Decades ago, we sat down for the news on TV. Now the news is pushed upon us through our phones, 24-hour streaming news channels and even at the gas pump. We scroll from one video to the next. Dr. Roxane Cohen Silver, a distinguished professor of psychology, public health, and medicine at the University of California, Irvine, has spent 40 years studying how our brains respond to never-ending loops of bad news. Her national studies of 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombings, and the COVID-19 pandemic turned up a startling finding: people who took in four to six hours a day of bombing coverage could end up more distressed than people who were actually there.
So why can’t we look away? Silver says the more graphic imagery we take in, the more we worry … and the more we worry, the more we’re pulled toward the next story. She discusses the impact of today’s eyewitness videos delivered to us with no editor deciding what we see, and the simple habits she uses to stay informed without drowning. She reminds us that we can look away. Cutting back even a little may help.
Read Dr. Cohen Silver’s bio: https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/rsilver/
Phil Stieg
When we picture someone exposed to a tragedy, we usually picture someone who was there. My guest has spent four decades showing that the picture is far bigger than that, and that for millions of us, the exposure comes through a screen.
Dr. Roxanne Cohen-Silver is a distinguished professor of psychology, public health, and medicine at the University of California, Irvine. Across national studies of 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombings, and the COVID-19 pandemic, she and her collaborators have found that repeated media exposure to collective trauma is linked to acute stress. And that watching hours of coverage can sometimes be associated with more distress than being near the event itself.
Today we’ll talk about what the news cycle does to the American psyche, why our attention keeps getting pulled back to bad news, who bears the heaviest burden, and crucially, whether anything can be done about it. Dr. Silver, thank you for being with us today.
Roxane Cohen Silver
Thank you very much for inviting me.
Phil Stieg
So, Roxanne, a lot of your work focuses on collective trauma. Can you define that specifically and how that affects people?
Roxane Cohen Silver
I would define collective trauma as events that are perhaps sudden, maybe unpredictable, but they impact a wide variety of people simultaneously. So things like mass violence, events, disasters, infectious disease outbreaks,— events that are experienced both locally but then often capture the media’s attention, and therefore they are disseminated far beyond the directly impacted individuals.
Phil Steig
You began studying this topic for about 40 years ago. How has the impact of the news media changed over that timespan?
Roxane Cohen Silver
Well, 40 years ago, most people in the U.S. and elsewhere received their news in— through 3 different mechanisms: television, radio, and print. And now, 40 years later, we get our news via push notifications on our phones. We carry very powerful cameras in our pockets, and we can take pictures of images, we can take graphic videos, and we can distribute it very quickly and widely to a large number of people. So the content may be different because of the source, and the kinds of topics and things to which we are exposed has changed dramatically over the 40 years.
Most of us, receive information via the media, and we are getting that through graphic images, often taken by individuals who are not journalists, who are not monitoring the degree of graphicness of those images, and it’s being rapidly disseminated.
One of the things that we have found in our research that was quite surprising was that Repeated media exposure to trauma or graphic images of a trauma can be more powerful, more potent psychologically and even physically than being directly exposed to an event.
Phil Stieg
So is that the essential difference then between when you talk about collective trauma versus private individual trauma? And by private individual trauma, do I assume that you mean that I’ve just experienced trauma, but I’m not seeing it blasted all over the news?
Roxane Cohen Silver
That’s correct. That’s correct. So a person could be in a car accident, they can experience a personal assault, but these are often not rapidly and graphically communicated to others who don’t know that person.
Phil Stieg
Personally, I’m finding that I don’t watch the news anymore because it’s just become so bombarding. Are we finding this to be a really public phenomena?
Roxane Cohen Silver
Right now we’re bombarded. You get alerts, constant alerts from many news sources in which you really have to avoid it now.
There is some evidence that people are indeed withdrawing from the media. During the pandemic people were finding it so overwhelming that they were withdrawing from it. I personally don’t engage in much media. I don’t watch any videos. I don’t engage with social media. That’s a very conscious decision that I’ve made based on my paying attention to my own research.
Phil Stieg
And then I guess the other question that then downstream from that is then where are they getting their information?
