Damn the news!

Article from The Times of Swaziland

My friend Hazel used to keep her TV switched off on the basis that the news was very depressing.  I remember her specifically saying, “You switch on the TV and all you hear is Boko Haram this Boko Haram that…” That left me rather perplexed because I thought everyone wanted to know what was going on in the world. I always want to be on top of things, first with the news. Lately, though, Hazel’s attitude seems to have rubbed on to me.

The death of Top Billing presenter Simba Mhere ruined my whole day. Although I only saw him on TV, he was so young, infectious, and had a brilliant career ahead of him I felt as if a friend had passed away. Before hearing about it, I had just read online about the suicides of five young Zimbabweans, one of them just 12 years old. Just as I was processing the tragic news, I heard of the beheading of Japanese war reporter Kenji Goto, one of many beheadings lately, then the Jordanian pilot who was burned alive by ISIS.

I really hate how I feel after watching the news or reading the papers. There’s just too much doom and gloom overload on my brain… talk about Taliban and Boko Haram killings, the Stellenbosch killings in South Africa, the recent Australian hostage drama, the political squabbling
in Zimbabwe, disappearing passenger planes, and the Charlie Hebdon gun killings in France. Here in Swaziland there appears to be a suicide being reported on every other day, a businessman was recently murdered by his wife and their kids, and a mini bus with more than 13 people was washed away by a flooded river. There were no survivors.

Article on Stellenbosch killings:The Sunday Times

The news just raises awareness about how unsafe the world is. We begin to be afraid of our own shadows. But I know for a fact that there are a lot of other beautiful things happening in the world, but no, the bloodthirsty media doesn’t want to focus on those. They are obsessed with the macabre, shocking, and tear-jerking stuff.

When we were still resident in Joburg, I started booby-trapping the door just before bed. One day my former colleague, Nontobeko, came home and when I told her why there was a bottle by the door side, she said, “One day that bottle is going to just fall in the middle of the night, just nje. What are you going to do?” I had no idea what I was going to do in the event of that happening.  Maybe I’d have got time to call for help, bring my son to my room, barricade the bedroom door and say my prayers. All that madness and paranoia started when I began practicing as a journalist, especially when I got involved in court reporting. Sometimes I’d sit in court from 8am to 3pm waiting for a case I was covering to be heard, and while waiting I’d hear all manner of depraved human beings talk about what bad things they did to innocent, law-abiding citizens. To actually see and hear a person who looks ordinary talk about such things made me want to jump out of my skin at the slightest bump in the night. One alleged criminal actually winked and leered at me while being tried for murder and I was sitting directly behind him so that I could clearly hear all the proceedings. I was traumatised for days.  I used to be very obsessed with court dramas like Law & Order, and thought being a court reporter would really be glamorous. There’s actually nothing sexy about it at all and I stopped watching Law & Order from the time I started court reporting.

Yes, it’s really a gory and debauched world out there, but we don’t need to have that shoved into our faces every day. We could do with some pick-me-up type of stories too. There are there, but beautiful and heartwarming stories rarely make it to the front pages.

Article obtained from The Sunday Times

But will I stop watching the news because it scares me? No. Better the devil you know. If there’s a serial killer in my area, I will be scared out of my skin but I want to know about it so that I can take precautions. If a plane has disappeared in Asia, I will feel very sad and depressed, but I want to know about it so that I can remember to thank God for each and every day that I see the sun rise and set together with my family, every long trip that we’ve embarked on and come back home safely, every outing we’ve had and weren’t accosted by some gun-toting extremist.  That should never be taken for granted.