As this is a holistic web site, it’s important that we take time every so often to feature pieces on other aspects of human health besides diet. So, today’s subject is unrelated to raw foods, but is directly related to your health. (Don’t worry: We’ll get back to raw foods on Monday!)

Today I want to share a super-valuable lesson I learned when I was just 21 years old. Back then, Wendi worked within the advertising department of a large newspaper. She helped me meet the paper’s photography editor who, in turn, approved an internship for me during my senior year of college. So, several days per week for one semester, I hung out with professional newspaper photographers. It was a lot of fun — and with real darkrooms, too (as this was way before the age of digital cameras).

In no time, I noticed a pattern emerging. How is it, do you suppose, that newspapers and television newscasts find much of their news? Have you ever asked yourself that question?

Well, sure, there are definitely “beat reporters” out there monitoring sporting events, gathering weather reports, and attending social functions. But, what struck me most were the always-on police band scanners. Now, if you’ve ever heard a police or fire department radio, you know that you’d never hear something like, “Dispatch, this is officer Friendly, and I want to report how delighted I am to see a group of people planting fruit trees in a vacant lot!”

No, it’s quite the opposite. In fact, it’s all of the worst things anyone can imagine, all concentrated into a single range of frequencies. Constantly, these scanners would be on in the background and, any time anything particularly awful happened — whether it was a fire, a robbery, or almost anything else that would require a police officer’s presence — we would dispatch a team to cover it. Most of what is awful in the world tends to become public record via this one system.

News production, I learned, is essentially over-dramatizing all of the worst things in the world in order to instill as much fear as possible into the viewer. We would never run a photo of, say, a house fire unless it showed raging flames. The more the better, I was told. It’s all marketing, really. More drama equals more viewers equals higher ratings equals more advertising dollars.

Overall, the news system is highly similar to the public sewer system. Media outlets collect and concentrate all of the miscellaneous foul deeds perpetrated in an area, filter and treat the worst of it with a healthy dose of theatrics, panic, and fear, and then dump it into the virtual river (aka the public airwaves) for consumers to “drink” (meaning watch, read, or listen to).

You don’t need this to survive. It’s the cooked food of the airwaves, so to speak, and basically facilitates an acidic environment within your system. Now, if you’re mired in the fear, you may be protesting that you want to stay informed, etc.  Well, let me follow that up with another quirky story:

A few years ago, Wendi and I witnessed a highly suspicious scene in which a man ran across the street just in front of our car, dropped a huge knife, picked it back up, jumped into an SUV, and sped away. It was so suspicious that we actually jotted down the licence plate number, just in case. (We were at an art studio at the time, and told some people there about it, too.)

When we returned later to the studio, there was a news team and a bunch of police officers there. One detective had heard that we took down a licence plate number, and wanted to speak with us. So, we gave it to him, asking what had happened. He said it was basically a drug deal gone bad, adding that pretty much 99% of the time you hear about such crimes, it’s not just random violence. There’s always a back story, and it’s quite often criminal interaction between … wait for it … criminals! In other words, if you’re not a criminal, you probably don’t actually have very much to worry about.

That wasn’t the public story, though. Since we were “involved,” we tuned into the news that evening. The report hyped the exact opposite of what had happened! Instead of a basic criminal-on-crminal story, the piece purposely tried to instill fear in area residents by questioning the safety of the neighborhood.

Newscasts, in my opinion, distort our perception of the ratio of “positive” to “negative” (for lack of better terms) in the world. They essentially perpetuate fear, offering you little positive to balance it off with. (The weather report and the sports scores aren’t the kinds of positives I’m referring to; they’re actually just “neutral” facts.) So, while we may well cover fasting here on Pure Jeevan at some point, let’s start with news fasts. See how a 10, 20, or 30-day news fast feels!  We’re on a couple-decade long one at the moment, and happily report that it feels wonderful!

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