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It's refreshing to see these wholesome memes. The way that news is reported and consumed has changed significantly over the last few decades. Nowadays we can hardly avoid it and many of us even actively feel the need to seek it out.
According to Graham C. L. Davey, Ph.D., who is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Sussex, UK, the modern-day tone of the news is increasingly emotive. "It's increasingly visual and shocking, and its commentaries increasingly negative and fear-laden," he wrote in Psychology Today. "It's not surprising that there is also growing evidence that negative news can affect our mental health, notably in the form of increased anxiety, depression and acute stress reactions."
Notifications on our phones keep us in direct contact with world events regardless of what we’re doing. As Mark Deuze writes in his book Media Life, the modern world has become one in which the media are ubiquitous, pervasive and cannot be switched off, and this is also true of news, where immediate daily information about world events has become an accepted reality of everyday existence.
But a more significant impact of the digital age on news reporting, according to Professor Davey, has been the dramatic shift to visual imagery in news items, especially visual imagery contributed by the audience and garnered by journalists from social media.
"User-generated images of important world events are now regularly captured on the smartphones of those close to or even directly involved in these events, and this new form of 'news reality' began to appear during the Asian tsunami, the 7/7 London underground bombings, and the Boston marathon bombings, developments that effectively allowed the audience to witness such events in what was virtually real-time," the psychologist explained.
Such user-generated images permit news broadcasters to present ever more dramatic and shocking images that were either not available or not permissible in earlier times.
For example, in news coverage of the 2015 terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, images were made available worldwide of one of the gunmen shooting a policeman at point blank range.
Flash forward two years and television news coverage of the terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament did not hesitate to show graphic smartphone-captured images of the injured, the dying, and the dead
"The news audience is now effectively being transported to the site of an event by real-time graphic images so that those watching these images become directly connected to the distressing events that are happening and the affect these events generate," Davey explained. In a way, the media no longer reports from the scene but is part of the scene and action.
