The news is bad for your health. The prescription is connection.

What the media broadcasts determines people’s sense of truth and imagination. It casts spells. I mean this literally not metaphorically.

In the philosophy of language, “a performative utterance” is a sentence that doesn’t just describe reality, but changes it–when a judge says, “I sentence you to jail,” or a minister says, “I now pronounce you married.” The media is also performative utterance–it doesn’t just describe, it creates reality. What reality are we creating?

When I started running Marfa Public Radio on Election Night 2016, I was not a journalist. I studied philosophy, social work, and storytelling, which is either the perfect or the worst preparation for running a news organization. One of the first things I noticed about the news and specifically a newscast was that it seemed like a six-minute heart attack.

Journalists often throw more journalism at a problem. If there’s a crisis–more reporting, more reporters. But research shows that the news can rewire your brain, causing stress reactions and hopelessness. It impacts the nervous system and can put the body in fight or flight mode. Do journalists metabolize this? While data reflects that people are avoiding the news, the journalistic impulse seems to be flooding platforms with more information. Journalism needs an intervention.

The psychologist Heinz Kohut said one of the ways we know ourselves is by how the world mirrors us back. Mirroring gives people a sense of identity. Individuals need to be seen. How does the media mirror back humanity? As a crisis?

At Marfa Public Radio, I wanted our programming to mirror back humanity and contribute to connection, rather than overwhelm. I wanted the airwaves to honor the dead and celebrate love; I wanted the news to reflect universal human experiences. So I created two on-air rituals that continue to this day. The “Love Drive” and the “Dia de los Muertos on-air ofrenda.” They’re kinda like a pledge drive, but for connection not for money. During Love Drive, we collected love notes from across the region (and nation) and broadcast them on Valentine’s Day. For Dia de los Muertos, we collected people’s testimonials of those they have lost and read them on air.

Don’t get me wrong. There have been a lot of crises since 2016. At the beginning of the pandemic when everything was terrifying, our team worked around the clock to get people the information they needed for their physical wellbeing. It was essential and it was nonstop. We were reporting with a deep ethic to the communities we served in a region that only had two ventilators, but we were missing something huge. People were terrified and alone. No amount of reporting could meet that experience. So I threw a dance party on the air. “Dancing on My Own” was a socially-distanced dance party one month into the pandemic where people could be alone/together by tuning in via broadcast, stream, or Zoom. People participated from across the region and the country.

What is the news? Is journalism relational? Before the printing press, news traveled by mouth. Today’s “gossip” comes from the Old English god-sib — a godparent, a friend, someone who helped you through childbirth. Connection and care were inherent in news sharing.

Because we live in a culture (and work in a field) that favors dichotomous over dialectical thinking, I want to anticipate an obvious objection: “So you don’t believe in facts?” Of course I do. If the thesis we accept is that journalism is essential, then the antithesis I am proposing is that journalism, as practiced today, is bad for our health.

What reality are we creating and how do we mirror humanity?

As a 2026 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, I’m exploring how media can nurture connection and belonging — how it can serve not only our informational needs but also our existential ones: our loneliness, our search for meaning, our togetherness, our joy.

The issue I’m addressing isn’t a journalism problem — it’s a social one. We are living through a crisis of isolation and loneliness that cuts across generations, geographies, and identities. It’s like a live wire humming beneath everything. If the media has played a role in dividing us, can it also help bring us back together? What if, instead of adding to the noise, what we broadcast helped remind us of our humanity and the possibilities before us?

For the past eight years, I’ve kept a wall of ideas pointing toward this kind of media. Now, during my fellowship at Stanford, I have the opportunity to bring those ideas to life. I’m currently developing a live storytelling series and a podcast — not as part of a “good news” movement or a solutions journalism project, but as an exploration of how storytelling, ritual, and in-person connection can repair our shared social fabric. At the epicenter of technology, the technology I’m most interested in is human connection.

Because I want better spells. And anything can happen.

You can follow how these projects unfold on my substack.