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I heard Ray Bradbury give a lecture at UC San Diego 18 or 19 years ago. I don't remember the substance of it, but one of his ancillary points stuck with me ever since: Never watch TV news. Never. Especially local TV news. That's the worst. Bradbury was right.

As Steve Solerno argues in the Skeptic:

We watch the news to “see what’s going on in the world.” But there’s a hitch right off the bat. In its classic conception, newsworthiness is built on a foundation of anomaly: man-bites-dog, to use the hackneyed j school example. The significance of this cannot be overstated. It means that, by definition, journalism in its most basic form deals with what life is not.

The world according to the nightly news is a bite-sized recapitulation of Thomas Hobbes -- poor, nasty, brutish and, well, short. Is it any wonder that a growing percentage of Americans get their news from Saturday Night Live and guys like Jon Stewart? But Solerno's bigger point (and Bradbury's) is that the facts are facts, and the facts are:

• The current employment rate is 95.3 percent.

• Out of 300 million Americans, roughly 299.999954 million were not murdered today.

• Day after day, some 35,000 commercial flights traverse our skies without incident.

• The vast majority of college students who got drunk last weekend did not rape anyone, or kill themselves or anyone else in a DUI or hazing incident. On Monday, they got up and went to class, bleary-eyed but otherwise okay.

A little perspective goes a long way.