No News November is back
Why you should try this one weird trick
I’m working through Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Meditations for Mortals. It’s great. It’s thematically related to his last book, Four Thousand Weeks, in which he discusses the question of how we, as mortal beings, should think about our relationship with time. As a philosopher who writes about death, I think about mortality a lot, but Burkeman’s work is actually useful. Even if we live to a hundred, we don’t have much time, so we should be vigilant to use our time effectively.
I mention this because last year, in December actually, I broke up with the news. I unsubscribed from all the daily news briefing lists I was signed up for, I stopped going to the home pages of news websites, and I unfollowed all news sites on Twitter. Since ‘No News November’ is catchier, I went with that.
No News November
A couple weeks ago, I stopped reading the news. This was precipitated by a bunch of things: stress from the end of the semester, the desire to read more books (and write more books), and an interview I heard on the 80,000 Hours podcast with Bryan Caplan.
I wasn’t sure how it would go, but now, almost one year later, the experiment continues. My reasons haven’t changed. The negativity bias of the news is almost guaranteed to cause anxiety, but I’m less anxious and more optimistic since I stopped being exposed to the onslaught of reporting on all the bad things happening. Quitting my habit of checking the news has also reduced the stress I used to feel for not staying on top of current events.
When I started the experiment last year, one of my reasons was that I increasingly came to believe that reading the news, especially negative world events, wasn’t doing me or anyone else any good. I now believe this more strongly. Sure, if you’re a head of state or if your job requires you to keep track of current events, then it’s a good idea. But I’m not in that kind of position, and other reasons people give for reading the news, such as ‘bearing witness’, are far less compelling to me than they once were.
This doesn’t mean quitting is easy. Sometimes the drama makes it hard to turn away. I confess that I relapsed in the hours following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, but that experience just proved my point to me: it was interesting, but it contributed nothing positive to my life.
A reason I didn’t discuss last year, though I now believe is relevant, is that the daily news is so often wrong. When I see coverage of the topic I know most about, assisted dying, and I see how often major news coverage makes pretty basic mistakes, it makes me realize that what’s true of assisted dying is likely true of other topics. If I want to understand an issue, there are usually better ways to do so than reading the news.
To be clear, this isn’t because journalists are bad at their jobs or intentionally biased (though sometimes they are). Instead, it’s because deadlines are tight and the industry rewards drama over nuance. Burkeman’s new book has a relevant anecdote on this point. He describes a job he had at the Guardian in his late-twenties. When he arrived at work each morning, he’d be given “some topic currently in the news” and had to turn in a “big-picture, intelligent-seeming 2,000-word article on it by 5 p.m. the same day.”
Now, I think Burkeman is great, but expecting anyone to produce nuanced, informed takes on complex issues with a half-day of research is absurd, and there’s no reason to think the situation has improved since then. As he puts it, writing like that “is a fundamentally preposterous undertaking.”
The evidence all points in the same direction: following the news is bad for you and, given its problems with bias and quality, is just as likely to make you misinformed. Therefore, you should quit the news.
Here’s what I’ve done. I still hold longform, fact-checked journalism in high regard (in fact, in higher regard than peer-reviewed academic articles). I subscribe to The New Yorker and The Atlantic, which both have rigorous fact-checking processes. The same is true of the New York Times Magazine. If you’re unsure about a publication, you can figure it out with a quick online search. If you can’t, that’s a bad sign. For podcasts, This American Life fact-checks their stories, so I trust their content more than most other shows.
I subscribe to a few newsletters, including some commentary ones such as Matthew Yglesias’s newsletter Slow Boring, but I’m careful about which posts I read. For example, I’ve avoided basically all coverage of the U.S. election this cycle because following it is bad for me and a waste of time. I still use Twitter—probably too much—but I’ve unfollowed all news sites. For topics I want to stay up to date on, such as assisted dying, I use Google Alerts.
In general, I’m consuming just as much information, but, since the news isn’t a reliable source of accurate information, my consumption has changed. Wikipedia and Our World in Data are far more likely to be correct than an article in a major newspaper or a segment on TV. (I didn’t watch news channels before, so that aspect hasn’t changed.)
All of this is to say that the start of November—especially this November—is as good a time as any to rethink your relationship with the news. It might be hard at first, but you won’t regret it.
I quite like this quote about email from legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth:
“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”
(Just substitute “news” or “social media”.)
Hear hear! I think this is great. I would suggest that you also quit Twitter! haha.
I haven't quit the news *entirely*, though (while I have entirely quit social media). I've just quit the habit of checking it all the time. I check the New York Times website's front page 2 or 3 times a week, but I rarely actually read any stories; I just look at the headlines. If there is an interesting story -- often a feature on something that is not current-events related, but rather some other topic I'm interested in, I'll save it and return to it on the weekend. But if by then it no longer seems so interesting, I don't read it and just delete it.
I also look at a local news website sometimes, or else if I'm in the car at the right time, I'll check in once during the day to the local newsradio station at the hour or half hour, when they list the headlines. That usually covers me for awareness of important Canadian national news, too, since if it's a big enough deal it'll be mentioned on the local station.
For me, this suffices, since it is personally important to me to be generally aware of what's going on, without focusing, obsessing, or trying to know everything. As you say, to do that is bad for the mind and the spirit, and you don't actually gain anything. (I think the same is true for social media--any 'benefit' is far outweighed by the negatives for one's mood, focus, brain-power, and overall attitude.) But in general, most news is either not important at all or it is not important that you need to know it the moment it breaks. Anything that IS incredibly important will filter its way to you through a variety of means, eventually.
I think what holds people back from ceasing news consumption is the fear that they will not know what is going on. I think this is a very understandable value to have, and I believe that in this post you give somewhat short shrift to the reasons why one might feel an obligation to be informed. Rather than their being no such obligation, or no very good argument for one, I think it's a false dichotomy to think that we must make a choice between engaging frequently with the details of the news or else be completely uninformed (I'm not saying that that is what you are arguing, rather, I'm trying to make explicit a worry that someone who values knowing what's going on in the world might have). There is a way to stay as minimally-informed as is necessary -- if one holds that to be an important value, which I think is reasonable -- without immersing oneself in the never-ending toxic stream of the newscycle.