Turning Off The News
I was a Cronkite kid and an NYT young adult. Here's why I turned off the news.
As a boy, I’d walk downstairs every night to my parents’ bedroom at precisely 6:29 PM. My dad, just home from work, would take off his tie, sit back in his bed, and put his drink on the night table. I'd lie down on my stomach at the foot of the bed, and he'd turn on the television when the clock struck 6:30.
On channel 10 was the CBS Evening News. Walter Cronkite greeted us when I was a small child, then it was Dan Rather when I was a little older. My mom knew not to call us down for dinner until the news was over at 7.
From a young age, I internalized that a close eye on the news was central to being a responsible, informed citizen. And I kept finding new ways to keep up with the news: reading the paper Philadelphia Inquirer as a young teenager, reading the paper New York Times in high school and then listening to NPR and visiting NYTimes.com as an adult.
In 2002, my grandfather, who’d spent years later in his life establishing a prize for investigative journalism, invited me to be a part of the journalism prize. Being an avid consumer of the news and a believer in its importance to democracy, I proudly accepted his offer.
In 2016, after Donald Trump was elected, I implored the New York Times to take my money, please. I saw the NY Times’ success as crucial to the future of American democracy.
I closely followed the news through the Trump presidency and through much coverage of the pandemic. But in 2021, I made a conscious decision to cut my news consumption by 95%. Let me explain why.
Getting dumber
Early in Donald Trump’s presidency, I read the news and found myself feeling something I hadn’t felt before.
Every day, it seemed, the New York Times or Washington Post would report on shocking drama in the White House. I’d eagerly dive in. Was this the scandal that would force Trump to resign? I was working on a startup that sought to elect people who would stand up to Trump — but with all this crazy stuff breaking, would Trump even make it to the next election? I was captured by the drama.
Reading the latest scoops, I got to know all the players in the White House, and the styles of the journalists who wrote about them. I followed them on Twitter, and my interest was piqued when they mentioned that the next big story was about to break. I was well-versed on the reports of Trump’s corruption, his hot temper, and his poor framework for making decisions.
The first few months of this felt like an exciting suspense novel. But over time, I began to realize that spending so much time on the latest news wasn’t good for me. The time I spent understanding Trump wouldn’t help me be smarter or more productive or a stronger leader or a better father. And I wasn’t confident it was making me a more responsible, informed citizen.
Reading about Trump only gave me insight into the life of someone I didn’t really want to know about or emulate. Choosing to get into Trump’s head, I realized, was like choosing to be best friends with someone you neither respect nor can learn from. It put me on edge and would not make me a better human being.
When I realized this, I started to ask questions about other types of news. Was all news overly focused on conflict and the day-to-day? Was it, like coverage of Trump, engineered to make me and others angry, rather than serving to help understand things more deeply?
I noticed a few things:
News organizations mostly describe major policy decisions as fights between factions or individuals. While talk about political fights is captivating, it ignores or underweights the actual impact on people’s lives. There are countless stories about police funding and support for police officers that highlight ideological chasms; there’s virtually no detail on public safety or the actual effectiveness of policing staffing or strategy. The same is true for reporting on countless other topics, from climate change to inflation.
Tech is either something new and shiny, or the worst manifestation of what someone could conceivably do with it. It is quite rare to read accounts that seek to understand technology’s tradeoffs and impacts in a thoughtful way. In the world of fraud detection (where I spent the early years of my career), people think about balancing the effects of false positives and false negatives. That is a great way to approach many problems, but much tech reporting instead focuses on a few extreme cases that will attract eyeballs and arouse anger1.
When vaccines were introduced, it was common to see reports of extraordinarily rare side effects of vaccines, likely leading readers to overestimate risks and increase vaccine hesitancy. COVID coverage in the news has often been lacking, trivializing risks early on, highlighting obviously flawed models as numbers climbed, and failing to thoughtfully consider tradeoffs in policy decisions throughout.
“If it bleeds it leads” continues to drive news coverage. A few especially brutal violent events receive a hugely disproportionate share of news coverage. School shootings, terrorist attacks, train crashes, and police shootings are terrible events, but the coverage they receive relative to far more common forms of violence and accidents — suicide, individual homicides, overdoses, and automobile fatalities — warp people’s perception of risk2.
