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The Independence Podcast helps everyday people discover that true freedom isn’t found in self-reliance but in total dependence on Jesus Christ. Each episode blends honest conversation, biblical truth, and practical application to help listeners move beyond emotional devotion toward consistent, daily surrender. Whether you’re new in your faith or longing to grow deeper, you’ll find encouragement to trust God fully, live from His grace, and follow Christ with courage in a world that celebrates independence but neglects dependence on the One who truly sets us free.
Bryan Dunham (00:01)
The modern media ecosystem is economically dependent on your attention and on my attention. And attention is most reliably captured through manipulating our emotions and through escalation like fear, anxiety, or outrage. And the result is a perpetual crisis that leaves us emotionally exhausted.
with distorted perceptions of reality and even potentially spiritual instability. But we as Christians confess something radically different. God is not pacing heaven, anxiously watching Fox News or CNN, and we of all people should be the most emotionally unshakable. History is not out of control, Christ reigns now, and believers are not required
to live in manufactured panic. Welcome to episode 29 of the Independence Podcast where we discuss how to live in dependence daily on God. am your host, Brian Dunham, and today's episode is entitled, The Apocalypse Du Jour. Why modern media constantly tells us the sky is falling and how to recover a theology of God's sovereignty.
that frees us from emotional captivity. I if you watched the Super Bowl last year, but typically there's always some media hype around the cost of a 30 second commercial for the Super Bowl. And last year, the rates were roughly seven to $8 million for a single 30 second commercial. So let's think about that.
$8 million for 30 seconds. I'm not great at math, that equals a little over $266,000 per second. Every single second of your attention during the Super Bowl is worth over a quarter of a million dollars to advertisers. Why? Why are they willing to pay so much money for advertising space?
during that game. Well, of course, it's because over 120 million people were watching that simultaneously. It's the largest audience year in, year out that advertisers are going to have access to, Not just an audience, but an emotionally dialed in, an emotionally charged audience.
exposes the underlying economics of all media. All media, everything from advertising in a newspaper or magazine to the news channels. Like all of them are driven off of advertising revenue. If they don't have advertising revenue, if they don't have companies willing to pay money for advertising, they cannot survive. It's how they pay the bills. And so
More eyeballs means more money. That's how they grow their advertising revenue over time is I need more viewers, I need more readers. And if I can have that, then I can position myself to companies that will be willing to pay more because there are more eyeballs. So once you realize that, a major lens opens up for understanding modern news media. More viewers equals more revenue.
So to get more viewers, I know if I can get them emotionally engaged, I will have more viewers. And the strongest emotional engagement is always fear. Which means the system naturally rewards emotionally charged coverage. You might say it this way. If a corporation
will spend $8 million for 30 seconds of your attention during the Super Bowl. Imagine what a 24 hour news network believes your attention is worth over an entire year. That's why stories have so much drama to them. That's why breaking news never stops. It's why everything becomes an existential crisis and why calm, nuanced reporting loses to emotionally activating.
content. News organizations, they may speak the language of public service, of keeping you informed, but economically they survive on the same thing as every advertiser, to keep you watching.
Because of that, they spend a lot of time convincing us that everything is urgent, everything is catastrophic, and everything depends on us staying emotionally activated. But Christianity teaches something totally different. The news says, stay afraid and keep watching. The gospel says, fear not, Christ is King. And in this environment, fear has just simply become
Monetized I don't know if you remember this if you're old enough to remember this this might be an education for some of the younger listeners for those of us that are my age and older you'll remember as a kid I had a television in my room and that television had access to four channels that had NBC ABC CBS and PBS public broadcasting system and that was it you had these four channels that you could watch and
At the end of the night, I don't know if you remember at midnight local time, what would happen is whatever show was on, right? When it would strike midnight, the screen would start playing the national anthem. You would see a picture of the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima. And after the national anthem was over, the screen would go dark or it would go into.
the white fuzz space and there was no more TV until five or six a.m. And interestingly enough, when it came to the news, the news channels were on for about an hour a day, if I remember correctly. We had about 30 minutes of local news and then 30 minutes of national news. I remember we would sit down as a family and we would watch the local news and then we would also watch
the national news. And back then, you know, the news arrived daily. But now it's every single second. The 24 hour news cycle created a structural problem because now we have news channels that operate around the clock, but there's never enough actual news to fill the machine. Do you think there's more news today than there was?
