If people want to read news articles rather than crime novels or watch CNN rather than The Bachelor, who am I to criticize their choices? Despite my recent claim that news makes us dumb (which I still believe), I really don’t think consuming news is harmful if it is treated for what it is—junk food for the mind.
The problem is that your behavior is considered aberrant if you don’t join in daily news consumption. This is a peculiar bias. If you refuse to indulge in Twinkies, junk food junkies don’t assume you are undernourished. Yet if you refuse to gorge on news, news junkies assume you are under-informed. Why is that?
Presumably, they think there is something to be gained from devouring news. But what are they getting out of it? As Rolf Dobell says:
Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career, your business – compared to what you would have known if you hadn’t swallowed that morsel of news.
[...]
Assume that, against all odds, you found one piece of news that substantially increased the quality of your life – compared to how your life would have unfolded if you hadn’t read or seen it. How much trivia did your brain have to digest to get to that one relevant nugget? Even that question is a hindsight analysis. Looking forward, we can’t possibly identify the value of a piece of news before we see it, so we are forced to digest everything on the news buffet line. Is that worthwhile? Probably not.
In 1914, the news story about the assassination in Sarajevo dwarfed all other reports in terms of its global significance. But, the murder in Sarajevo was just one of several thousand stories in circulation that day. No news organization treated this historically pivotal homicide as anything more than just another politically inspired assassination.
(Via: Bryan Caplan)
Note: This post is dedicated to my friend Ted Olsen, news director at Christianity Today and unapologetic news junkie.
March 7th, 2011 | 9:54 am
I don’t think this fully explains it, but one motivator is that random reinforcement factor, the same as what gamblers get motivation from. Just that one article or tidbit out of one hundred that at least seems to really impact your life, your way of seeing the world, makes you think, Maybe this one, maybe this next one, maybe THIS one…
Another rationalization that comes to mind is the idea that each little story, idea, and piece gets aggregated in our minds to give us a “more accurate” view of the world at large.
March 7th, 2011 | 9:59 am
I’ve had this discussion with news-junkie friends on several occasions.
How does watching the daily news improve one’s life? It doesn’t. It steals hours of your time, it usually angers you, or depresses you, and only occasionally encourages you.
Ninenty-nine percent of the items discussed on the “news” are things that we can do absolutely nothing about.
Most of the items nowadays are designed to appeal to our lower instincts, to titillate, or arouse our passions. None of them appeal to our reason or intellect, as that would take more than 90 seconds to do.
The “news” stories are presented, one after another, totally divorced from their larger contexts, and all followed up with a perfect smile on a beautiful face on a talking head – regardless of weather the story is about a mass murder, a landslide that killed hundreds of children, or a fireman rescuing a kitten from a tree.
The news makes us “dumb and dumber,” it desensitizes us to tragedy, and it steals valuable time.
March 7th, 2011 | 12:23 pm
I said it, Joe, when you ran your original post on this topic:
Daniel Boorstin argued a variation of this case in 1982 (in Reader’s Digest, of all places). See his article, “Homo-up-to-Datum Is a Dunce.”
March 7th, 2011 | 12:33 pm
I quit watching the news and reading the paper years ago for about the reasons given above, and adding the reason that a great portion of what actually passes for news is detraction. I look at the sports scores and that’s about it.
March 7th, 2011 | 3:07 pm
What do y’all do when it’s time to vote? Just curious.
March 7th, 2011 | 3:34 pm
There’s an old name for most of what we call news: gossip. Some people like to gossip about the neighbors; others like to gossip about the governments of foreign countries or the most recent party politics.
March 7th, 2011 | 4:41 pm
News (and its small-scale cousin, gossip) is like a tool. Whether it’s good or bad depends on how one uses it, and why.
