“I’m going to tell you something that upsets a lot of people. I never watch the news and have bought one single newspaper in the last five years, in Stansted Airport in London, and only because it gave me a discount on a Diet Pepsi.”
—Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
Watching and reading “the news” is a standard activity for almost every adult. We have a fear of missing out. One way we allay that fear is by watching the news.
Well, I have news for you. You’re a worse person because of it.
What is the News?
The news is factual. At least it tries to be. Or at least it’s meant to try to be.
The news is recent. It’s up to date, the latest word on the street from people who specialise in gathering words from the street. Streets including Wall Street, the local street that was just the victim of a house fire and the street where Cardinal Pell was found guilty of child sex assault.
The news is everything you see in your facebook feed, watch on SBS or Fox News, read in the New York Times or hear from colleagues, who either heard from a news outlet or witnessed it themselves. It doesn’t have to big news, just attempt to be factual and is recent.
Why Does the News Make You a Worse Person?
“…anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.”
Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
Fake News
Let’s tackle the first of the listed news attributes. Factuality. If the news were always factual, it’d be much more beneficial to read the news than it is now. But it’s not. Some journalists think it better to promote ideology through completely fabricated stories or stories that deliberately obfuscate facts.
You are not a full time fact checker. Nor should you be. You’re busy, you have a life. How are you to know what is true and what is false? Or when the people who are supposed to be satiating your desire for fact are misleading you, often intentionally?
The news is an attention whore. It earns money by seizing your attention. Sometimes the facts are boring. There is an incentive to make them less boring. How can journalists even be blamed for writing false or misleading stories then? The incentives are misaligned. This fact should at least raise some doubt about the validity of the news as a whole.
By reading the news you don’t become informed, you become misinformed.
The Violence Effect
“Significant exposure to media violence increases the risk of aggressive behaviour in certain children and adolescents, desensitises them to violence, and makes them believe that the world is a ‘meaner and scarier’ place than it is”
(1) – Strasburger, (2010)
While this study was of children in particular, adults are also affected. Adults are affected less than children due to the adult brain being fully developed and therefore less suggestible.
“The epidemiologic evidence indicates that if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults.”
Brandon Centerwall from University of Washington
People like Steven Pinker have demonstrated that rates of violence in humankind have been decreasing on average for millennia. This trend continues in spite of the media indirectly causing more of it. News outlets could drastically lower the violence statistic simply by reporting it less.
Insensitivity to Base Rates
Even if a story is completely factual, it can still mislead. Ask yourself: What gets shown on the news? Is it Betty walking her dog to the shop and home safely? Or is it the vivid and emotive murder of Josh, the country boy, on his way home from school? The news likes vivid and emotional stories because you do. Rationality does not.
The news is a series of terrible events happening to ordinary people like yourself. A cute panda birth here and there, sure. Wang Wang isn’t going to keep you safe from the terrorists or violent youth gangs though, is he?
You become conditioned to think this is reality. A constant stream of terrible events, done by terrible people. How is one to think highly of humanity when most of what we see is disgusting? The first step in building a better anything is believing it’s possible. The news does not leave us with hope of building a more humane world.
Recent
The news is ephemeral. You probably completely forgot (if you’re Australian) about Wang Wang and Funi before I brought them up. Why did you bother to read a story about them way back when? You probably did learn something about pandas, I won’t deny that. But who cares about the date and time they were born? Specific personal details about individual cases don’t matter if you’re not going to do anything about it.
I am not saying don’t care about the specific details of the incident that lead your friend to have their leg broken in a car accident. This matters. You know this person. You waste your time and emotional resources on things you cannot influence, by watching the news. Save them for things you can influence.
What the News Should Do
The news should broadcast stories of true social heroes, people who brought about change for humanity itself, people like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi. We don’t need to see acts of vicious intent. People would take on a positive and humanitarian outlook to their day after seeing such stories.
The same parts of the mind at play making us more violent when we see violence are the same parts that make us more compassionate when we see compassion, more generous when we see generosity or more grateful when we see gratitude.
News outlets should continue to report violence and other malicious acts. Just not directly to you. If you want to know of the murders and house break ins of the day, you should have to go looking yourself. It should be easy to find. But it should not be standard broadcast material on the 6:00pm news.
What You Should Do
Don’t watch or read the news. Unless a major event has occurred, of course.
It’s better to be uninformed than misinformed.
Instead of wasting your time reading about shit that won’t matter in two days. Read a book. Earn knowledge that lasts. Take an online course, upgrade your life. Do something that is going to bring value to your life and to the lives of others.
Create something. Write something. Draw something. Code something. Contribute to humanity. Do something that might decrease the rate of car accidents instead of reading about the latest one.
Do something positive that’s newsworthy. It doesn’t have to be formally broadcast. I can guarantee the elderly man will be home to tell his wife that you missed your bus to help pick up the papers he dropped. That is still news.
References
- Strasburger, V. C. (2010). Media education. Pediatrics, 126(5), 1012– 1017; doi:10.1542/peds. 2010–1636. Anderson, C. A., Berkowitz, L., Donnerstein, E., Huesmann, L. R., Johnson, J. D., Linz, D., . . . Wartella, E. (2003). The influence of media violence on youth. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4(3), 81–110. Another study adds: “The changes in aggression are both short term and long term, and these changes may be mediated by neurological changes in the young viewer.” Murray, J. P. (2008). Media violence the effects are both real and strong. American Behavioral Scientist, 51(8), 1212–1230, doi:10.1177/0002764207312018
