We may not need a 'good news channel,' but we need some good news

The news comes at us like water bursting from a firehose, in overwhelming amounts and with 'bad news" making up most of the torrent.

We need to be informed citizens and so avoiding the news all together seems to lead to... well, nothing. 

But some surveys lately indicate that at least 40 percent of Americans are actively avoiding engaging with news regularly (women are the majority, for some reason). Other advanced countries have much lower levels of "disengagement." A Washington Post columnist, Amanda Ripley, got to thinking about what this all means last week, and suggested that it's possible the product -- the actual journalism -- may be the real problem.

Maybe we just aren't doing it right.

Her conclusion was that people can get so overwhelmed, so depressed, and so hopeless that they choose not engaging with news as a logical way to live a less "angsty" life.

Climate change coverage is a fine example of news that almost always features dire warnings and predictions of "it's now too late to avoid disaster," and emphasizes how little governments are actually doing about this coming nightmare.

But what if journalists did not settle for the doom sharing and tried to add some coverage of what individual and small groups and even specific companies are doing to battle the apocalypse?

For student media, this might mean that we don't leave our coverage at "school is damaged and we struggle with issues that no one seems to care about." Yes, that claim is true, but there are people who are trying to make a difference in their own way. 

Women who feel embattled by society and the law are being told to come out and vote. I read that President Biden has basically thrown up his hands and is saying to potential voters that the midterm election is key in providing enough legislators. He claims he can't do much about Roe or climate or anything else.

He may be right, from a global perspective. But progress and justice rarely comes in some dramatic law or decision... it comes in bits and pieces and small movements and individual choices that eventually add up. (We hope.)

Yes, the midterms are important, but millions of individual acts and conversations and investments are ultimately more important.

I would love to see a news coverage philosophy that honors the idea of working to find something people can actually DO... ARE actually doing, to balance the dreadful long-term trends, the dramatic weather and fires and war stories, with examples that remind everyone that we are not helpless passengers on the trip.

School media are the perfect place to practice this intentionally positive sort of reporting.