You're Stressing Me Out!

Should we really be surprised to find out that in a new survey, it was revealed that Americans are more stressed about the economy and money issues now than in the spring. You can't get away from the doom and gloom no matter how hard you try! The nightly news, talk radio, even commercials citing "With higher gas prices and the state of the economy...blah blah blah.

You may not know this but I was a Broadcast News in college and I knew I wanted to be in the media industry since junior high. My freshman year in 1994, the Internet was just starting to hit the mainstream. The good old days of logging on to AOL with the dial up modem and the annoying static sound to get into the Internet. People still prefered to get "ink on their fingers" as my J-30 professor, Bob Woodward said. CNN was really the only 24 hour news network. Sometimes a breaking news story wasn't reported for 30 minutes to an hour. Now, a squirrel causes a four-car pile-up in La Crosse, Wisconsin and it's BREAKING NEWS. I think my life will go on without this information. Breaking News isn't a matter of informing the public of what it needs to know right now. It's about who scooped and carried the story first.

It saddens me to see the state of the media these days. News is no longer the unbiased disimination of important events. It is filled with opinions, false "facts", and personal agendas. I was at the gym several months ago and they had four stations on. Fox News, MSNBC, ESPN and TNT. No local channels so that I could watch The Price is Right! When I asked why there were so many news channels on that were reporting the SAME things, the answer was that people complained that one was too liberal and one was too right-wing so management had to put on both channels. Seriously people! Get over it! A gym is a place to go and relieve stress, not create it because a freaking TV channel!

The bottom line is that with so much instant access to "news" via text alerts on our Blackberry phone, it's hard not to get stressed out over all the issues at hand. My advice is to just remain calm. Don't check your mutual funds everyday and certainly, don't listen to the media. Sad to say, isn't it?