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Before doomscrolling became a 21st century concern about the engineered addiction to the kind of news that induce powerful negative emotions, the “mean world syndrome” was coined in the 20th century to describe viewers’ addiction to both fictional and journalistic accounts of violence on television, and their resulting negatively biased perception of the world.
And before that, in the 19th century, the concern of the day was the readers’ neurotic addiction to newspapers that overindexed on violence and conflicts.
“Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity. And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … I do not understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.” wrote Baudelaire in 1860.
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