Finding 'faith' when apathy starts to strike

A JOURNO'S VOICE

- KEANAN HARMSE

As journalists, and my fellow colleagues can attest to this, we are swarmed with often-harrowing and -disturbing information.

Whether it is murders or sexual assault cases, we are tasked with digging deeper, speaking to the victims of abuse or the family members still grieving for their loved ones.

It’s our moral obligation to remain professional and neutral in our reporting and detach ourselves from becoming emotionally involved when covering these stories.

However, we cannot remain numb and passive amid the alarming statistics of crime, gender-based violence (GBV) and gang crossfire killings plaguing our communities.

So many of us "doom-scroll" the nights away, absorbing so much traumatic news our eyes start to glaze, glossing over so much violence that we start to see it as "content" and start accepting these narratives as the norm.

We're overstimulated and it's so easy to become cynical about our society and powerless about the injustice we see, and the more we binge these bite-sized reels the more our algorithm curates our feed to keep us glued to the screen.