KHALIL TRABELSI

KHALIL TRABELSI

Husband and Father. Community Manager. I cook Podcasts and I check facts

Why you should stop watching the news!

News Headlines..! Always with red bold text and all caps! meticulously designed to grab your attention.. and usually followed with a bunch of stories containing problems with NO solutions. 

I’m a journalist who consumes a lot of news, especially in the morning before starting our editorial meeting at work, to decide later on what stories should we cover. After a while, I started thinking it’s kind of weird to start your day with news about murders, kidnapping, protests, sexual assaults, bombing, and other shocking graphic content! But at the same time, I was saying to myself that it was fine… I got used to it and it was extremely important for me to follow what’s going on in the world. And I didn’t know that those little doses of negativity were fueling something inside me

70% of my dedicated time to news goes to Tunisia, since I’m abroad, I have that feeling that if I didn’t check what’s going on there I would still need that missing pill! I realized that News I’m watching about Tunisia -and emotionally invested in- is a constant loop of the same 3 or 4 stories: Boring footage from the national TV about members of the parliament fighting… Shouting… Talking about everything but with no concrete results, protests in the streets, Coronavirus cases numbers, and death rates… In addition to that, you will hear week after week about a shocking story that goes viral on social media for several days, and then it disappears… Headlines like a kidnapped 4-year-old boy found dead or a prominent politician involved in a bribery scandal, or a Leaked video of a rape that shook the internet! Etc… All in loop! And it’s approximately the same 3 or 4 stories in any country in the world.

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