Fix the news

tl;dr

It seems everything in the world is shit when we read the news. With most of us always online, negativity and pessimism is just a click away for almost 5 billion people .

IMMO, this leads to mental health issues and makes humans extremely unproductive. But  Fix the News with a mission to report good news is trying to fix this. I highly recommend everyone to check them out and support them.

fear news

In the search of clicks and engagement, online and print media has gone too far in publishing news that incite fear and pessimism about the future. For example, if you see instant messaging groups that you're part of, most of the news shared in these groups is about what is wrong with the world.

In fact, in a study in the United States published in 2022,  shows an increase of sentiment negativity in headlines across news media outlets popular in the United States since at least the year 2000.

here is where things are

I came across this wonderful painting by Oliver Jeffers, in the '23 yearly round up of Fix The News, where they shared 66 ways the world improved in '23 and almost none of it made the news.

This painting shows what it means to be human. Yes, we have lots of problems, but we also have the power to fix them. If we only hear bad stories about how everything is bad in the world, many folks will lose hope. But it's important to believe in a better future. If we focus on problems rather than their solutions just because we constantly only hear what's bad we stop thriving as a human race.

More than ever, the information we consume affects the way we believe the world works. It turns us against each other and spends our energy in damaging ways.

Let’s fix the news.

Thanks to Constance Tan K for reading the draft and helping make the note better.