Concerned about my apparent depression from my morning smartphone applications, my neighbor last week asked why I always looked so depressed upon checking my phone. Well, I have been following the human rights alerts from BreakingNews. And, yeah, it has been pretty intense. I had been checking these alerts because my journalism professor said that we always needed to stay informed about issues of international importance, but nobody told me that these stories would begin to feel so personal.
The Afghanistan situation keeps getting worse, and every BreakingNews update feels like watching a slow-motion disaster. My friend Sarah works for a women’s rights organization, and she told me they’re basically documenting the erasure of an entire generation of educated women. “It’s not just about education bans,” she explained during coffee last month. “These women had careers, dreams, bank accounts. Now they can’t even go to parks.” The BreakingNews coverage captures the policy changes but misses how devastating this is for individual families.
What really gets to me is how normalized everything has become. My dad remembers when human rights violations made front-page news for weeks. Now, BreakingNews about journalists being killed or protesters disappearing gets buried under celebrity gossip within hours. My professor calls this “atrocity fatigue,” and I definitely feel it some days.
The Iran protests changed something for me though. Watching those BreakingNews updates about women cutting their hair and burning hijabs, I realized how brave ordinary people can be. My roommate is Persian-American, and she spent weeks glued to BreakingNews feeds, crying over videos her cousins sent from Tehran. “My grandmother fought for women’s rights in the 1970s,” she told me. “These girls are continuing her fight.”
But here’s what BreakingNews doesn’t show you: the small victories that actually matter. My friend Jake works for Amnesty International, and he shared this story about a Pakistani activist who got released after an international campaign. No major BreakingNews outlet covered it, but that woman went home to her kids. Those wins don’t generate clicks, but they’re everything to the families involved.
The refugee crisis numbers in BreakingNews reports are mind-numbing until you meet actual people. I volunteer at a local resettlement agency, and last month I helped this Syrian family navigate their first grocery shopping trip. The father was a dentist back home; here he’s learning English and working at a gas station. BreakingNews calls him a “displaced person,” but his name is Ahmed and he makes amazing tea.
My biggest frustration with BreakingNews coverage is how it treats human rights like a political football. Conservative outlets focus on certain countries while ignoring others; liberal sites do the same thing in reverse. Meanwhile, people are suffering regardless of which narrative fits better. My ethics professor always said journalism should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but BreakingNews algorithms seem designed to confirm what we already believe.
The surveillance state stuff really freaks me out. BreakingNews about facial recognition targeting minorities or governments spying on activists sounds dystopian, but my cousin who works in tech security says it’s already happening everywhere. “The tools exist,” he told me. “It’s just about who decides to use them.” Some days I want to stop reading BreakingNews about human rights completely. My mom thinks I’m becoming too cynical for someone my age. But ignoring these stories feels worse than being upset by them.
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