(Opinion) Overwhelmed by the Media
Do y’all like the 24 hour news cycle? I ask because I’m genuinely unsure.
I saw something on Facebook the other day that showed a map of the U.S. On the map were three rings. My eyes were immediately drawn the the bright red ring in the center that said “kill zone.” I, of course, had questions. What will be killing us? How accurate is the size of the ring? Then I read the bold, black letters that titled the graphic. “Possible Yellowstone Supervolcano Eruption.” Excuse me? This is a joke, right? I mean, I live just about on the border between the “kill zone” and the “primary ash zone.” Now I have more questions. What is this “primary ash zone” you speak of? I saw “Dante’s Peak” and (spoiler alert) Pierce Brosnan had to use windshield wipers to get the ash off his stolen truck. There was a lot of ash.
Ok, so you’ve probably deduced by now that this map was part of a meme. The source? Meme Wars. But that didn’t stop me from spiraling for just a few minutes, or hours. All of a sudden I found myself on Yellowstone National Park’s website and Googling the volcano. At a quick glance of my Google results, I found that some think it’s overdue for an eruption and others think we have another 50,000 to 100,000 years before the next eruption. Quite the discrepancy in information here. So who’s right? All I know is, I don’t know when that thing is going to erupt. And I’m stressed.
Don’t get me wrong. If there’s an impending supervolcano eruption and I’m in the “kill zone,” heck yes I want to know. However, I also feel like I’m drowning in a sea of legitimate news, fake news, improperly vetted news, jokes portraying themselves as news. You get the idea. While I realize my example was from a post clearly depicting itself to be a meme, I still had to wonder where the information to create the meme came from.
I’m tired. Really tired. This 24 hour news cycle is exhausting. One day COVID-19 will likely kill us all, then just the elderly and immunocompromised, but not if we wear masks, or if they wear masks, or if we both wear masks, but actually, scratch that, masks don’t work, and we need to wash our hands until they bleed because the virus can live on our cereal boxes, but not on our steering wheels, and we should have a vaccine soon, but we will probably have to shut down the economy again in September when the virus comes back. I’m not making light of the COVID-19 situation. In fact, I’m doing just the opposite. We have a real, life-threatening virus tearing through the world and we’re not only on information overload, but the information isn’t even consistent. What are we supposed to do as consumers of information?
Sometimes the media reports information they believe to be correct and it’s not, but sometimes biases creep in and we can hear the exact same story about the exact same event, but the biases of the reporters or networks can skew the outcome entirely. So is President Trump really a hot mess, or is he a good president who just doesn’t care what people think of him? Please, for the love of all the things, DO NOT ANSWER THIS QUESTION IN THE COMMENTS. I’m just making a point.
Politically, I’d probably say I’m moderate to conservative, but isn’t that the problem with politics? We are told that where we fall on the political continuum should dictate which news station we watch and which news websites we visit. But what if I disagree with some conservative viewpoints and some liberal viewpoints? How do we sift through the massive amounts of information coming at us on a daily basis and have the time to properly vet it and decide our opinions on it?
How do we know if the volcano is going to erupt or not? I’m tired.