30 years ago when we had an hour of nightly news. No, not really. So when you have 24 hours to talk about an hour's worth of content, speculation becomes content. Outrage becomes programming. Anxiety becomes engagement. And the media doesn't merely report emotion. It manufactures an emotional atmosphere and it creates the space where normalcy and calm
are bad for business. And so if you think about how the news media in particular has moved over time, that hour a day of information, once you expand that to 24 hours, it's not just information that you're delivering anymore, then you need to have some commentary to fill the space. And then it goes from commentary to, have a lot of advertising space I need to fill in a 24 hours.
channel, right? got a lot now I have all a day's worth of advertising space to fill. So now I need to have some emotional commentary to ensure people stay tuned, stay dialed in. And then it turns into over time to keep the viewers watching emotionally charged commentary, identity warfare, existential panic.
And now even we consume a lot of our media through social media, is even drives the machine even more because you know that's recycled air, right? Like the algorithms in all your social media just keep showing you the things you're already looking at. And so it's not, know, when you watch social media, you're seeing a lot of what you already have been watching. And so it further reinforces the idea.
that there's something to be angry or upset about and that everybody is moving the same direction as you and it creates this outrage scenario. But what if, what if I could tell you right now, what's going to happen over the next 10 years? What if I looked in my crystal ball and I said to you, over the next 10 years, here's some things that are gonna happen. We're gonna go through a major economic downturn and recession.
There's going to be an escalation from the fighting that's happening in the Middle East right now. As a result of that conflict, we're going to have a massive oil embargo. will quadruple the price of oil per barrel. And that's going to lead to widespread fuel shortages across the United States. In fact, you'll only be allowed to refuel your car on certain days of the week.
that'll be determined by the last digit of your license plate. The sitting president of the United States will be assassinated. There will be racial riots, social unrest across the country. We will be on the verge of a nuclear conflict. Inflation is going to go to double digits and there will be, of course, fear of national collapse. Now, what's interesting about that decade that I'm describing to you?
actually isn't the future, that's the past. That was 1963 to 1973. We endured all of those things. In just a few years, we saw all of that happen. President Kennedy had been assassinated, not to mention Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. The Vietnam War was escalating nightly on television. There was the Six-Day War where Israel preemptively struck Syria, Lebanon, Jordan.
There were massive protests, riots across the US, the Cold War that was hanging over everything. We had the OPEC oil embargo, gas shortages, inflation exploding, recession and stagflation. If cable news and social media had been around in 1973, Americans would have believed civilization itself was ending. And yet, and yet, people still raised families. They went to church.
They worked at their jobs, they invested, they built businesses and history continued. Every single generation has had its reasons, their own apocalypse du jour that the world is about to end. There's never been a shortage of headlines convincing people that normal life is no longer possible. And just think about some of the major events we've endured.
Over the last 50 years, Pearl Harbor, Cuban missile crisis. mentioned JFK's assassination, the oil embargo inflation. Reagan was attempted. You know, they attempted to assassinate Reagan, Trump as well. Black Monday, the Gulf War, 9-11, the Great Recession, COVID. Yet market societies and ordinary life continued over time. But the media is training us to interpret every crisis as ultimate.
unprecedented but history says otherwise
and Christians especially should understand this, the consistent biblical message is never panic. It is perseverance under the sovereignty of God. And so I'm not saying we should deny problems or things that exist, but we definitely need to examine the amplification and emotional manipulation.
that is going on in our world. And if you look at the apocalypse du jour for us, whether that is ⁓ our democracy that's collapsing, AI is going to replace humanity, aliens are coming for us, the economy is completely unstable and about to fall apart, the climate catastrophe, more pandemics potentially and lockdowns coming, political elections.
being characterized as the most important in history. When you look around at the current racial divide in our country, whether it's war escalation, identity, politics, male, female, social media outrage, the decline of the church, the narrative there, like every issue that is significant.
and needs to get discussed in the 24 hour cycle in ways that are emotionally driven to keep viewers coming back, to keep their attention, to drive their advertising revenue. It means that every issue becomes ultimate, becomes immediate, becomes emotionally totalizing. The media is not going to say, or very rarely will just say, hey, this matters. What they're going to say is this changes everything forever.
and you should panic immediately. But the psychological impact of that is we become addicted to that emotional outrage piece and we've come perpetually vigilant, like always on the lookout for what's coming next, unable to mentally or psychologically rest or even to prioritize actual responsibilities. And
This is connected to doom scrolling, chronic anxiety, even learned helplessness. Much of media consumption functions like an abusive relationship. Like the audience is kept fearful, dependent, reactive, exhausted, feeling isolated, and language like developing story, breaking news, know, stay tuned just after the break.
