News Break — Blog

This is mostly a blog about photography. I write about old film cameras and having fun with them. Once in a while I stray and talk about the days when I used to work in radio and television, my experiences selling on eBay or even how rude people can be on social media. But mostly, it’s a blog about photography—my opinions and thoughts. I don’t always get it right but I try and do the best job I can with the information I present here.

I never talk about my politics or even politics in general because I think your beliefs are your own personal thing. And whatever you believe, as long as it’s not hurting another person, is your own business.

I start each workday the same way. I make myself a cup of coffee, open my laptop and catch up on the news. I used to get a morning paper and flip through that, but a good newspaper is hardly that anymore, so I click around two or three news websites, hit the shower and head to the office.

Lately, I find catching up on the news unsettling. It gives me a mild level of anxiety. I’m old enough to know that there’s always been bad news and conflict in the world, but it seems we’ve reached a point where the lines between fact and fiction, news and opinions, have become so blurred, it’s driving a level of discord I have never experienced in the six decades of my life. Back when I worked in broadcasting, anytime we put an opinion on air, we had to disclose it as “commentary.” That’s not the case anymore and lots of good people I know are digesting opinions as fact and that can be very dangerous in so many ways. What’s more troubling is when people in power believe in and make decisions based on the same misinformation.

I am not going to stick my head in the sand, but I do need to modify my consumption of news for my own mental health. I am still figuring out what that’s going to look like. Many years ago, I was an avid watcher of the CBS News program Sunday Morning. Charles Kuralt or Charles Osgood would always close out the show by saying “Today, we leave you with….” followed by a few minutes of fields full of wildflowers with birds chirping or waves crashing on a beach. It was a way to say that even in this noisy world full of bad news, there are amazing and beautiful things, if we just take a few minutes each day to notice them.