Well the short answeris yes! Evidence supports that news has a direct impact on ourmental health. As if we aren’t already suffering enough during lockdown! Reading,watching or listening to negative news will make us all sadder and more anxiousthan if we spent our time focusing on neutral or positive stories!

Do you ever find yourself wondering what happened to a mediawhere the value of quality and ethics were essential to any news story, where factsand reality were checked in order to remain a trusted source of information?

So, have the media ‘gone over the top’?  You decide. Add fake news to the mix andsuddenly we’re not only fighting a pandemic we’re fighting an infodemic! With storiesrife with speculation and fear-inducing vocabulary, the media controlsthe narrative, instead of being part of the solution they chose to fan thefires of negativity,  Instead focusing onpromoting the more sensationalists aspects of any news event, sending audiencesrushing to make sense of it all.

We turn to search engines and social media, in order to seekthe truth, where only a fraction of the information might be reliable, a lot ofit won’t be, all orchestrated by bad actors manipulating the TV, radio andsocial media for economic gain!

So, what’s the solution? If you can, find and stick toreliable and credible news outlets, and if you’re tempted to share a dramaticsnippet of news that just appeared in your social media feed, don’t!  Or simply take control of your own narrative,switch it all off and go and do something way less boring instead, you’ll feelbetter that you’re not part of the worlds media circus by gently slowing thepromotion of over-the-top reporting, which is really just another kind of virusitself!

#zest2rec #rajnasta #fakenews