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till kingdom come
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Some people start their day by reading The New York Times. Others end
it by watching the nightly news. Some get it from The Daily
Show. Others download it from a variety weblogs. Some keep
up-to-the-minute by following CNN. Others have instant news updates
automatically text messaged to their phone. But everybody seems to
agree: it’s a citizen’s responsibility to keep up with the
news. Everybody except me.
I think following the news is a waste of time.
Some people agree with me on a small scale. Some point out that the
cable channels are obsessed with bizarre crimes that have little
larger impact, that they worry too much about horse-race coverage of
politics, that too much of the news is filled with PR-inserted
nonsense. But they do this because they think these are aberrations;
that underneath all this, the news is worth saving. I simply go one
step further: I think none of it is worthwhile.
Let us look at the front page of today’s New York Times, the gold
standard in news. In the top spot there is a story about Republicans
feuding among themselves. There is a photo of soldiers in Iraq. A
stock exchange chief must return $100M. There is a concern about some
doctors over-selling a nerve testing system. There is a threat from
China against North Korea. There is a report that violence in Iraq is
rising. And there is concern about virtual science classes replacing
real ones.
None of these stories have relevance to my life. Reading them may be
enjoyable, but it’s an enjoyable waste of time. They will have no
impact on my actions one way or another.
Most people will usually generally concede this point, but suggest
that there’s something virtuous about knowing it anyway, that it makes
me a better citizen. They point out that newspapers are a key part of
our democracy, that by exposing wrong-doing to the people, they force
the wrong-doers to stop.
This seems to be true, but the curious thing is that I’m never
involved. The government commits a crime, the New York Times prints it
on the front page, the people on the cable chat shows foam at the
mouth about it, the government apologizes and commits the crime more
subtly. It’s a valuable system — I certainly support the government
being more subtle about committing crimes (well, for the sake of
argument, at least) — but you notice how it never involves me? It
seems like the whole thing would work just as well even if nobody ever
read the Times or watched the cable chat shows. It’s a closed system.
There is voting, of course, but to become an informed voter all one
needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues
before the election. There’s no need to have to suffer through the
daily back-and-forth of allegations and counter-allegations, of
scurrilous lies and their refutations. Indeed, reading a voter’s guide
is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the
crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides
of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually
think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics.
Others say that sure, most of the stuff in the news isn’t of use, but
occasionally you’ll come across some story that will lead you to
actually change what you’ve been working on. But really, how plausible
is this? Most people’s major life changes don’t come from reading an
article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or
thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed.
Which brings me to my second example of people agreeing with me on the
small scale. You’ll often hear TV critics say that CNN’s
up-to-the-minute reporting is absurd. Instead of saying, “We have
unconfirmed reports that—This just in! We now have confirmed reports
that those unconfirmed reports have been denied. No, wait! There’s a
new report denying the confirmation of the denial of the unconfirmed
report.” and giving viewers whiplash, they suggest that the reporters
simply wait until a story is confirmed before reporting it and do
commentary in the meantime.
But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of
watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of
reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review?
Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead
of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?
With the time people waste reading a newspaper every day, they could
have read an entire book about most subjects covered and thereby
learned about it with far more detail and far more impact than the
daily doses they get dribbled out by the paper. But people, of course,
wouldn’t read a book about most subjects covered in the paper, because
most of them are simply irrelevant.
But finally, I’d like to argue that following the news isn’t just a
waste of time, it’s actively unhealthy. Edward Tufte notes that when
he used to read the New York Times in the morning, it scrambled his
brain with so many different topics that he couldn’t get any real
intellectual work done the rest of the day.
The news’s obsession with having a little bit of information on a wide
variety of subjects means that it actually gets most of those subjects
wrong. (One need only read the blatant errors reported in the
corrections page to get some sense of the more thorough-going errors
that must lie beneath them. And, indeed, anyone who has ever been in
the news will tell you that the news always gets the story wrong.) Its
obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting
people. Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less
reflective thinkers. Its obsession with surfaces makes us shallow.
This is not simply an essay meant to provoke; I genuinely believe what
I write. I have not followed the news at least since I was 13 (with
occasional lapses on particular topics). My life does not seem to be
impoverished for it; indeed, I think it has been greatly enhanced. But
I haven’t found many other people who are willing to take the plunge.
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