Bad News for America

There's a lot of bad news in America.

You can't escape it. You turn on the TV and it's there. You flip open the newspaper and there's more bad news. The radio stations play nothing but bad news. And then there are the Internet websites, with their endless streams of bad news—that's how we feel about it.

But what if we're wrong? What if all this bad news isn't really bad at all? What if it's actually good for us?

That's what legendary radio broadcaster Paul Harvey believes: that there is a purpose for all the bad news in America, and that purpose is to make us stronger as individuals and as a nation. He explains this idea in his 2003 Landon Lecture Series at Kansas State University, which he dedicated to former President Dwight Eisenhower.