Roxane Cohen Silver
Well, people are not getting their information from print media anymore, and some people still are getting information via radio or podcasts, of course, People are still getting news from television screens, but most of us are receiving information from a variety of sources, both our friends, our acquaintances, influencers, as well as traditional media that is now showing up on one’s computer or one’s phone,
Phil Stieg
And to be clear, the things that you’re focusing on are more of the stress psychological effects of all this, or do you also look at some of the medical implications, you know, high blood pressure, eating disorders, and that related to the stress they have about all of this stuff?
Roxane Cohen Silver
We look at primarily the psychological effects, but in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, which is now 25 years ago, we began a study of several thousand people across the United States. And we found that over the next several years, people who had engaged in or watched a lot of television in the days after the attacks were more likely to develop new onset physical health symptoms.
We saw cardiovascular symptoms, neuromuscular symptoms. We really didn’t look at things like eating disorders back then, but we were seeing both elevated post-traumatic stress symptomatology as well as Physical health ailments. And we have seen that now in several other studies over time.
Phil Stieg
You seem to indicate through your studies that the degree to which people got involved with the information and news regarding the COVID pandemic, also related to their symptomatology. Can you go into detail on that a little bit?
Roxane Cohen Silver
We found in the early days of the pandemic that the more media hours that people were exposed to about the pandemic, the more –they were exhibiting symptoms of what we call acute stress. And let me describe those as flashbacks or nightmares, feelings of hypervigilance, emotional numbness, anxiety, worry, those kinds of symptoms were more likely to be exhibited by people who were spending more time engaged in the media. But one other point about the pandemic, the more people were exposed to conflicting information in the media, the more likely they were also exhibiting these signs of distress.
Phil Stieg=
To me, it seems somewhat commonsensical, but maybe you can explain why you found in the Boston Marathon bombings individuals that were there had less anxiety and stress related to the event when compared to people that watched all the news media coverage of it. What’s going on? Why did that occur?
Roxane Cohen Silver
Well, first, the most important thing is that we’re talking about individuals who were sort of at the extreme of media exposure, so about 4 to 6 hours a day of combined exposure from a variety of sources. You’re a tragedy – there’s a beginning, middle, and end, and you walk away or you drive away or you’re wheeled away to a hospital. But when you’re engaged in media, it’s a loop. In fact, in many newscasts, you will even see the same videos shown over and over and over again. And so there isn’t really an end. And we think that that constant repetition of graphic images without end, without a sort of stopping point, is what is so psychologically and potentially physically damaging over time.
Phil Stieg
You’ve also talked a lot about the cycle, and can you, can you describe for me what you mean by news consumption and this distress feedback loop process.
Roxane Cohen Silver
Let me step back and just say that the kind of research that I do involves large thousands of people, representative samples of individuals across the United States. I’ve been doing studies like this since the September 11th terrorist attacks. And when we do our studies, we follow the same people over time. So if we’re studying, let’s say, the Boston Marathon bombing, a few years later there was the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. Or we started looking at the pandemic, and in recent years there have been other tragedies that have occurred. All of those things enable us, when we do a longitudinal study, to see how people respond at one time point and then to the next event.
And what we see from those studies is that individuals who engage with a lot of media about the first story are more likely to experience distress, acute stress, sometimes post-traumatic stress, and importantly, worry about the future. And when the next event happens, which quite frankly could be days, could be weeks, could be months, individuals who are worried about another tragedy are in fact drawn to media stories about those tragedies.
Phil Stieg
Do you find there’s any addictive behavior, however? Are there some news junkies out there that just get the positive serotonin dopamine release by devouring it and knowing about it?
Roxane Cohen Silver
I’m sure there are such individuals, but what we found after the Boston Marathon bombing was that people were engaging in about two and a half hours a day of media on that.
Phil Stieg
News media or all media?
Roxane Cohen Silver
No, news media about the Boston Marathon bombing. Now, how does this happen?
So it happens because many sources of news can play at the same time. You can be watching the television screen, the radio can be in the background, you might be holding your laptop, you may be getting some sort of push notifications on your phone. And so people are consuming a great deal of media, maybe different stories, but in the combined consumption, can come to around 2.5 hours a day.
