A recent letter to The Day lamented the media’s relentless preoccupation with negative news.

The writer observed “Nobody likes to keep reading about dreadful stuff all the time.” I couldn’t agree more!

She pointed out that recent headlines insisted we relive the tragic flu epidemic of 1918. We’re masochists! If there’s no new bad news, we’ll drag out old bad news!

And it’s not just newspapers. Television news has become a circus of fear that has inflicted me with “news fatigue.”

A Pew Research Center report released earlier this year claimed “Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of white Americans express fatigue with the amount of news, much higher than among both Hispanic (55 percent) and black Americans (55 percent). Women are also somewhat more likely than men to feel worn out (71 percent vs. 64 percent, respectively).”

With the U.S. population at 327 million in 2017, that’s a lot of people.

There are certainly good news reports, particularly at the local level, but national news is overwhelmingly about tragedy and human failure.

Some television news shows have become rampant, emotional home invasions.

When did television’s mission to inform become to “bombard with voyeuristic tragedy”?

I’m chock full of compassion for my fellow citizens, but do I really need to know about train wrecks in India, a ferry sinking in Zanzibar, or a domestic dispute gone horribly wrong in Des Moines?

Even weathermen use scare tactics by exaggerating impending storms and reporting weather disasters around the world. Bad weather has become news, even when thousands of miles away.

One of the worst offenders is surely ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir. Sadly, it’s also touted as “America’s most watched news show.” Night after night, Muir pours death and destruction into homes across America.

Muir’s broadcast is a tirade of human misery. He shouts the word “deadly” within minutes, and fires fearful, incendiary words like “gruesome,” “horrific” and “violent,” into our homes with the staccato rhythm of a machine gun.

The show is a verbal flame thrower.

Martha Stout, Ph.D., is a psychologist, a 25-year faculty member of the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of “The Paranoia Switch” (2007).

Stout says that on Sept. 11, 2001, the “fear switch” in our brains got flicked.

Since then, fear has transformed our behavior, and the paranoia switch in our brains can be pushed over and over by “fear brokers” who manipulate our emotions for their own agendas.

These predators could be politicians, salesmen or television news programs, people who “use language that pulls for primitive effect.”

Is it any wonder that anxiety is the most common mental illness in the U.S., affecting 40 million adults? TVs gushing purveyors of doom invading our living rooms and kitchens every night can’t be helping.

In “The Better Angels of Our Nature (Why Violence has Declined),” Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, says that media follow the watchword “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Pinker claims television’s bombardment of violent news warps our impression of the world, disconnecting us from reality, since violence in the world has actually declined throughout history.

TV fear brokers relentlessly flick our fear switch for their own gain (ratings).

Personally, I’m tired of being waterboarded by hyper TV news reporting. One critic says viewers of television news often feel like they’re “drinking from a firehose.”

As I get older, I value quality of life, with no desire to drown in calamities out of my control.

Fortunately, curing news fatigue is as easy as flipping a switch.

John Steward lives in Waterford and can be reached at tossinglines@gmail.com, or visit johnsteward.online.