citizens trusted that what he was saying was fact without too much of his own opinion mixed in (usually). Responsible citizens read the opinion pages to get someone else’s point of view while they trusted the rest of the paper or news anchors to give them some facsimile of unbiased news. Then, when the news was over or the paper read, people lived their lives. How far we’ve come since then! Using Walter as the standard, news doesn’t exist anymore in America. News online and on TV is currently designed as entertainment. We have been conditioned to need the drama and outrage supplied by these ‘news’ sources and we’ve been taught that the rush of that adrenaline can and should be accessed many, many times during the day. It keeps us anxious, nervous, angry.
Not one of those emotions is helpful or edifying. Each one of those emotions keeps us from what we are actually called by God to do: Rejoice in the Lord always, Trust and obey. What is the solution when that ingrained voice deep inside me says that I need to be informed? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that now that I’ve recognized the information programs available to me for what they are – titillating suckers of my time and feelings of well-being, I’m going to view them with a much more distant eye.
