You week off. dont quit. tv#

And that’s to say nothing of the opportunity cost. It becomes clear that those years of news-watching amounted to virtually nothing in terms of improvement to your quality of life, lasting knowledge, or your ability to help others. You can become informed by reading a bus schedule.Ī month after you’ve quit the news, it’s hard to name anything useful that’s been lost. “Being informed” sounds like an accomplishment, but it implies that any information will do. If you ask someone what they accomplish by watching the news, you’ll hear vague notions like, “It’s our civic duty to stay informed!” or “I need to know what’s going on in the world,” or “We can’t just ignore these issues,” none of which answer the question. 2) You were never actually accomplishing anything by watching the news You can get better information about the world from deeper sources, who took more than a half-day to put it together. What appears is whatever sells, and what sells is fear, and contempt for other groups of people.Ĭurate your own portfolio. What appears on the news is not “The conscientious person’s portfolio of concerns”. Once you’ve quit watching, it becomes obvious that it is a primary aim of news reports-not an incidental side-effect-to agitate and dismay the viewer. We’ve evolved to pay more attention to what’s scary and infuriating, but that doesn’t mean every instance of fear or anger is useful.

Their selections exploit our negativity bias. So the idea that you can get a meaningful sense of the “state of the world” by watching the news is absurd.

They select for what’s 1) unusual, 2) awful, and 3) probably going to be popular. The news isn’t interested in creating an accurate sample. They don’t realize that what you can glean about the world from the news isn’t even close to a representative sample of what is happening in the world. News junkies will say it’s because you’ve stuck your head in the sand.īut that assumes the news is the equivalent of having your head out in the fresh, clear air. If you quit, even for just a month or so, the news-watching habit might start to look quite ugly and unnecessary to you, not unlike how a smoker only notices how bad tobacco makes things smell once he stops lighting up.Ī few things you might notice, if you take a break: 1) You feel betterĪ common symptom of quitting the news is an improvement in mood. There’s a big difference between watching a half hour of CNN’s refugee crisis coverage (not that they cover it anymore) versus spending that time reading a 5,000-word article on the same topic. This post isn’t an indictment of journalism as a whole.

You week off. dont quit. tv#

To be clear, I’m mostly talking about following TV and internet newscasts here. Eight years after having quit, that idea now seems ridiculous-that consuming a particularly unimaginative information product on a daily basis somehow makes you thoughtful and informed in a way that benefits society.īut I still encounter people who balk at the possibility of a smart, engaged adult quitting the daily news. I grew up believing that following the news makes you a better citizen.