Confession: I don't consume any news
And I haven't for 5 years. Here's why I exited ‘The Machine’
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Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter seeking pathways to more purposeful living.
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The day I stopped consuming the news
Once upon a time, the first things I would look at in the morning whilst eating my breakfast were the online news channels. BBC News, The Guardian, Sky News - the daily drip-feed of everything from fashion tips to weather updates to terrorist attacks would begin with a serving alongside my granola.
I’d scan over the details of stories about mass shootings, tsunamis, all the different wars. Reports on bombings, stabbings, inflation, recessions, motorway pile-ups, poverty, racism, the climate crisis, and everything else.
Transitory thoughts of ‘urgh’ or ‘that’s so sad’ would enter and then leave my mind as quickly as when someone tells me their name for the first time. Then I’d click off and carry on with my day.
Then the global pandemic happened and I found that what I was able to give my energy and attention to – and the constant onslaught of misery I had the capacity to consume – shifted quite dramatically.
When the national pastime became media doom scrolling, tuning into the daily live briefings from heads of state and a voyeuristic curiosity of what celebrities were getting up to locked away in their mansions – I was pushed in the opposite direction.
I wanted to retreat from media and technology entirely – no screens, no Zooms, no death toll numbers, no graphs, no banana bread recipes. I found all I really wanted was to sit in my garden and watch the bees.
Something had switched in me. It was around this time in March / April 2020 that I stopped watching TV (shows and films – all of it) and by proxy, also the news.
Apart from the occasional episode of Gardeners’ World or Portrait Artist of the Year (I’ve also recently been told about Handmade: Britain’s Best Woodworker – sounds delightful, might add) and binging films on long haul flights, I haven’t consumed TV or news since (which also includes news websites, newspapers and radio news).
It seemed I had reached my capacity for wallowing in the mire of terror and horror that is the media. I had had enough, I was out.
It seems I’m not alone
This is interesting because I thought, maybe I was.
According to global market research company GWI in their assessment of Covid 19 trends that are here to stay (or not), news was high in demand during the most uncertain phases of the pandemic.
But this has since decreased and is actually experiencing year-on-year decline: demand for news is decreasing1.
Our brains and evolution are not designed for this
When George Floyd was murdered in police custody on May 25th 2020, the harrowing and sickening ordeal was captured on various cameras. This was good in terms of evidence.
But the videos got on the internet and what did so many people do? They chose to watch it, George’s last breath being taken by the hands of another – they chose to watch a real life snuff video.
You can find first person shooter footage of Ukrainian troops fighting off enemy forces on newspaper YouTube channels. Like a scene from Call of Duty, you are transported to a Ukrainian forest with bullets firing all around and wounded soldiers dropping to the ground. But not before you have to watch a series of adverts.
I was recently on a long taxi journey and the driver had a talk radio station on covering Israel-Gaza. The first thing I heard when I got in the car?
‘The following comes at a warning and is very distressing to hear, but we have received reports that babies are being decapitated...’
What appropriate reaction is there to any of these things other than getting out of the car, falling to your knees, turning yourself inside out and stopping the world from turning?
But these are neither doable nor practical and so we swallow this information, these words, these videos like bitter pills and just carry on driving.
Is this normal? Are we – OK?
The news today
As research for this piece, this morning I took a look at two mainstream news websites for the first time in years.
Here were some of their front page headlines:
‘Courageous’ teen beaten to death by mob after standing up for bullied friend
Gaza hospitals caught on front line of war
‘Hazard flips’ being created by climate change as Italy’s drought mirrors climate in Ethiopia
NHS struggling to open emergency winter beds
Man without hands or legs is left without carers
How do these words make you feel?
They make me feel quite terrible.
I simply do not possess the ability to digest this kind of information without it affecting me for hours, days, weeks.2
A disparity in coverage
Another issue I have with the way news is reported is why some of the world’s atrocities get more airtime than others. There is always a despicable despot somewhere on the planet peddling evil and barbaric brutality at any given moment in time, this is how things have always been.
Yet we hear about some more than others. Whatever is ‘trending’ or gets the most traffic is what seems to take up the top news real estate spots.
At the point of writing this, Israel-Gaza has a prime strip on the front page of the BBC News website. This is where news about the war in Ukraine used to be; it has now been relegated to a separate tab at the top.
Is one war more terrible than the other? Is one war more deserving of our attention than the other?
And what about all the other armed conflicts that are happening around the world, right now. The Geneva Academy is currently monitoring more than 110 of them. As they say, some of these make the headlines, others do not. Where is the front page coverage for Myanmar, The Philippines, Colombia, Cameroon, Somalia, Senegal and the rest?
Do we care less about these conflicts? Is it because they are further away? Is this reporting disparity fair?
‘If you don’t like the system, don’t depend on it’. I don’t like the way mainstream media does news and so I choose to opt out of it entirely.
I also don’t believe I need to know all of this stuff either.
Do I need to know about every terrible thing?
