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If you love the thought of coming home after a long day at work, easing into your favorite chair, and relaxing awhile before dinner, well, snap out of it, because the news will soon be on!

The news is on again and you wonder what the main topic of the day will include. You play guessing games with yourself as you ponder the many possibilities. Surely today the main topic will center around something pleasant for a change. NOT! One thing is for certain, the news is anything but pleasant. It has become the new meaning for the word "morbid".

So why does it always have to be this way you ask? Well..simply put good news is boring. News organizations realized a long time ago that sensationalism in the media was good for ratings and with time sensationalism has been sensationalized. The media has done a clever job of scaring us half to death with its over-reporting of news stories. Those stories that make the news and garner the main topic over a period of a few days are those which are grossly over-exaggerated at every possible turn. Talking about 'driving it in the ground and breaking it off'. The more extreme the story the better chance it has for making headlines. Bad news draws people in and makes them want to keep watching. Now see why the news is the "new morbid" in society? We're all guilty of watching the endless hours of media coverage of a given story. We can't get enough. The more the media talks the more we want to know. Even when the media runs out of details on the headline story, repeating the same information over and over, we never seem to tire of hearing it become ingrained in our brains.

How many times have you seen or heard endless coverage about a ten year old kid named, Jonathan who set up a local lemonade stand and raised money for charity? You barely heard mention of such good news. It certainly didn't garner the attention of news organizations worldwide to send a reporter and news truck satellite set-up to the given location of the lemonade sale to stake out and watch it all unfold.

No, good news is bad and bad news is good..at least in the eyes of the media. A lemonade stand won't get the attention it certainly deserves but a criminal who has committed a henious crime will. And then we wonder why society has gone mad?

Learn more about this author, Dawn M. O'Neal.
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