Back in the early 80s I was living in LA and I'd grab some food on the way home from work and the "News" on an independent station. They had 3 half hour News show back to back. They started out with "Local News", then moved on to "National News", and finally "World News".
At first it didn't seem much different than the big 3 Networks. Everyday I'd come home from work feeling fine but after a few months of doing that I realized by the end of the last broadcast I was very depressed.
It finally occurred to me, after a few months, that the station was gathering every tragedy they could find, rapes, robberies, murders, wars, airplane and auto crashes, etc. So I decided to stop watching it and immediately went back to my normal, happy, content self.
Since I've learned to monitor the "News" as opposed to consuming it and that's much easier to do when we can pick and choose what to consume and ignore it with just a click or tap. And since then I've had quite a few friends and relatives who're happy and content before and are now in a constant state of rage because they're pretty much addicted to watching FOX/CNN/MSNBC, etc.
That said, I would love to see a serious study on this because it's grown into a serious and national mental heath problem here in the U.S.
NPR and PBS are the best if you have to.
I think someone could make a few billion running a positive happy news channel.Isn't that essentially what TikTok is? A 24/7 feed of all the positive, happy, dopamine-triggering content you could ever want, tailored to you. And yeah, they have.