Continuous reading of negative news leads to serious physical and mental problems.

I'll start a little further. After my heart attack, which I luckily survived, my wife asked me what kind of newspapers should I bring to the hospital? I told him one of everything: it should include politics, business, a computer and a color magazine. And so it happened. Then I started browsing them and realized that newspapers dealing with politics make me anxious and nervous, and I pushed them away from me. I then told my partner to take them from the cupboard next to my bed.

A lot of time has passed since then, but the "experience" burned into me and I didn't understand it myself. After all, until then I read the political press daily; it was part of my profession to be in the picture. I can't explain it to anyone else since then, because I was probably in such a heightened state of mind that I perceived the reality affecting me much more precisely.

All this came to mind because of three things. In part, there is an old dilemma here, which affects not only us journalists, but also everyone else who claims to have national sentiments. Do we have to deal daily with what exactly the fallen prime minister is delirious about, how many kilos of potatoes the worthless representative brought into the Parliament, what obvious lies the propaganda media calling themselves an independent and objective press, x, y or z " politician " ” of everyone with everyone and everyone against everyone ? Do our elderly parents, who click on the news on RTL or ATV, even if by accident, have to face these on a daily basis? Then the next day, they tell us how excited they were, how restless they slept, and they expect us to explain everything they heard and saw.

Moreover, the situation in the right-wing press is not much better. Unqualified opinions of traitors quoted from other sources appear here, probably for the sake of "balance". Would it be worth counting how many times our own press covered the "We are ready" campaign of the fallen prime minister? For what? For who? As if it were our business, while Gyurcsány obviously happily acknowledged that even the right-wing press is full of him.

Are we normal?

Sure, it's fun to poke fun at other people's bullshit. HírTV's Sajtóklub, for example, is about this, and that is why it is unfailingly successful. But, I am begging you, let our press stop the daily advertising of the opposing politicians, because this way we are "raising" them.

Let what Viktor Orbán said at the CPAC conference in Dallas be true: "We blow the whistle on the left-wing press!".

Yes, until 2026 and beyond, let's whistle at them, let them cook in their own juice, let them deal with their incompetent and failed leader and the daily brainstorming of their deeply below-standard politicians. Which we can sometimes - once in a while - mention (just for the sake of entertainment), but they should only be worth that much to us and no more.

If for no other reason, at least for our own readers, we think this through. According a new study

constant reading of negative news can lead them to serious physical and mental problems.

74 percent of those showing signs of seriously problematic news consumption reported mental problems and 61 percent reported physical problems, The Guardian cited research published in the scientific journal Health Communication.

According to associate professor Bryan McLaughlin, lead author of the study and a researcher at Texas Tech University, following the news 24 hours a day can create a "constant state of alertness" in some people, making the world seem like a "dark and dangerous place."

However, we do not imagine Hungary like this.

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