Are things REALLY as bad as the press makes it seem?

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If all else fails, there is always The Onion.

Press is just for creating Pressure from fear on the people, specially on their minds, what they think.
They produce opinions, not truths, they re-telling story's and twisting things for commercial success.

So just don't believe what they say or you will end up insane.

Stop reading it, stop using it, stop talking about it and your life will be much better.

It is a vehicle for creating civil war's, look what happens on south american countries.

If you think the press is free, objective and not acting in interests, you are trapped in a romantic idea of press freedom from 1800's.

I don't think it is, but I've reached an age where if it is, I'm still good.

uhm.... amount of press and media etc. is at an all time high, and the number of civil wars in western countries as at an all time low. Press does actually the opposite of create civil wars - it manufactures consent.

read books. political philosophy. that certainly created civil wars in the past.

Maybe its because I am older than you, but the news has always been bad since Ive been aware of newsmedia as a child in circa 1960. And the world just keeps on turning despite all of the leading bleeding headlines. So the current news doesn't bother me any more than news has ever bothered me.

A young person on this site (not you, but you're reminding me of him right now), literally couldn't sleep because of Kim Jon Un's nuclear program. The worst thing that could happen would be for the tin horn dictator to take out one American city and kill fifty thousand of us. I grew up during the long decades of the cold war when Russia had thousands of H bomb tipped missles aimed at us, and we had the same aimed at them. Any minute a 100 million Americans could die in an instant. This Korea nuke program is not even one tenth of one percent as much of the threat we all grew up with for decades.

“Democracy dies in darkness” means that Democracy dies when people are left in the dark by authoritarianism.

Exactly.
The free press is vital to preserve democracy because authoritarianism thrives on secrecy. As Krafty points out.

So how long until Ammmmeeerrrruuucccaaa becomes an autocracy? Is there any hope for us or the world once that happens?

We’re far from that.

Just on a side-note: little boy killed 150.000 in an instant in Hiroshima, so 50.000 is an unlikely low estimate. That will trigger US response, wiping North Korea off the face of the earth. Fine. That will be followed by nuclear winter (which will cancel global warming, so that's a plus) and millions of people starving, fleeing and that will lead to civil war in all sorts if places.

You're also assuming that just because mankind was lucky enough for an individual Russian to decide to not act on the alarm of their early warning system, that this will happen again. That's a normal human fallacy. Which is sort of like playing Russian roulette with an unknown number of bullets/nuclear warheads and an unknown number of chambers in your revolver, and thinking: it always worked out in the past.

Usually things that are news are bad

The articles about bad things earn newspaper more money

When school shooting occur, front page

The schools without shootings, don't get in the news

Your facts are off, and even if you were right it would just prove my point. And I have made no fallacy.

100 to 200 thousand people did die at Hiroshima. The same number as the number who die on US highways ever two to four years.

But even that would not happen because of the very thing you said. The Norks know we would retaliate by wiping out their nation so they aren't likely to do it.

But even if they were dumb enough to nuke an American town and get their own country obliterated- were are talking about North Korea. A pipsquak half of a nation the size of Pennsylvania. North Korea is not a continental sized landmass with 100s of urban targets for thousands of H bombs like the USSR, the USA, or China, or the European Union. Nuking the norks would not be enough to start a nuclear winter.

And all of that just reiterates my point. The current North Korean tensions are just a return to what was normal for us who grew up in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. Just part of life. Except the Norks don't have anywhere near the symmetry that the soviets had with the US in nuclear war heads. So its actually a reason to loose even less sleep than a sane person might have lost any night during the aforementioned three decades.

My point was that the current crises is just a return to the normal. You have just proved my point.