If I Were in Charge of the News --- Day 138

Walk:  car/de young (last pre-Columbian lecture), r/t Mindful Body
Distance: 16 blocks and teach

On my way back from Marin today I listened to the 3:00 Nightly News Hour as I often do.  Today's report was a solid hour of bad verging on catastrophic news: Europe finances on the brink, almost the same in the U.S., robots taking all the few remaining and future jobs and a definitely innocent man executed by the state of Texas. 

Then I had to teach a yoga class.  Sometimes it is hard for many of us to find the will to go on with any joy muchless teach or whatever one has to do next.  An hour of horrendously destabilizing/sky-is-falling news is so disspiriting that I wonder if it would be ethical/legal/whatever for the producers of news shows to always intersperse them with some bright or positively forward looking pieces - even if the news that day is all bad.

It just doesn't seem right that the listener is essentially dumped on with information he/she can do little about except get anxious or upset or even despairing. Obviously you can't make a law that there be balance in a news show, but working toward balance just seems the decent thing to do.  Run the pieces about the robots and the wrongly executed man another night or something.  Clearly those pieces had been produced earlier and were just waiting to be aired.  I say grab other completed pieces - maybe on the arts or something positively thought- or hope-provoking.  We don't need to know about no jobs for people or a massive miscarriage of justice/the malfunction of our legal system at the highest level on the same night as the world as we rely on it being onthe  economic brink.  No we don't need to know all of this right now.