Scary Things Series

Installment 3: The 24-Hour News Cycle

So far all of my Scary Things posts have been about things that happened to me, but are unlikely to happen to you or your loved ones. I just present these stories sort of as an outside chance, what-if scenario so, if they do happen to you you’ll know you can manage. Mostly, though I post these as stories to illustrate that sometimes weird, inexplicable things happen and it’s important to know you’re strong enough to hack it, and you can always find a way to make it seem not so bad.

Today’s post, though, is a scary thing that will almost certainly happen to you because that’s just the world we live in.

I’ll start with saying that shortly after my pacemaker was installed my contract with my phone company was up for renewal, so they sent me a new iPhone. At that time that was the iPhone 11. I used it all the time, as I always do with my phone and I didn’t have one single issue with the phone, with my heart, with anything.

Okay, So What’s the Problem?

The problem is the News Idiots had other plans for me.

Way, way back in 1930 a BBC newscaster on a day when nothing noteworthy happened said to his audience “There is no news” and then someone kindly played the piano until it was time for regular programming to recommence. Can you imagine that happening today? And it’s not because more stuff happens now. It’s because news people wouldn’t have a job if there wasn’t news and, because of that, they aren’t always scrupulous about what they report and how they report it.

Maybe there’s News Idiots out there right now reading this getting mad at me for my characterization of their chosen profession and for calling them idiots, and maybe I am being overly critical, but I think we can all agree that some news stories demonstrate fewer scruples than others. Let me get back to what I was saying before about the iPhone and you’ll see where I’m going with this:

While I was busy living life and using my new phone, some doctor somewhere had published an article saying that the magnet in the iPhone 11 was strong enough to disable your pacemaker or other implanted cardiac device. News outlets took that and ran stating that we would all certainly die or something to that effect if we didn’t immediately fling our phones in to the sea or whatever they wanted us to do about it.

Is this the face of a man with an evil, pacemaker-disabling plan?

I had been using my phone for about a month or two by the time this report came out, and I had not even come close to dying in that whole time, so I took these reports with a grain of salt, but I can’t deny they kinda got under my skin a little.

I know it seems like this is a very specific example, but the fact is the news and the media at large WILL eventually tell you that you’re definitely going to die if they haven’t said so already, whether they’re talking about my pacemaker, or whatever is going on with your heart. It’s one thing if you’re not in the middle of any health problems but, if you are, these things are going to hit you much harder than they usually would.

So What Are We Going to Do About This Problem?

The first thing we’re going to do is recognize that even the most respected of news sources is going to be a News Idiot some of the time. It’s not because these news outlets are run by bad people (although maybe they are, I don’t know them), but even good people have to pay their bills and that sometimes requires pandering to click bait. So how can we recognize click bait when we see it? We can’t always, but here’s what we can do to make this less scary:

• Look at the headline. If it contains the word “might” or “may” or “could” or “can” or any similar words, depending on the context, chances are pretty good it is entirely made up. For example, during all the hubbub about Y2K, my local news had a report about how September 9th, 1999 (9/9/99) COULD cause just as big a problem as Y2K. They were all being so careful to couch everything so heavily in hypotheticals it was immediately clear they had five minutes to fill in their news broadcast, so they dug up the most preposterous nonsense they could find.

• If they want to tell you about something that may be a serious threat to your health, just wait until after this commercial break. Or tune in to the news at 6:00. Or click this link. Or pay for a subscription to our news service… keep scrolling. If something is genuinely a risk to public health, they’ll just say so. If they don’t, it is not something that you need to panic about.

• Look at where they’re getting this information from. Is it one person saying this? Is it one study? Is that study peer-reviewed? Find these things out. If this is coming from one source that has yet to be verified by other experts, there may be some validity to it, but it’s probably no cause for panic. Especially if it’s something like my iPhone example where I had been using the killer phone in question for some time with zero negative repercussions.

• While you’re considering the source of this information, consider whether or not they stand to profit from you believing this, whether it is true or not. So, for instance, if a rival phone manufacturer was funding this research into whether or not iPhones will kill us all, that should be enough to shed a bit of doubt on their results.

• Ask your doctor. If you have an appointment coming up, it would be a good idea to file this news report in your memory bank so you can ask them about it when you get there. As it happened, with my iPhone example, I had an appointment coming up with the pacemaker clinic so I asked them about this article. They told me that the magnet in an iPhone was strong enough to alter my pacemaker but only if I held it closer than 15 cm (if you’re American that’s roughly 4 tater tots) away from the device itself. So talking on it will not change anything. And even if I do hold it closer than that, the worst thing it can do is restore my pacemaker to factory settings, and it changes back to my own personalized calibration as soon as I move the phone away. So I will not die. The worst thing that will happen is that, if my heart happens to need the device and I’m holding my phone too close, it will beat a time or two at a different rate than it normally would. Worst case scenario is I’ll feel a bit weird for a second or two.

It’s really easy for these news reports to make you nervous. They can snowball, too. It wasn’t long before I started hearing that fridge magnets would certainly kill me too, which seems excessive no matter how prone you are to catastrophizing. So when you hear these reports, just remember that the people doing the reporting get paid more the more views or clicks or whatever your attention equates to for them.

This fridge magnet would slap you silly for a dollar but that’s about all the harm a fridge magnet is going to do to you, pacemaker or not.

Tell me in the comments about your own experiences with unnecessary fearmongering. And then maybe take a break from news. Have some ice cream instead.