Interesting story, and one that makes sense for me. I largely gave up reading the news at the beginning of 2009.. the news is unbalanced, and if it’s not bad, it’s not really seen as news:
In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.
Read full story. Always interesting to think how much easier it is to give up following the news, etc. as the ‘big stories’ still come via Facebook/Twitter, etc… and this story came via Rachel!
2 replies on ““No News is Good News””
Not addictively swallowing endless news is fair and good.
This is possibly inevitable for a former BBC lackey, but I’m not convinced by the people I know who have said “I gave up on radio/TV/papers and find out everything I know from tweets/blogs etc”
Said people seem to have very fixed political positions and everything they retweet/repost seems to reinforce their existing position.
The point of “the media” is that – at best – it “mediates”. I don’t think we realise (because of the many epic fails of journalism) how much bullshit and imbalance a good professional newsroom can suck out.
We would be immeasurably the worse for no The World Tonight, Newsnight, or even The Times.
Bruce Springsteen once sang “57 Channels and Nothing On” (I think it was 57). Ironically, *solely* dipping into an infinite pool of reportage and opinion seems to homogenise our way of seeing the world just as much as reading a partisan inky from the street of shame.
Definitely think am still exposed to the news, but it’s mediated in a different way …
Lots of newspapers online – though offline I’m used to reading The Times as that’s what my parents buy … I’m fascinated by newspaper headlines, etc. and how many different angles they can take, but let’s face it – most people read only one paper (and sadly the biggest selling seems to be The Sun) … I feel I almost engage with MORE news now that I’ve stopped reading newspapers, and certainly have some news on the TV .. but Breakfast News/The One Show is more ‘cheerful’!!