The article was authored by Grisha Gasparyan in the frame of Individual projects announced by Public Journalism Club.
Does this situation sound familiar? In the morning, you open your phone thinking, “I’ll just check the news for a few minutes.” But those few minutes turn into half an hour — sometimes even longer. Headlines follow one another: sharp, sensational, and often frightening, causing anxiety, tension, helplessness, or simply.
At times, consuming media content becomes an ordeal we go through every day. And this is where a question arises — one that concerns many people today: how can we consume media without disturbing our inner peace and while protecting ourselves from “toxic” media content? To achieve this goal, two key participants — the media producer and the consumer — must reconsider their approaches and explore the principles of nonviolent communication for everyday application.
Our small-scale study, conducted from October 2025 to February 2026 and involving 67 participants (the initial target was 50), gives us grounds to say that the majority of them receive and consume information mainly not from actual news websites, but from social media platforms.
Through social media, news or media content transmits emotions and feelings to consumers more quickly due to the speed of emotional information processing. The news appears on your screen not only as text, but also as an image, a comment, and, of course, hundreds of reactions. Before you even manage to think, “What is this?”, the content has already had its emotional impact. In the responses of the study participants, the same phrases were frequently repeated: “every day,” “very often,” “I feel anxious,” “I avoid discussions,” and “I immediately react defensively.”
“The full article is available in Media.am.
This article was made possible within the framework of the “Professional Media, Practitioners and Grassroots Joining Forces for Dialogue” project, implemented by the Public Journalism Club with financial support from the European Commission.
