Reading the news is the new smoking
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experimental-history.com
Stay safe, and I wish you all the luck I can that you all manage to drive out the Russian invaders.
But completely ignorance of what’s going on in the world is not something to be lauded. It’s how we’ve ended up in the situation we find ourselves in today, a fact free environment where politicians get away with murder (sometimes literally!) because so many people aren’t paying attention.
Equating reading the news is smoking feels completely incorrect on a number of levels.
I can’t argue with your premise because I agree, but the empirical data shows that if anything there is a positive correlation between accessibility of information and further descent into… whatever it is you’d describe is our modern situation.
It may not be causative but it’s also not really a sufficient counteracting force.
a) there are more other things than ever before too. Used to be folks would watch the nightly news because there were only four channels or so to even watch. Now you have endless options.
b) the competition between all the news options means that more of them are leaning into opinionated content that you’ll either identify with on a tribal basis or get outraged by, because that gets more views. Informing the public is a secondary goal.
This strategy was laid out by Steve Bannon in the old frontline PBS interview where he called the media “the opposition party.”
“They’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time,” he said. “All we have to do is flood the zone. … Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never – will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
Also see Vance’s recent comments about how nobody would hold Nixon accountable for watergate if it happened today, it would be lost in the next news cycle.
Paying attention to the news can be almost anything from pointlessly harmful, to entirely necessary. "The News" isn't just reading outrage coverage and politics, world events beyond the muttering of politicians and business leaders exists. There's also such a thing as curating and moderating your intake, as well as dealing with underlying issues. A lot of people who feel overwhelmed or made helpless by the problems in their lives take that energy and apply it to global problems instead, especially young people.
That's not the news being "toxic" like nicotine and smoke though, that the collision of emotional instability and reality.
If you read a wide spectrum of news sources with high standards (established non-tabloid newspapers and reputable long form publishers), I would be willing to bet that you are far better off (pick any metric) than someone spending the same amount of time with OAN/Fox/Daily Mail, etc.
This goes for someone anywhere on the political spectrum; I'm not just picking on the right. I would much rather live in a society of people that I don't necessarily agree with but that get their information from sources that value truth, than live with people of the same ideological bent, but only get their news from propaganda.
I can have a conversation with someone who thinks we're on the wrong side of the peak on the Laffer curve and wants to lower government spending. I can't have a conversation with someone that heard that immigrant run daycares are feeding pets to children and that we should cut daycare programs from the government budget.
The only solution for a thinking person is to read widely and synthesize all your knowledge into a slightly more accurate picture of the whole.
Social media and fringe alt media can be bad for people with cognitive issues, but that’s not a reason to get rid of them.
(Note, there are many times when both the MSM and most of the alt media present a distorted picture! I would argue the ongoing Iran crisis is one of those times.)
I respectfully object to this. I’m thinking of research that was done a few years ago, measuring American’s knowledge of current events. The folks in the research that leaned right were generally more informed - meaning, they knew about a lot more currents events. But they were also overwhelmingly wrong about what they ‘knew’. Further, folks on the right tended to rate themselves higher than left-leaning folks wrt their knowledge, even though they were wrong a lot more.
What situation are you talking about?
The world is less violent, more affluent than 30 years ago, but appears to be the opposite due to 24/7 news cycle.
Expanding out to the entire world and choosing the arbitrary point of thirty years ago doesn’t change that fact.
Even for USA,
1. The 90s were the most violent period in terms of crime.
2. Corruption has neither increased or decreased in the last decade.
3. Other than the 2020 election during the pandemic, the number of votes cast has increased in every election contrary to your claim.
> The 90s were the most violent period in terms of crime.
So any increase in violence from, say, five years ago to today doesn’t matter because it isn’t as bad as the 90s? ICE agents killing people and detaining others without recourse is just a big whatever?
> Corruption has neither increased or decreased in the last decade.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? Because the corruption of the current administration is widely known and goes beyond even the conspiracy theories of what the previous administration did.
> Other than the 2020 election during the pandemic, the number of votes cast has increased in every election contrary to your claim
Voter suppression does not mean “reduce the overall number of votes cast nationwide”. It is a deliberate attempt to prevent certain voters (i.e. the ones who are going to vote against you) from successfully casting a vote. And the simple act of trying to do that is notable even if it isn’t a success. If someone repeatedly tried and failed to break into your house you wouldn’t shrug your shoulders and ignore it.
If you’re ignorant of all of this then you’re proving yourself a great example of why paying attention to the news actually does matter.
* You can have direct email feeds about the things you find important.
* You can use RSS readers curated to your interests.
* You can listen to podcasts.
* You can—gasp!—talk to people around you who are more knowledgeable than you on these areas.
News websites make money of you visiting and staying on their site, so they give you stuff that will get you to come back. Their interests are almost certainly not aligned with yours.
If you define your own priorities, you can define for yourself what it means to pay attention and be informed, and then seek "news" specifically on those topics.
Non profit news also doesn’t have the issues you’re describing. Sites like Propublica do incredible work.
The reality is that everyone has a perspective. That person you have a conversation with doesn’t necessarily have an unbiased opinion. They may have incentives if their own to convince you of something. That’s why a varied media diet is a better option.
Just enough to stay roughly informed, yet not drowning in it.
We go stir crazy at home now, a sensation I have forgotten since my childhood, and feel almost obliged to go out to do things lest we go crazy from boredom. It's wonderful, and I can't recommend it enough.
And post on HN? :)
On the other hand, yes, absolutely put the phone down at the dinner table and engage with those who are present. No questions there.
