News obsession isn’t a harmless pastime. It’s a distraction from what matters
My office has a TV on mute with a news-ticker, conveniently located above the entrance to the bathrooms. I don’t consider myself a news junkie, but I can’t look away. It’s a disaster unfolding that I need to rubberneck until it’s out of my line of vision.
During these Supreme Court appointments, my eyes have been glued to that ticker at the bottom. Every time I take a “break” from work to use the bathroom, I glance up and find a new thing to get upset about. When I get back to my desk, I look up said horrifying news and get even more upset.
A few days ago I thought, “What if I just don’t look up?”
The things I’ve been getting so caught up in don’t need to upset me every hour of every day. In fact, if I didn’t look up one time during the course of the day, I could still catch up on all the upsetting things once per night and actually enjoy the rest of my day.
I could make the radical decision to be present in my own life.
News is legitimized entertainment
When I was growing up, my dad watched ABC News every night, with Peter Jennings.
Now he watches Fox News.
But regardless of political bent, I see now that ABC and Fox are The Same. Thing. Why? Because they are created as escape from our daily reality, an escape that we welcome with open arms.
I’ve been asking myself — why do newspapers include comics and puzzles?
Is the entertainment and escape offered by Sudoku any difference from the entertainment and escape offered by the latest celebrity trials?
Why does The New York Times have so many pages? How much of that information is useful to the public and how much is created to draw readers to the back of the paper where the ads are?
Being a news junkie is comparable to being a sci-fi junkie or a soap opera junkie. You are watching events unfold for hours each day, events upon which you cannot effect change at that hourly rate. As with a soap opera, news stories build suspense until you can’t look away. And as with a soap opera, if you tune in 3 days later, almost nothing will have happened.
“BUT I CALL MY SENATOR!!!” you argue. Well, how many times per day do you call your senator vs how many times per day you consume news? How many times does calling your senator need to happen within a timeframe of 1 hour or else it’s too late?
Do you really need to keep up in real time, or could you get by with getting one national news download per day? Or one per week?
What we call ‘news’ is just empty calories for the mind. — @Bruce Flow
National-news-junkieism — our middle-class pastime — is a copout. we’re leaving our lives. We’re withdrawing from reality like one of those people who get together to speak Klingon.
In fact, I find out all the world news I need to know by reading for 1 hour at the end of each month. Instead, I keep up with local news, news for which I can truly effect change.
If there’s anything urgent I need to call my senator about, I’ll hear it through my news-obsessed friends who are devouring this stuff like chicken ‘n waffles. There is ZERO reason I need to know every quotable phrase of the Kavanuagh hearings. There is ZERO reason I need to be so glued to the ticker that I can’t even say hi to my coworker on her way out of the bathroom.
News junkies feed on others’ heartbreak
News entertainment — yes, both online and print ARE entertainment — feeds off people’s misfortunes like piranhas chasing koi. As people who appear in the news can tell you, it does not feel good to have your problems played out in front of the nation. It’s horrible to be plagued by swarms of hungry reporters camped in your driveway.
Ever since the Columbine shooting, we’ve watched with fascination the series of ways kids come up with to kill each other. I pretend it’s all compassion, that I’m getting involved for hours every week because I can help. I’ve never helped once, unless voting once a year and posting to people who already agree with me on facebook constitutes “helping.” Really, I’m just watching in horror and disgusting fascination as people’s lives get ruined.
I’m so ashamed.
There are incredibly positive ways to consume news. For example, I can read the headlines about the hurricanes and crisis, get my credit card out, and donate to the rescue efforts. But instead of spending that 2 minutes to give money and move on, I spend 30 minutes glued to video replays and reading quotes from heartbroken people.
Am I the only one? Let’s take a good long look at ourselves:
We are gaining PLEASURE out of the latest earthquake as it destroys people’s homes and kills their pets. We’re spending our time GLUED to bloody images of a murder, someone’s child or someone’s grandfather. We feel IMPORTANT telling our friends horrifying stories about a gang rape. We feast our minds on ruined lives.
Speculation is not news
news: NOUN /nuz/
Newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent events.
Most of what we call “news” is speculation. Specu-tainment, if you will.
Specutainment is not news. By definition, it is fantastic renderings of the future that are based on insufficient facts. Specutainment is a constant stream of toxic spew designed to keep us watching. Entire hourlong “news” shows unfold fear-mongering fictions. Hosts call in experts to tell us what is going to happen. But 80% of the time, IT DOESN’T HAPPEN.
Specutainment is predominately negative. And that’s by design.
Negative news is reporting gold. News IS a business, not a public service.* The more negative and out-of-proportion the speculations, the more viewers a show gets. Ratings go through the roof and the cost of ad slots skyrockets. Ratings are based on attracting more viewers, not quality of information. News production and scripting has become the ultimate popularity contest.
Have you ever heard someone speculate about all the companies that are going to go green this year? Imagine an expert speculating about how many lives will be saved by more people walking and less people driving. How about a prediction of how many school kids are going to buck the trend and exceed grade-level expectations in 2019?
Why even flip morosely through your Apple newsfeed? You’d get the same rush from a depressed tarot reader telling you all the ways you could die this week.
“But predictions are fascinating!! And sometimes they come true!”
Whenever I get to a speculation in the news, I stop reading. It’s good to be prepared for the future, but we’re smart enough that we don’t need to hear 45 minutes of other people’s doomsday scenarios to take care of ourselves.
Let’s look at some predictions that got hours and months of airtime. These really seemed worth spending our time on back in the day:
In 1996. Robert Metcalfe who invented ethernet gave the internet a 12-month life expectancy:
“I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” — Robert Metcalfe, Infoworld, 1995
To be fair, he recognized his error. A couple years later during a conference talk, he made his prediction into a smoothie, dropping a copy of his article into a water-filled blender and eating it with a spoon. Metcalfe’s humble pie takes on a whole new level.
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From Newsweek in 1995:
The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
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Y2K. Yes, if you are a millennial or older, you stayed up until 12am on New Year’s waiting for the lights to go out. Months and months of articles and airtime warned how bad things could get. Yet there was zero benefit to our obsession. No new information surfaced. The best we could do was stock up on food and water, no matter how many hours we watched.
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“In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution.” — Life magazine, 1970
I bet that issue made a lot of sales.
Our news obsession is not harmless
Negative news (read: 95% of all “news”) is unquestionably bad for our health. A 2011 study indicates that watching even 14 minutes of bad news lowers our mood and makes us more likely to catastrophize personal worries.
News takes us away from things we could be doing to make the world better, things we could be doing in our own backyards, in our communities. In the time it takes to watch your favorite pundits, you could be mentoring that kid next door who desperately wants to not suck at Little League, helping him out with his swing. You could be helping a refugee find some clothes to wear to their job interview. You could be working toward better health by getting on your bike. You could be meditating to become a less angry person.
News obsession is a choice. It’s choosing personal entertainment over the actual well-being of others. It’s choosing to fill our time building up worries instead of building our strengths.
It’s time to stop.
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(*When I wrote for my local newspaper — owned by a businessman 120 miles north of us —the newspaper told me my spin on the topic before I even had time to research it. The spin was created to please the newspaper owner.)