As Ruby Wax perfectly puts it in her brilliant book, Sane New World:
“I’m sure we’re equipped to know only what’s happening on our street and maybe the local deli—are we really supposed to know if there’s been an infestation of cats in Malawi? If there’s a flood in Poughkeepsie, what am I supposed to do? Fly over there, get in a canoe with a hand pump and start draining?
OK, if you show me a photo of a maimed person, I will write you a check immediately, but most of the time, what are we supposed to feel about these global disasters? I would probably like to know if my next-door neighbour gets shot but maybe I’m not so upset if it’s someone three blocks away. How close am I to the bullets? That’s what I want to know. I feel terrible saying this but it’s what I’m thinking.”
But surely we have a duty to stay informed, to know what our fellow humans are facing, to give space to the voices that are going through the worst of times, to not forget them, to not bury our heads in the sand.
We do, to an extent.
I do need to know Russia invaded Ukraine and the war is ongoing. I do need to know there’s a cost of living crisis. I do need to know our climate is in the toilet. And I can support these various issues in different ways.
But do I need to know the minutiae beyond these headlines? Do I have the emotional and mental strength to deal with the details? Will my doing so benefit anyone in any way, or result in any positive effect?
As
says in this excellent post:“Please be advised before you begin a self-righteous tirade about “living with your head in the sand” or “Something Privilege,” it’s not that I don’t care about these issues. I care, in some cases quite deeply. I simply don’t possess your ability to wallow in the cesspool of relentless media which our daily lives have become.
Living under siege like this this isn’t normal, and it isn’t noble, I don’t care what the people profiting off it claim.”
We live in an age of fear because of the news and the media
Yes, terrible things do happen to people. But being aware of every dickhead on the planet makes it seem like there are only dickheads on the planet. This is neither useful nor true. And it is why we as a society are segregated, discriminate and live in an age of fear.
The only outcome of me knowing the intricacies of every terrible thing is falling into a black pit of ‘what is the point?’ despair and believing that this beautiful planet we have been gifted with — and everything and everyone on it — is in fact awful, corrupt, destructive and evil.
I choose the other path. I choose to not believe this.
I choose to believe that people are fundamentally good, even if the media does its very best to erode any remnants of confidence we may still have about this.
I’ve always found it a disingenuous and trite tick-box exercise that many news reports – after topping up our anxiety and levels of dread with the latest global abominations – end with a cute story about a British parrot that went missing for four years finally returning to its owner speaking Spanish3.
Mass media doesn’t report on good news because — it doesn’t sell
When Russia’s news site City Reporter only reported good news to its readers for an entire day back in 2014 – bringing positive news stories and any and all silver linings to the front of its pages – no one wanted to read it. The site lost two thirds of its normal readership that day.
And I have previously heard of an old newsroom adage: “if it bleeds, it leads”.
Negative events are more memorable and emotionally impactful than good ones (aka ‘negativity bias’ which we discussed in this Sunday Reflections a while back). And the media gives the people what they want. We have a pervasive fascination with negativity and too much bad news can leave us feeling hopeless and apathetic.
I think the eternal barrage of atrocities the media has become is ruining our sense of humanity, wellbeing and our mental health.
Our news feeds don’t have to be all doom and gloom
There is so 👏 much 👏 good 👏 happening in the world, everywhere, every day, all the time.
So many stories with the potential to restore our faith in humanity that rarely get told. And that’s where the good news feeds come in.
There are lots of platforms and publications rallying against the norm such as Good News Network, a website with an archive of 21,000 positive news stories from around the globe, confirming what we know deep inside – good news itself is not in short supply, the broadcasting of it is.
On their website they note:
“Thomas Jefferson said the job of journalists was to portray accurately what was happening in society. GNN was founded because the media was failing to report the positive news.
In the 1990’s while homicide rates in the U.S. plummeted by 42 percent, television news coverage of murders surged more than 700%, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs.”
There are also some great social media accounts choosing to focus on the feel good stories such as @goodnews_movement (5.2 million followers), @globalpositivenews (961k followers) and @the_happy_broadcast (707k followers) which comes with some lovely illustrations too.
“If news is not really news unless it is bad news, it may be difficult to claim we are an informed nation.” – Norman Cousins, Journalist and Editor
I’ll finish with a quote from former Chief Business Officer at Google and 3 x best-selling author Mo Gawdat, whose primary topic of research is happiness:
“Everyday, I receive an endless stream of questions that ask me how we can deal with all of this and still be happy. My answer:
Exit The Machine! (as much as you can)
[…]
Stop watching negative news and horror movies. Accept that politicians will lie and so don't listen. Stop believing in the promise of advertisers. Stop wanting what they sell that you don't need. Stop chasing money and instead focus on enjoying what you have. Stop adding more work to your day to get further in life.
[…]
Humanity has crossed the limits of its ability to deal with the mounting insanity. The machine is broken.
It's up to you to save yourself. Wake up. Run.
Say goodbye to the machine.”