Finally, my kids are getting to the age where their friends have phones and use them to communicate. My kids don't yet have that and are reliant on me to text parents, which is a lot of friction for everyone involved. Their summer is very boring because they hardly get to see their friends. So, sure, fight boredom by entertaining yourself, but that's a lonely existence.
However, for the few details-oriented analytic people among us, the news are a *mental pit hole*. This is what I saw on myself since 2020. The mind works under an illusion that there is a possibly to synthesize some positive a change in your personal life based on information from the news - but it's wrong. It didn't keep me from browsing though, and getting addicted to those information streams, just like sugar.
So occasionally I do a 'news detox' like the OP describes.
Surely social developments can affect you and your neighborhood, your city, or your country on the long term, but in that case it is better to consume a monthly or yearly digest.
Or a daily digest. I vibe-coded a daemon that sends me the Wikipedia's daily summaries, once a day. It's a one page of 'this is what happened' without interpretation (but with left-leaning bias, because Wikipedia).
I know SO many people that feel the exact opposite way about Wikipedia
> but with left-leaning bias, because Wikipedia).
Well, the core problem is that conservatism (or rather, what most conservative parties make it out to be) doesn't exactly correspond with reality - particularly where stuff such as climate change is concerned.
I remember back many years ago I would only think about politics and all that when I read The Economist once every few days. Or I would read NewsWeek once a week.
Aside from that I wouldn’t think about the news at all.
Nowadays with smartphones the constant bombardment of news….thats what the new smoking. Not the news in of itself.
Actually if you look at the negative cognitive effects of constant news reading….I would say that reading the news is the new drinking rather than the new smoking.
Our society is under attack and changing rapidly in dangerous ways. Staying informed might not be the same as enlisting and heading overseas to fight the good fight, but we owe our current pax americana to those who did. So I stay informed so I can occasionally enter the fray in our contest of ideas. The worst of what is happening now is because too many people are under and ill-informed.
"Remind me... to write an article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers."— Stranger in a Strange Land
From the 50s to the mid 90s, people saw the news as a dull obligation. You watched the news because it was important, to be a good citizen.
Then came the Iraq War, and CNN made that duty a 24 hour operation. When the war ended, they had to keep filling up a 24 hour news cycle even though it was no longer a crisis. So they found ways to make the news fun, especially when Fox News realized that it was fun to be angry all the time.
There's still this lingering idea that you're a better person for watching the news, but it has long since ceased to be true. At most, you need the 12 daily minute news segment (before the sports, weather, lifestyle, and "here's a bunny on a surfboard" closer). You don't even need that much, but it's a hell of a lot better than a drug with an unlimited supply.
The only news that's still viable / widely consumed are national and international news, and they generally don't cover crime less severe than mass murder.
So I suggest that the main evidence in the article, the disconnect between crime perception and reality is not caused by news consumption. People were more aware of local murders, muggings etc in the past when local media was a regular part of people's lives.
IMO it's caused by social media consumption.
The biggest criticism I've received is that I am in a privileged position and so I can afford to do so. I think this is probably true but my mental health isn't worth the alternative.
For years, I read many online newspapers a day, as well as journalism trade publications. I also did a little low-key activism, during an earlier tech industry gold rush, when caring was less fashionable.
Today, I read almost zero news, and have set up filters on social media to block most references to the awful.
I have a pretty good idea about some very bad dynamics going on, but I can't do anything about them.
Were I to dwell on the very bad news, throughout each day, I wouldn't be able to do any small bits of good. Such as by contributing to a non-evil startup. Or trying to get sufficient resources that I can afford to share more.
Some people need to be told to take a step back, before they're destroyed by empathy and futile problem-solving. Other people need to be told to care more, or to be less self-centered. Other people need to be told not to be so incredibly awful, that they are ruining everything for everyone else.
I decided I'm in the first group, and hope to shift into an overly-comfortable second group, then fine-tune to somewhere between the two.
Even when I go coldest turkey, I’ve found that actually important news will find me, often in a way that makes it easier to judge for myself whether it’s good or bad.
For me, removing myself from Facebook (2010) and Twitter (2023) was the best thing I have ever done for my mental health.
(... which explains, among other things, the multiple references to a singular Trump presidency)
For example, he mentions reading about genocide and not doing anything about it. In a democratic state the thing you do about it - aside from giving money to NGOs and other groups who are actually helping on the ground, protesting, sending letters to politicians and editors, boycotting businesses that align themselves with it - is to vote against the people who enable it. If you do nothing about genocide, you don't care about genocide. You always have levers to pull. Our role in a democracy is not to be a passive consumer; we have to use our votes, our voices, and apply pressure about the things we care about.
The idea that the news doesn't tell you about the historical context of a particular event is also an important tell. That's a pretty good indication that you're reading the wrong news, not that news as a whole is bad. There is plenty of really good, smart, long-form, deeply reported, contextually revealing journalism out there. I agree that there's a lot of news that doesn't fit that description. But it's out there.
But most importantly, this is a barometer of how people are actually feeling. The news industry is doing a terrible job of meeting people where they're actually at.
Part of the problem is that we are genuinely in a tough spot in history: rising authoritarianism, climate change, oligarchy, and many other factors are joining together to squeeze the most vulnerable communities. I don't know that looking away is the right thing to do, but the fire alarm analogy is almost good: it's true that if you're subjected to continuous peril you'll stop paying attention, but the peril is real and not akin to a broken alarm.
Perhaps what we need is a newsroom that only takes a step back and reports on the underlying trends, removing a dependence on the individual stories of today. For example, we should be worrying a lot more about the integrity of midterm elections here in the US, but the individual stories get lost in the mix.
This kind of checking out / mass abdication and apathy seems really dangerous in a democracy.
Facing reality is so boomer...