Another mega-inspiration behind The250 is Bari Weiss’s Common Sense newsletter and her companion podcast Honestly. Want some plain-ole clear thinking and honest questions about what’s happening in the world today? That’s your place.
By far, the most entertaining output from Common Sense is each Friday’s TGIF, written by Bari’s wife, Nellie Bowles.
As I’ve stated before, the purpose of The250 is to encourage empathy through opening new perspectives. I don’t do much overt call-to-action because the whole point is that most of our lives are complex and nuanced.
Except “Turn off the news!!” I am unabashed with that one.
In a recent edition, Nellie published real-world data to fuel the fire of my campaign slogan, “Turn off the news!!”
Here’re some graphs that show the emotional trends of news headlines from 2000 until now. Note the full spectrum of news sources as part of the data.
As I suspected.
I will point out one issue, however: the Y-Axis scales on each chart are not the same (as I’ve pointed out with the red boxes). This is the kind of misinformation trickery that sides use to magnify and hyperbolize their point. It has happened here, but the overall results are not skewed.
Do note that the downward trend of “joy” and “neutral” would not appear as drastic as shown if the scales were identical.
Regardless, turn off the news.
