I am currently one of the DJs at Home.fm and I am required to do a three-hour show every day of the week except for weekends. This means that I am responsible for coming up with 15 breaks that all have interesting, engaging content each day. In order to find this content I cycle through news stories and what I’ve learned through this experience is that news outlets love to focus specifically on bad news. Often times it is quite discouraging to sift through stories on drugs, violence, sex and crime on a daily basis.
For this reason I like to dig as deep as I can to find all the good news in the world so that I can share it with others to help them realize the world is a little bit better than they make think. This is not as easy as it may sound, and often I like to imagine that all of the bad news stories are one giant monster that I have to fight with my legendary sword of good news. I provided an extremely detailed and well-illustrated diagram below so you can see the epic battle first hand.
At the end of the day I want to believe I caused one person to smile or realize that there is good in the world. This is not an easy feat as the bad news monster lives to crush the people who fight it, but if good news continues to spread, the beast is not too hard to overcome. See illustration below.
I have had many people tell me that talking about nothing but good news makes people ignorant. They believe this because I am not telling my listeners the reality of how dark the world is. While this may be true, I believe if someone wants to have a glimpse at the bad news monster they can find it pretty easily. I want people to see the other side of the news world. If others can spread good news then the bad news monster will not be so intimidating and step-by-step we will learn how to conquer the beast.
P.S. Some people may be frightened to see I killed a living animal. First, remember that the creature is hypothetical. Second, for the sake of calming everyone’s nerves we will just assume the creature passed out from my shiny sword. That’s what most things do around shiny objects after all.
By Joel Bradley
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