39page. If there’s no drowning, they’ll reluctantly go with
a near-drowning.
There is nothing wrong with this. It’s not immoral or
unethical. It feeds the public’s hunger for bad news. It’s
exactly what people want, so, in a way, it is a service.
But it reaches its most damaging proportions when
the average listener to a car radio believes that all this
bad news is a true and fair reflection of what’s happen-
ing in the world. It’s not. It is deliberately selected to
spice up the broadcast and keep people listening. It is
designed to horrify, because horrified people are a riv-
eted audience and advertisers like it that way.
The media have also found ways to extend the sto-
ries that are truly horrible, so that we don’t hear them
just once. If a plane goes down, we can listen all week
long as investigators pick through the wreckage and
family members weep before the microphones. A week
later, playing the last words of the pilots found in the
black box, on the air, extends the story further.
In the meantime, while we are glued to our news
stations, air safety is better than ever before. Literally
millions of planes are taking off and landing without
incident. Deaths per passenger mile are decreasing ev-
ery year as the technology for safe flight improves. But
is that news? No. And because my seminar schedule
requires that I travel a lot by air, I can see up close what
the so-called “news” has done to our psyches. Simple
turbulence in the air will cause my fellow passengers’
eyes to enlarge and their hands to grip their armrests
in terror. The negative programming of our minds has
had a huge impact on us.
If we would be more selective with how we pro-
gram our minds while we are driving, we could have
some exciting breakthroughs in two important areas:
knowledge and motivation. There are now hundreds of
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