Experts warn, endless countdown clocks, dramatic music. Like all of this is emotionally loaded framing for a reason and the emotional manipulation often matters more than the facts themselves. And if what I've shared so far doesn't convince you that that's true, do know the two most common words to describe the movements of a market by media?
the two most common words used to describe the movements of a market. This is any market, stock market, oil market, any market. The two most common words are sore and plunge, sore and plunge. Now, if you don't think those words have an emotional reaction on you, the next time you're on vacation and you wanna go up to your hotel room, you walk over to the bank of elevators that are there along the wall and instead of those buttons saying up,
or down, they say, soar or plunge. Are you going to get on that elevator? Right. I wouldn't either. I'm not telling you not to be informed. But if a pastor preached every sermon like the world was ending by Friday, we'd ultimately call them unstable. But when media personalities do that nightly, we call it programming.
That's an appropriate word, programming. Think about that one. Just asking you to open your eyes to why things get reported like they do and what the intention behind it is. The intention is less to keep you informed on the facts and more to keep your eyes on the show. And the main point is constant fear can reshape your soul because fear
competes with trust in God. This is Psalm 46, starting in verse one. Like this is saying, understanding God is sovereign and we will not.
fear, even if the mountains fall into the sea. The media wants to grow fear, wants to grow rage, wants to grow ⁓ tribalism, like you pick your side, you pick your team, and that leads to despair. But as Christians, we are called to sober mindedness, steadiness, hope, patience, faithfulness, and
While many believers confess that they trust God's sovereignty, too many times we're consuming media like practical atheists. God is not threatened by the modern news cycle. Christ reigns now. Human history is not chaotic to God. Nations rise and fall under his authority. The church has survived worse eras than ours and Christians are not called to panic.
but we are called to faithfulness. So a couple of different verses here I wanna share with you. The first one comes from Daniel and it's Daniel chapter four, verse 35. And this is actually King Nebuchadnezzar talking. And he says, all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing. And he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among all the inhabitants of the earth.
And none can stay his hand or say to him, what have you done? And the next is Colossians chapter one, verses 15 through 17. And he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. That's speaking of Christ. For by him, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.
Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And then finally, Ephesians chapter one verse 11, in him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him.
who works all things according to the counsel of his will. Trusting in God's sovereignty is not apathetic and it's not denying the issues and problems that we face. It's not disengagement from what's happening in the world, but it does mean refusing hysteria, rejecting emotional.
captivity and remaining faithful in ordinary life. The media profits from your fear, but God calls us to faithfulness. We should be the most unshakable, the least manipulable people in society. The sky is always falling somewhere, yet Christ remains seated on the throne. So,
What are some thoughts here? If you were watching a 24 hour news cycle more than you're reading your Bible, that's probably an issue. I would encourage you to limit your news intake. I don't even watch news on TV anymore. I consume news through the computer, typically things I want to look at or things I might want to know about because once you understand like,
The whole point here is just to keep your eyes glued so they can make more money. It devalues what they have to say. I would encourage you to avoid doom scrolling and outrage entertainment. It can be addicting to watch some of that stuff. I would encourage you to recognize its impact on your emotions and on your soul. read scripture before you read headlines. Recover silence and prayer.
Recover a Sabbath day, like pushing all that stuff to the side, setting your phone on do not disturb, not even turning on the TV, spending time with your family. My daughter and I just recently learned how to play gin rummy together as a way to interact and have fun without having to on a Saturday without feeling the need to just sit in front of the TV and consume. And just the general idea of
leaning into the relationship with the Lord? Like how much time, I became convicted over time of how much time I was spending watching television in a given day versus spending time with God. And what am I looking for in my consuming of media that I probably should be looking to God for?
And so I would really encourage you to spend time in the word, replace some of that media time that you're presently spending with time in his word, in silence, and in prayer. You were not designed by God to emotionally process everything going on in the world every hour of the day. It's not being dismissive of suffering, not being naively optimistic.
but being deeply anchored. The Christian answer is not denial, it is God's sovereignty. History is not spiraling out of control. Jesus Christ is Lord.
If you found this episode helpful, please follow the show, share with a friend, and until next time, grace and peace, my friends.