I pretty much stopped engaging with news media back around 2018.
I was dead sick, stuck in a hotel and for some reason I was watching US news. Every few minutes they would cover something about Trump that made it sound like he was seconds away from being taken down because of some silver bullet bit of information that had come out.
But no one was actually really saying anything significant, there was just this obvious, coordinated effort to ratchet up the tension over stuff that predictably went fucking nowhere. Like, you could tell us the facts without the dog and pony show of trying to generate fake stakes that just don't exist.
It reminded me of back in 2013 when I lived in a Hilton hotel building that had tvs with CNN on 24/7 in the elevators, which is weird for a hotel in Canada, but whatever. Anyhoo, if I believed the news at the time, then the US was apparently on the brink of Nuclear war with North Korea. Then the Boston Bombing happened and suddenly the threat of total nuclear destruction just didn't exist anymore??? I swear, they just never mentioned it again.
Then during the convoy occupation in Canada's capital, I was so flabbergasted by how the news covered it. A bunch of losers in the freezing cold acting like fools got away with doing it because they weren't actually having much impact except in terms of preventing small businesses from reopening. The police let them in and didn't really do much about it because no one really took them seriously and it was so cold everyone expected them to leave pretty quickly. Then they just didn't leave and eventually some one had to do something because it was so stupid. But the news tried to make it seem like this dangerous terror on the center of the capital. The area was basically a ghost town because everyone was working from home. It wasn't terribly scary, it was incredibly lame. I went and walked through a number of times and it was just so, so lame. The second the same group fucked with something that really mattered, they got shut down immediately. The news tried to make it seem like the capital protest was going on for so long because it was big and unstoppable, but it was more that they weren't taken all that seriously, so no one really wanted to be in charge of getting rid of them because that *could* cause drama.
The amount of people from around the world who contacted me to make sure I was okay during that time was astounding because I lived right near it. The news made it seem like I was in danger and being terrorized by truckers. I was annoyed, and I was deeply bothered by how racist they were to my SIL, but they were more of an unbearably cringey experience rather than some dramatic insurrection. It wasn't scary, it was lame. They didn't bring the city to it's knees, they parked trucks in a largely unused area of the city and slightly impacted rush hour traffic sometimes.
But the news told a totally different story. A factually correct one, but framed it with so much drama and anxiety that the factual information was not able to be processed effectively. Had the news framed it with less drama, the whole world would have laughed at these cringey losers, not given them the credibility of being taken seriously as some kind of threat.
It was the equivalent of if some really popular MRA dude on TikTok made a video about thinking Taylor Swift is "mid" and the news reporting that:
"prominent influencer Joe Bob Nobody is lashing out against Taylor Swift and challenging the validity of her fame. Swift has yet to comment, but we turn now to our panel to disc the implications of this challenge. Mark what do you think the impact of Joe Bob Nobody's attack on Swift will be on her future tours?
Well Amy, it's early days and hard to say exactly. There are so many stakeholders involved, and as we know, Taylor Swift is a global economic force. Her reaction to this could have widespread impacts on a lot of people's jobs. No one from her camp is saying that her next tour is cancelled, but we're definitely going to watch closely what the mayors of the cities she's supposed to visit have to say if any of them comment.
Yes, yes Mark, some folks will be on the edge of their seats waiting to see how this plays out."
What's worse is that a lot of my friends who lived through the convoy nonsense alongside me agreed with how lame and essentially useless the whole thing was at the time, but over time, they're subscribed to the media narrative around it, especially with the trial going on. They're consuming so much real-time news that their own take on what happened is being reshaped through a crisis porn lens.
I don't plan to follow anything about the judicial process until it's all over and I'll read someone's intelligent analysis of what went down in the courts. In what universe do I need to know everything about the case as it happens??
Information is actually really, really hard to process when paired with anxiety, so I prefer not to get my information from sources that are actively trying to trigger as much anxiety as possible.
I read an astronomical amount about geopolitics, and a lot of what I read is factually distressing, but it's not designed to trigger that urgent, high-stakes, anxiety feeling that the sky is falling.
I find that understanding the underlying structures of how and why things are happening is much less anxiety-inducing. It evokes a lot of existential angst and often a sense of powerlessness, because we are, individually rather powerless much of the time, but not the BREAKING NEWS! Kind of immediate-threat anxiety that the news intentionally tries to evoke.
There's very little news that requires being known in real time. Even enormous world events, there's little actual need for individuals to know of them then and there.
Once I accepted that *I* am not important or influential enough to require immediate informing of most world events and issues, it became a lot easier to find higher quality information on major issues because I just had to wait for it in forms like well researched books.
I'm not totally clueless, I follow a few entities that will summarize events or give perspective on events. I'm really enjoying the Alt Parks Services account on FB right now. I highly value the first hand accounts from friends affected by DOGE. But I'm not going to read news coverage of it because I don't enjoy having my psychological state purposefully manipulated in ways that make it harder to process information.
I have a professional exam for my license coming up, and the exam is specifically designed to trigger anxiety about the information that needs to be processed in real time. A lot of people fail this exam despite being perfectly capable of processing the info, because when info is designed to trigger anxiety, it dramatically lowers cognitive processing ability.
News presents information specifically formulated in a way that lowers the cognitive processing skills in the person receiving the information.
No thanks, I'll pass.
The media has created an illusion that we all need to be informed NOW on everything. But that's simply not true. Virtually none of us are important enough to need to be briefed on every little detail of what's happening in the world.
It's important to know when something needs to be done, but we don't all need to read the news every day to do that. We just need decent sources to give us our options as to what we need to take action on and what actions to take.
I'm not advocating ignorance, I have a very high information diet. But I do believe that everyone has bought into some need for the urgency of information that doesn't actually exist for the vast, overwhelming majority of info.
