Amongst a reality guided by the urgent culture and the constant search for something that relieves human’s mind from an exaggerated, tiring routine, negative news filled with pessimism. Dramatization and sensationalism are the main features of the most consumed journalistic vehicles, contributing negatively to any attempt at a more positive look towards a large part of the Brazilian population’s routine.Â
In an interview with the journalist and creator of the Brazilian positive-news focused portal sonoticiaboa.com.br, Rivaldo de Oliveira, he explains: “Bad news attracts more people’s attention historically since ancient Greece, when they put men to be devoured by lions and the audience was packed. When you see someone suffering, you have the feeling that this person’s life is worse than yours. When what is shown on television tells people that their life is “less worse”than someone else’s, it pleases them, and the press is always betting on this to get an audience.”.
The Need for Good News
In what is considered by experts to be the Mental Health era, stimulating the brain with hours of negativity can have very serious consequences, such as panic attacks, anxiety, and depression. The continued consumption of content that focuses only on a negative point of view of a reality already overloaded with pessimism acts directly on the perspective with which people see life in general.
“Good news are directly linked to people’s mental health. We even did a paper with a doctor from Rio de Janeiro who said that for every 5 minutes of bad news that you watch, read, or listen, you need 5 hours to recover, so it’s a mental health issue, a public health problem”, confirms Rivaldo. “Access to good news is a necessity for us to have hope, good examples, to believe that life and the world are not as bad as they make it out to be, to have another vision, otherwise we won’t leave the house, interact, work, or do anything. We’ll stay at home, locked up and scared to death, and that’s not what life is.”
Life Through Other Lenses
Being strong minded and able to consume mostly bad news and not be affected is almost like a superpower nowadays. Working more than 12 hours per day, taking on your personal problems and still having to deal with the world’s chaos is a strong combo for anyone, and that is when platforms like “SĂłNotĂciaBoa” take a huge importance in people’s daily dose of information:
“Read in 150 countries, with more than a million followers on social media and 3.5 million viewers every month, SĂłNotĂciaBoa is a website that only has good news. When I created the portal, it was not my intention [to get so big], but as the decades of journalism went by, I realized that that was what was missing, my heart asked for positive things”.
The journalist says “It’s so cool to know that someone managed to save a person, that a teacher taught something important to someone, that a scientist created a vaccine, a medicine, but people normally don’t see those, because they are hidden at the end of the paper, or are the last news on tv, the media space for good news is very little, but then it’s an editorial issue, and it’s up to us to look for the right places, to try our best not to fall down in the rabbit’s hole of negativity”.
The website is an example of how life changing and necessary it is to pay attention to what kinds of information are being processed by our brains regularly. People become more and more interested in good news every day when they realize the “shot of hope” it brings to life, to inform one self about positivity takes the weight away from the portion of life destined exclusively to happiness.