Are depressing stories turning you off to the news?

I remember reading an article some years ago by a highly educated man who said that he didn’t follow the daily news. He’d hear about anything major regardless, he reasoned, and there were more intellectually challenging things to occupy his mind.

I was shocked.

 

I’d diligently read the daily newspaper my whole adult life. The habit, instilled by my dad’s example, was reinforced when my first jobs were reporting for newspapers.

Nowadays lots of people, particularly young people, do not get their news from newspapers, but I continue my daily habit. The first thing I do every morning is sit down with the Chicago Tribune and a pot of tea.

I’ve been noticing, however, that I skip more and more stories. The news is depressing. Gaza. Ukraine. Crime. Shootings. Climate change. Polarization. Inequity. The migrant crisis. Trump’s trials. Trump’s rants. Especially Trump’s rants. 

I’ve heard other people also say that they also are not spending as much time with their news sources as they used to — for the same reason I’m not. 

The trend extends well beyond my acquaintances. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that since it started surveying in 2015, 18 percent fewer US respondents are “very interested” in the news, and 38 percent sometimes or often avoid the news. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal have reported declines in their website views. 

“I’ve always felt I had a responsibility to know everything,” a news avoider told the Washington Post. “I don’t feel that way anymore.”

“I don’t know if the world is worse now than it was before. But [the news] never used to feel like a personal threat,” another said. “Nothing you do gives any control, other than laying the newspaper aside, turning off the TV and going for a walk.”

From my current perspective, I didn’t need to know what happened every day of Trump’s trial. I’d hear the verdict. 

I don’t need to know the details of every bombardment in Gaza or Ukraine. I get the gist from the headlines. If a headline suggests I should keep reading, I do.

I ignored the negotiations about the state budget. It was enough to find out what finally passed.

There’s nothing more that I need to know to cast my vote for Joe Biden in November. 

Aside from possibly limiting my conversation, consequences of my casual attitude to the news aren’t apparent. I don’t want to be a head-in-the-sand citizen, but I feel that whether well- or ill-informed, I’m largely powerless to affect developments. 

And maybe less engagement is improving my mood. How could a sensitive person not be depressed by the constant stream of bad news? 

What makes news generally is what goes wrong rather than what goes right. A lot is wrong in our world; the media aren’t to blame for reporting it. But bad news isn’t the whole picture.

“As journalists, we’re definitely oriented toward the negative,” says Tina Rosenberg, cofounder of a nonprofit called Solutions Journalism Network. Solutions Journalism’s mission is to balance the negative by “telling people about how other people went about solving a problem.” Fix the News is another positive news website I saw recommended; it publishes “stories of progress” to “make your inbox a more hopeful place.” 

These sites publish so many stories they overwhelm me, however. I’d like to find a quick daily upbeat read to supplement my traditional news sources. Googling “positive news sites” yields quite a few possibilities, but I’d like to hear recommendations from readers.