March 7th, 2011 | 5:31 pm
During the season of Lent, high-minded bloggers should lead the way to the redemption of the mass media. Stop relying on entities that publish this stupid thing called news — from CNN to The New Yorker, from The Atlantic to Virginia Quarterly Review — as the basis for even one post.
Discerning readers need not be bothered by any on-site reporter’s delusional and vain efforts to interview anyone involved in a conflict. Remember: If content purports to be news, you have better material to write about.
Untold numbers of other bloggers will thank you for delivering more deeply informed opinions on news-free content. You may have less to write about, but you will no longer be part of the problem, even in a derivative manner.
March 7th, 2011 | 7:41 pm
This just showed up in my feeds this morning:
http://wehrintheworld.blogspot.com/2011/03/trivia-competitions-and-good-life.html
But then I remembered my goal. I think Don’t be good at trivia is a good mantra to live by because it provides a surprising amount of guidance on what to avoid. If you look at the things you do in an average day and ask which of them are most improving your trivia skills, I’d bet you’d also say those are some of the least valuable uses of your time.
So, as a simple rule of thumb…
Beware of that which improves your trivia skills.
That includes, of course, sitcoms and celebrity gossip but also things like news, sports, and politics.
March 8th, 2011 | 9:10 am
Thanks for the post. I’ve been kind of thinking something similar, in a less organized way.
I suspect part of the appeal of being a news junkie is feeling superior to other people. It also may gain the admiration of others, who believe that following the news is a sign of being smart.
I vaguely remember an anecdote from George Weigel’s biography of Pope John Paul that may be helpful here. According to Weigel (as I remember it–I couldn’t find it quickly in the book), the pope usually didn’t follow the latest news closely until at some point he was convinced that he had some obligation to read the newspapers. So he did, and found that it wasn’t worth the effort because he quickly grasped the fundamental questions and enduring points and the rest was just noise.
To me, that a model worth emulating.
March 8th, 2011 | 12:53 pm
Judy, I find that a pretty cursory survey of news sources keeps me informed enough to make good voting decisions. Most news on any given day consists of the repetition of the news of the previous day, possibly with a a small detail added or another person’s position in the matter added to the mix. If it could be arranged that a person could read a short article every Friday on every major news topic, that would probably be sufficient, most of the time, to grasp the issues.
But the constant imbibing of the information that passes for “news” doesn’t really add to that, and has its own bad effects. A friend once commented to me that “ignorance is bliss” when I suggested that constant feeding upon negative news probably didn’t do her any good or accomplish anything. I didn’t get the chance to explain to her that I wasn’t suggesting that people not be informed, just that constantly imbibing news and “being informed” are not precisely equal concepts.
March 8th, 2011 | 1:46 pm
Good answer, Pentamom. I agree as far as the constant imbibing of shallow information goes. Of course, looking at articles that give you a deeper understanding is something different. (But you don’t need to do that to vote.) But I wonder what someone who just looks at sports scores does.
March 8th, 2011 | 6:58 pm
why should the criterion for worthwhile knowledge be that which allows me to “make a better decision about a serious matter affecting my life, my career, my business?”
for if the above were true, then why make all/most high school students study calculus? or world history? or art? or music theory?
why collect stamps? why develop knowledge of gardening? or trigonometry?
it seems clear to me that anything can be made into mere entertainment. but anything can become a window into truth, beauty, and goodness. including the news.
March 10th, 2011 | 8:20 am
We all miss the gist if we don’t read the first article, ‘news makes us dumb.’ I would agree with Sommerville.
But does what of Dobell’s example that “In 1914, the news story about the assassination in Sarajevo…was just one of several thousand stories in circulation that day…”? We could say the same of a day in November, 1963. For some events in the news we do need to pay attention whether it be the death of a president or a neighbor or a tragic earthquake in Haiti.
March 11th, 2011 | 7:03 pm
[...] News is the Junk Food of the Mind via Joe Carter at First Things. Hmmm, I think I’ll stop now. Share on Facebook [...]
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