Too busy to read?

This chapter has touched on terrifying events: natural disasters (0.1 percent of all deaths), plane crashes (0.001 percent), murders (0.7 percent), nuclear leaks (0 percent), and terrorism (0.05 percent). None of them kills more than 1 percent of the people who die each year, and still they get enormous media attention.

Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln's principle that 'you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time'. ... government control of the media undermines Lincoln's logic, because it prevents citizens from realising the truth. Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others, and divert attention to external threats - either real or imaginary.

There was little hope of overpowering the history my father and sister were creating for me. Their account would claim my brothers first, then it would spread to my aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole valley. I had lost an entire kinship, and for what?

We live in a fear-promoting society. It is the business of advertisers to stoke our anxieties about what we have, what we look like, and whether we are sexually adequate. A dissatisfied consumer is more apt to buy. Likewise, the purveyors of television news attempt to hold our interest by scaring us with stories of violent crime, natural disasters, threatening weather, and environmental hazards ("Is your water safe to drink? Details at eleven.").

For his bravado, Nick Denton was an incisive reader of other people. What he knew was that most people did not have the stomach--or the cash--to actually take it very far against a media outlet. He felt protected by the moat explained in the old twentieth-century proverb: Never fight a battle against someone who buys ink by the barrel. It's easier to just let the whole thing go.

In August 2011, Forbes put out its annual World's 100 Most Powerful Women list.15 I'm savvy enough to know that the list wasn't based on a scientific formula and that magazines love these features because they generate lots of page views as readers click through each name.

Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that's the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It's stressful and misleading.

There are six effective ways we can change our media diet in a way that will help us become more informed, engaged and empowered: 1. Become a conscious consumer 2. Read/watch good-quality journalism 3. Burst your filter bubble 4. Be prepared to pay for content 5. Read beyond the news 6. Read solutions-focused news

Does the media create or reflect opinion? Is the media a commercial enterprise that is led by profitability, or a noble one led by integrity? Does it report news that is in the interest of the public, or in the interest of its own success? What are the consequences of reporting such a negative picture of the world?

People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention.

Rightly or wrongly, the media infamously has a mantra of "If it bleeds, it leads." The resulting heavy coverage of violent crime causes people to think it occurs more often than it does.

Whoever controls the media controls the mind. -- Jim Morrison