It appears to us from some of our research that it may be about 4 hours a day that is the— maybe the critical point. And I do encourage people to be very vigilant about how much time they’re engaging in media consumption about terrible stories.
Phil Stieg
Do you have any thought on – just the way the news is presented these days? Is that almost equally as disturbing and strident as some of these events? In terms of creating stress in our lives?
Roxane Cohen Silver
Well, let me compare 2001 to now. So after the 9/11 attacks, there were editors who were making decisions about what we were going to see. In fact, I heard that editors were making decisions quite early whether or not they were going to show images of people jumping out of the towers or falling out of the towers. And they made a decision not to show those things.
Fast forward to the Charlie Kirk shooting, which occurred on a college campus in which thousands of people were recording his speech and captured the shooting. And thousands of those recordings were posted on social media and distributed rapidly without any editors making any decisions and without, I believe, the people who were posting this thinking about the psychological consequences of those images. And because there were so many different angles and images, the social media was bombarded with these kinds of graphic images in which many young people reported that they saw these images over and over again.
That’s completely different than what you and I saw after the 9/11 attacks. The graphic nature of the images are different. Nobody is really making a decision whether or not they’re going to show it or not. In fact, people rapidly distribute it, and we’re trying to understand why do people actually distribute it. And one of my doctoral students is actually focusing on that for their dissertation. But this is— these are the kinds of questions that we really don’t have any answer for.
Phil Stieg
Well, do you think that auditory versus visual news effects is also different, or are they both equally effective?
Roxane Cohen Silver
It’s a fantastic question, which we do not have a definitive answer yet. One of my doctoral students did her dissertation on just this. If you just hear talking heads versus if you’re actually seeing the images.
We do know, we do believe that the image is important, but we also know that there’s variability in the extent to which people can hear somebody describe a picture and then they can imagine it. So there’s different levels of people’s ability to be imaginative, and I suspect that those individuals may have the same sorts of effects if they hear it via a podcast versus actually seeing it.
Phil Stieg
I also find it astounding that you reported that people listening to all of the news about COVID the pandemic news – that they had more distress by watching the news than learning about the number of people that died or the restrictions that were going on.
Roxane Cohen Silver
A shocking result.
Phil Stieg
So it’s not only— yeah, so it’s not even just the news, it’s what news they’re talking about. And how do you break that down? I mean, are we going to be able to legislate this?
Roxane Cohen Silver
Well, I really don’t endorse censorship. but back in, I’m thinking, 2005, I remember speaking to a journalist group about my early 9/11 findings on the role that television exposure was playing on mental health and physical health. And people were yelling at me, actually, to say, are you suggesting that we censor these— this topic? And I said, absolutely not, but what I want is something akin to what we see on television. So I want a running message at the very bottom of the screen saying, watching this over and over again may be damaging to your health.
I think it really is up to the individual consumer to pay attention to how much they’re exposing themselves to these images or to these stories. People are quite willing to recognize that maybe their children shouldn’t be engaging with these media stories or these images, but I think that they don’t give enough attention— they don’t pay enough attention to the impact on their own psychology.
Phil Stieg
Even to the peril of society. I mean, there are so many avenues whereby we can gain information and God knows what country is putting it out there. And now with AI coming out and the ability to generate it — we’ve gotta come up with something.
Roxane Cohen Silver
This is a very important point. You know, disinformation, misinformation, AI, deep fakes, we are just scratching the surface. And it is very, very difficult for people to tell what is true versus not.
And let me speak to one, one other issue. We as perceivers of this content filter it through our own attitudes, opinions, and we see something different. And I was really struck by the shooting in Minneapolis, By ICE. There were many images and there were reports in the aftermath of the Minneapolis shootings where politicians were saying, well, I’m not sure exactly what I’m seeing here, versus somebody else saying it’s, you know, it’s an obvious murder. And they’re seeing the same images. I don’t believe people are lying. I truly believe that people are filtering this information in a way in which they— in which it’s most consistent with their pre-existing views.
Phil Stieg
So for somebody that’s listening who says we need a deeper dialogue about this, where do they go? Who do they talk to? I mean, I can’t imagine writing a letter to your congressman is going to be of much help.
