Breaking Out

So I have a bone to pick. And it is with the fourth estate. There used to be a time when I would sit with an open newspaper in front of me, the first thing in the morning. Spend about half an hour to 45 minutes reading about what was going on in the world and then happily go about my business. Key point. Happily.

Not anymore though. The headline in the picture above is a rare attempt at bringing humor to a serious subject. When was the last time anyone read a news article and finished it with a smile on their faces? Quite frankly the only purpose news serves these days is to remind me to be thankful that I am not suffering the same as the people mentioned in there. Every time I open a website, my biggest fear is seeing a banner headline on the top with the letters in twice the font as the rest of the page. That just spells disaster. Even when there is none of that, the rest of the stuff is just downright despairing.

Just a short sample of the news I have been reading through the last few days: School shootings, rapes, fiscal cliff, debt ceiling, some more shootings, bombings, missile attacks, soldiers getting killed, corruption scandals, hate speeches. Give it a rest! Am I to believe that there is no positive news in the world and in the last couple of weeks there have been no positive deeds? In despair, I turn to the sports section. Where being a fan of Arsenal and the Indian cricket team does you absolutely no favors. Even the usually reliably positive Sachin Tendulkar articles started catching on tinges of sourness, until he decided to announce his retirement. Cue the emotional tear-jerking overdrive. But hey, I am not complaining. At least there is still some positivity to it!

Faith in the government is probably lower than at any other point in history. You would be hard pressed to find someone in India who would think that the current Prime Minister is doing a good job. And half the population in the US believes the wrong man was elected as the President. Even the remaining half is not fully convinced that the right man was elected. It was just that the alternative was worse. And opinions seem to sink lower everyday. And why won’t it? Where is there any positive news about the government on our news channels? They surely cannot be doing everything wrong! If they did, we wouldn’t have a world to live in. So they must be doing something right. But what is that something? Your guess is as good as mine.

Now I am not claiming that negative news items should be brushed under the carpet. Of course we deserve to know what is going wrong in the world. But even these news items can be reported in a positive light. Shootings are disturbing. But more focus on the victims and the families affected would probably be more positive than focusing almost exclusively on the shooter’s movements to almost last minute precision. I do not need to know how many computer games Adam Lanza played a day before the shootings or how many times he reloaded and discarded his cartridges. Though I would definitely like to know more about the children whose lives he cut short. It is a choice between feeling grief when reading about the victims or feeling anger when reading about the shooter. Neither of them is particularly positive but then anger never really helped anybody.

In the brutal rape in India, I find it surprising that no Indian news agency seems to have reported the victim’s name. The foreign media, on the other hand is freely reporting her name after the family gave interviews and permission to do so. It simply baffles me. More so because the names of her assailants are quite freely released. We do not live in China or North Korea where every bit of information is spoon-fed to us. Then why this selective journalism? And what kind of message are we sending out by glorifying the evil and neglecting the victims. We just encourage more copycat incidents. You want to get your name in the papers? Sure! Go ahead and do something notorious. More negative news to report. More newspapers sold.

Sigh! We need Raju Srivastava for Prime Minister, I tell you. Only hope for such headlines.