Hello.
There was a time you would buy the newspaper on a Sunday with its forty-seven supplements and it would give you a week's worth of reading. Then private television decided to dedicate channels to news, all day every day. After that came the world wide web, the boom of mobile phones which was followed up by social media. The result? More and more outlets chasing the story and thus the rise of sensationalism. Dog bites man, non-story. Man bites dog, however. Who is going to read a well-written piece of researched journalism when they can see an Egyptian lion trainer being mauled to death on the online version of a national "newspaper" (this story, with the video ripped from LiveLeak, is actually the top story as I type these words). Ah, long gone are the days of the Fleet Street hack. Long live the media consumer who has now been trained to stay up-to-date and, consequently, addicted to news. Bad news. And this can have psychological impacts even on the sanest and most optimist of minds.
Our obsession with news - or rather being the first to know - is mournfully fascinating. But it is evolving into something more. Since the online papers have allowed us to comment on the piss poor drivel they publish, they have learnt pretty quickly that badly researched articles or non-stories about some person with a sex-tape will rile people up. People will actually click on it, without reading, just to leave an angry comment. The publisher shows click-rates to its advertisers, not time on page data.
The main culprits for clickity-click shit-stirring are the DailyMail.com and the Independent's i100. Both despise each other but their tactics are exactly the same: politically-leaning, selective, non-researched, bad news in order to breed frustration and madness in the poor souls who happen upon their websites. But the latter has reached a new low today with an 'article' that, at first glance, seems to dispense fact-based advice to failing couples.
The piece suggests that television is the ruin of marriages. The source? A woman called Dushka Zapata. Her qualifications? No idea. She works in PR and Communications. She writes stuff on Quora like 'How to be ferociously happy' and other opinion pieces. I am all for freedom of speech and personal opinion. But don't pass it off as fact! Because the researched fact of the matter is that shared media (for example, watching TV with your partner) predicts greater relationship quality. That is, having a binge of your favourite show on Netflix with your loved one can create more closeness in a relationship. Whatever goes on in Dushka Zapata's private life, and how much TV she watches, are her prerogative. If getting rid off the TV bettered her relationship, so be it. Good. I hope she is now having lots of chats and sex with her partner. But here is my opinion: stop reading shit-stirring online 'newspapers' because in the end...
...it's all a load of Bovine Skittles!
Sources :
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/08/what-all-this-bad-news-is-doing-to-us.html
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dushka
http://spr.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/07/26/0265407516660388.abstract
http://lifehacker.com/watching-tv-with-your-significant-other-might-improve-y-1784898093
https://www.quora.com/profile/Dushka-Zapata
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