Roxane Cohen Silver
I think the message is getting out. I keep thinking that at some point, we’ll see people stop reacting to the images. But in something like the Charlie Kirk shooting, there’s so many images. And I just don’t have a good answer for your excellent question.
Phil Stieg
So I guess that’s part of the problem also. I mean, people feel like they can just video something and they can just put it out there for everybody to consume it.
You’re doing a marvelous job of characterizing all of the things that are happening with exposure to this, but then what are we going to do about it?
Roxane Cohen Silver
As I said, I think the best thing we can do is convey that engaging with this, these media stories can be damaging to one’s mental and physical health.
I just think that it’s up to the consumer to pay attention to this, to be vigilant, to check the news at given times, or even if it’s throughout the day for just a few minutes, to not allow ourselves to be immersed in this kind of bad news all the time. There’s no shortage of bad news.
Phil Stieg
Is there, is there something we can say to people today that if you’re spending more than X number of hours on news consumption via every portal, it’s probably going to be unhealthy for you?
Roxane Cohen Silver
Across several of our studies, it does look to me as if it’s around 4 hours of news exposure from a variety of sources, and it could be simultaneous. So You know, maybe you’re not spending 4 hours, you’re spending 2 hours, but you’ve been bombarded by 4 different kinds of news stories. I also think that avoiding the graphic images is extremely important.
I do think people get a sense of what’s too much. Many people, after they listen to one of my talks, my colleagues will say to me, “ I try to pay attention to what you’re telling me, and I, I think I’m better at it than I, than I used to be.” They’re just being vigilant.
Phil Stieg
Do you think that it’ll end up being that there’s going to be so much bad news that we’re starting to consume that they’re going to say, wait a minute, this is having bad health effects, and maybe the AMA will come up with some guidelines for us?
Roxane Cohen Silver
I have not seen any clear guidelines from the American Psychiatric Association, for example, or the American Psychological Association. And I do want to say that 15, 20 years ago, there was a great deal of controversy about this. The diagnosis for something like post-traumatic stress disorder requires direct exposure, and the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, actually excludes media exposure as a cause for post-traumatic stress disorder.
So we don’t say that people who are engaging in media exposure are exhibiting post-traumatic stress disorder. We say that they’re exhibiting symptoms that mimic post-traumatic stress disorder. And but it’s still controversial.
Not too many years ago, I was quoted in an article in which somebody else was responding to one of the comments in one of my articles, and they said that it was absurd to think that one could have psychological, serious psychological effects from media exposure. That wasn’t that long ago. This was at the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. So 15 years ago, I think people were still resisting this.
Phil Stieg
In 2020, you apparently had the pleasure and honor of making some comments to policymakers. What, what message did you deliver?
Roxane Cohen Silver
Well, in 2020, I was invited to speak at— in Congress, and one of the things that I suggested was that we would be likely to see mental and physical consequences from repeated media exposure about disasters, about the pandemic. My colleagues and I actually wrote a paper in February of 2020 about the news media and the impending pandemic. We were suspecting from our prior research that the news media might amplify distress about the pandemic. And it sort of came true. So those were the kinds of messages that I was giving in early 2020, and it’s still in 2026. The stories are a little different, but the—
Phil Stieg
The tragedies keep coming.
Roxane Cohen Silver
There is really no shortage of tragedy to which we can be exposed.
And I think that if we could get young people and older people alike to recognize that distributing this kind of content without forethought is not wise.
Phil Stieg
So my last question for you is, During this entire conversation, I sense optimism on your part. Given everything that we said, I’d really like to understand what you’re optimistic about and why.
Roxane Cohen Silver
Tough question. I would say that I do believe that People don’t want to be feeling bad most of the time. People want to be happy, resilient.
And I think that if we can provide people with some guidance that is realistic. I mean, I think it’s not realistic to say, you know, go sit in a closet for 6 months and ignore everything that’s going on in the world around you. But I do think that people understand if they are consumed by these images and videos and bad stories, if they can understand that maybe if they can cut back just a little bit, maybe they will feel better.
Phil Stieg
Dr. Roxanne Cohen Silver, thank you so much for spending this time with us. It was a pleasure visiting with you.
Roxane Cohen Silver
Thank you so much for inviting me. I really appreciate it, and I appreciated your very thoughtful questions.
