Why Everyone Should Watch Less News
And read more books instead
It has been said of each successive scandal or policy announcement in the Trump era, that if you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention. Certainly, there has been no shortage of outrageous images splashed across the news: children in cages, an American President kowtowing to a hostile foreign power, and a seemingly unending parade of well-known personalities exposed as abusers or deviants.
Perhaps it’s time we realize that consuming more news about the world around us is not the way to improve it (or ourselves), personally or politically.
But the question we need to ask ourselves here is not whether such behaviors (or the cover-ups of such behaviors) are outrageous, but rather why we have become such insatiable consumers of these outrages? What does it cost us?
According to a 2017 report by the American Psychological Association, 95% of American adults follow the news regularly, even though more than half of them say it causes them stress and over two-thirds say they believe the media blows things out of proportion. In contextualizing the survey’s findings, the APA’s chief executive officer, Arthur C. Evans Jr, said, “Understanding that we all still need to…