If I wanted to be a responsible and informed citizen, should I be spending so much time reading and listening to the news?
Why read, watch, or listen?
I consume a lot content created by others (you probably do too). That content can take many forms — social media, amateur video content, professionally produced video content, podcasts, print books, Kindle books, articles, audiobooks, radio, games, etc.
Here’s why I read, watch, or listen:
To learn things that will allow me to do my job more effectively.
To learn things that will allow me to be a responsible, informed citizen, and a better friend, husband, and father.
To better understand the world for the sake of understanding itself.
To exercise my brain / intellectual muscles.
To be able to engage in conversations around current goings on (news, TV shows, sporting events, etc.).
To engage with others in a shared experience (e.g., watching a movie together).
To be entertained.
To improve my health and well-being (mental and physical).
The bulk of my news consumption in 2021 — reading the NY Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal and listening to NPR — failed on almost all of those heuristics.
A small amount of the news I was consuming helped me do my job, but most did not. A small amount of the news I was consuming helped me to be a better person, but most did not. Very little of the news I was consuming helped me exercise my brain (and most of the Trump stories were pure junk food). The news wasn’t terribly entertaining, and it certainly wasn’t improving my mental health or physical health. The news did give me topics for conversation with others — hardly a ringing endorsement.
A less accurate understanding of the world
My most damning conclusion was that spending more time with the news was giving me a less accurate understanding of the world and making me a less responsible, informed citizen.
The availability heuristic refers to humans’ natural inclination to overweight the likelihood of events that immediately come to mind relative to those that are harder to imagine. The typical example is to ask “how many words start with k, and in how many words is k the third letter?” It’s easier to think of words starting with k, so people tend to mistakenly think they are more common.
Much news, which centers on individual and extreme cases, serves as an engine to fuel our availability biases. “Extreme case” news leads readers to believe that certain events are far more likely than they are. Though this is usually unintentional, it leads to a massive distortion of the world and its challenges and makes people less responsible and informed.
Imagine an avid news follower who reads eighteen stories about Uvalde. All eighteen may be individually accurate, but — because the reader is human and subject to availability bias — he comes away with an inflated sense of the risk of school shootings. And as a result, that reader pushes for policies that may help in very, very rare events, but fail to help solve broader problems.
I don’t want to be that avid news follower. I seek to understand the world and its biggest risks, challenges, and opportunities. And in 2021, I realized that much of the news I was reading was warping my view of the world. So late in 2021 I chose to cut my news consumption by 95%.
I stopped opening news apps on my phone when I’m bored and I stopped turning on NPR. Instead I restrict myself to two “news reading sessions” per day, each lasting around five or ten minutes. Spending 15 minutes per day on the news means I won’t be completely clueless in conversations with others, and gives me more time for other things. I’m content with not being the life of the party when the topic du jour is a detailed strategic discussion of the latest bill Schumer is trying to pass.
Now I can spend four hours a day on Twitter.
Just kidding! That would be a terrible idea.
Instead of reading or listening to news, I’m listening to audiobooks, reading Kindle books, and reading a few thoughtful newsletters.
As a result, I’m able to go deeper on topics relevant to the work I want to do. I’m able to indulge my curiosity more deeply on things that I hope can make me a better person. I have a deeper understanding of topics like development economics, management, happiness, migration, and WEIRD psychology — all way more interesting than speculation about the political impact of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Though the world of Walter Cronkite is long gone, I haven’t given up on journalism and believe it’s important to our democracy. But right now, it’s not serving the role of creating responsible, informed citizens. In my next post, I’ll explain how I hope journalism might evolve to help us all be more responsible and informed.
Ironically, this is almost precisely what many news organizations — often rightly —criticize Facebook and Twitter for doing.
When I was working on prototypes that led to Change Research, I asked survey respondents whether they were more concerned about terrorism — which the question kills about 50 people a year — or car accidents, which the question notes killed about 50,000. A sizable number of respondents said they were more concerned about terrorism. If asked, many survey takers would fear police shootings (about 1000 per year) and school shootings (under 50 per year) more than car accidents. To what extent is the disproportionate news coverage of these rare events driving those fears?
Definitely. I'll check headlines on The Economist or Bloomberg perhaps once a month, that is my only exposure to mainstream news. Otherwise, I get most of my content on blogs and podcasts