My suggestions:

1. Turn off the tv
2. Go outside
3. Enjoy life, there's a lot of good stuff out there.

I've cut way back on watching the news and I'm not nearly as grouchy.

The list you made...all these have been causing mankind a lot of grieve for millenniums....and I suspect they will be around far longer then we here have to worry about.

At the risk of repeating myself, life's a [censored]. Then you die.

The news folks love to tell bad stuff. How often to you see "news" about something good happening???

Only a few more weeks before the mainstream media changes its narrative from "grim" to "hope". My guess is that you'll see many more stories in the news taking the "glass is half full" approach in 2009.

I don't know if anything has really changed with the world; but, I have definitely had a different "feeling" for the last few years.
Until just a few years ago, I never thought about keeping extra supplies on hand, or carrying emergency gear. Now, I couldn't imagine not making those types of preparations.

Maybe it's all really just a product of growing older and becoming more conservative or cautious as we age.(?)

Back in the mid 90's, a neighbor of mine was working on her masters degree in journalism. The topic was regarding race relations in the US and how it was reported in the news.

Starting in 1990, the amount of coverage of racial tensions started increasing, while crime data showed a real decrease in the actual number of real race related crime (which had been decreasing for several years). The paper basically showed that after the fall of PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER., there was less 'hard' news that people really cared about. This coupled with the increase in news channels (cable) drastically lowered the bar for what qualified as 'news'.

This is even more true today. I don't feel the world is fundamentally worse off today that it was 30 years ago, but back then, if a husband killed his wife and kids 3000 miles away, it was maybe an inch of news on page 34 of the paper and never mentioned on TV at all. Now we are getting all the details in real time.

When I was a kid, there was an incident where 2 cops got killed and the killer took off and hid for 2 weeks in the corn fields. Today that manhunt would be headline news for a few days. Back then, people that lived more 100 miles away didn't know anything had ever happened.

yep... job opportunity!

Even though mine study and mine job is about disaster and crisis management/policy, i can still sleep well, not worry to much, if not worry less than i used to. Enjoy life, what more can i see.

The media is a for profit business. They make money by getting people to watch. They get them to watch by sensationalizing everything that happens. The proliferation of technology also allows photos and videos of events to come from all corners of the globe now. We are seeing more bad news, but there are not more bad things happening.

True. One of my biggest gripes with the news folk is the way they edit film to show what "they" want "us" to see. Case in point, the Rodney King video. Not until there had been a riot, several deaths, and a jillion dollars in damage and public expenses did I see the first part of that video, the part where Rodney was on his feet, an officer was preparing to 'cuff him, Rodney turned and charged the officer, and the fight began. Pre-riot all we saw was Rodney on the ground being whacked by a bunch of LAPD officers.

And don't even get me started on how the LAPD took over a CHP arrest without being asked to, then messed up the prosecution...