@smokey This completely resonates with me and I can no longer watch any news on TV and have partially tried to completely block out the news cycle as I know it effects my emotional state. I remember watching the start of the Gulf War, up late with fiends when the coverage was raw and unedited watching cruise missiles glide down Baghdad Main Street and laser guided bombs being delivered with pinpoint accuracy. And the twin towers. And a number of other events that the media seemed to salivate over. I had a friend who worked at Sky News and he reached a point where he could no longer stand the blood rush. I personally think it’s almost become a form of pornography with the news establishment getting their rocks off to every form of tragedy and lusting after ever more gruesome events like the execution of Sadham Hussein. We have become and are increasingly being desensitised to violence and I want no part of “their” world where suffering sells.

@stickmandiaries Yes; it’s rotten all the way down to the local news, and I’ve tried to cut all TV news out of my life, because just hearing it makes my blood pressure rise. (I think of those lyrics from “Only Living Boy in New York”: I get the news I need / On the weather report / Oh, I can gather all the news I need / On the weather report”…)

@stickmandiaries @smokey At the time of I think the first Gulf War, I had not owned a television for a number of years, and was living in a Buddhist community. My only exposure to news, (infant internet then which I was not on), was occasionally listening to bulletins on BBC radio or with even less frequency reading a newspaper. So with the war being fought I was invited to London by my sister for a small gathering in her flat. My memory of the evening, actually sparked by this thread, was watching the scene play out at my sister's. People sat around laughing, talking, drinking and eating while the television in the corner beamed us the fighting live from the Gulf. Maybe it was my heightened sensitivity having been away from such media for so long, but the whole thing seemed completely bizarre to me, and no one else that evening appeared to me to notice.

@crossingthethreshold Looking back, how we covered and consumed the coverage of the 1990 Gulf War is surreal. I think back to every piece of literature I’ve read involving war, where they describe how the protagonist feels about war up to that very first moment of fighting (or, historically, how people came from DC to picnic and watch the First Battle of Bull Run, before they had to flee in terror)—that was what that war was, writ large. I suppose on the ground it probably began to turn to real war at some point, but at home it was mostly a lark. I hope that subsequent conflicts and their coverage have disabused most of us of that notion….

@smokey Very well written. I don’t know if from a neuroscience standpoint constant “hits” of news triggers dopamine release or what. But it sure can draw a person in unless conscious enough to resist.

@ronguest Thanks, Ron; I dashed it out after being stuck most of the afternoon in a place where the TVs were tuned to CNN’s coverage of the Notre Dame fire (at a louder-than-necessary volume), and I wasn’t sure how well I made my argument, but I had to get it out there ;-)

It would be interesting to see what this sort of “news” coverage does to the brain; in my case, it’s certainly not triggering reward/addiction, but closer to flight/trauma… :-( Being trapped somewhere with continuous “breaking news” coverage or cable “news” on TV is cruel and unusual punishment :-P