Is News Consumption Bad For You?

One of the themes that both pundits and ordinary people expound on these days is the way that following the news can be stressful. There’s so much bad news, and there are so many outlets that will dish it up for as many of your waking hours as you’re willing to spend consuming it.

But I’ve read a couple of things recently that go a bit further: suggestions that overconsumption of news is detrimental to your mental health and bad for your grip on reality.

This essay by Cal Newport nicely summarized the first idea. Newport writes,

The anxious uncertainty of the pandemic, combined with social and political unrest, combined with an information landscape dominated by a tribalized social media, is breaking us. Our days are fragmented by a fast drip of insistently panicked content that wrings anxiety, outrage, and fear from our autonomic nervous systems until we’re left exhausted and emotionally dry.

If you’ll excuse the understatement: this is not good.

Rutger Bregman, in his book Humankind: A Hopeful History, expounds on this idea. One of the first researchers to investigate this phenomenon, he says, was George Gerbner. In the 1990s Gerbner coined the term mean-world syndrome, whose clinical symptoms are cynicism, misanthropy, and pessimism. People who follow the news are more likely to agree with statements like “Most people care only about themselves,” they more often believe that we as individuals are helpless to better the world, and they’re more likely to be stressed and depressed.

Bregman goes on to say that when people in thirty different countries were asked in a survey a few years ago, “Overall, do you think the world is getting better, staying the same, or getting worse?” the vast majority of people answered that things are getting worse.

Now, if that were true then we could regard “mean-world syndrome” as an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of having a clear-eyed view of reality. But the reality, Bregman writes, is the opposite.

Over the last several decades, child labor, deaths in natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have all plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever.

So why don’t we realize this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is — be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster — the bigger its newsworthiness. You’ll never see a headline reading NUMBER OF PEOPLE LIVING IN EXTREME POVERTY DOWN BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY, even though it could accurately have been reported every day over the last twenty-five years. Nor will you ever see a broadcast go live to a reporter on the ground who says, “I’m standing here in the middle of nowhere, where today there’s still no sign of war.”

A couple of caveats are in order here. First, one might be inclined to look askance at this narrative in light of the last six months. But the coronavirus pandemic doesn’t negate the longer-term trends, and I view the tumult following the death of George Floyd as more a demonstration of the long arc of history bending toward justice, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., than as some unraveling of the social order.

The second caveat is that Bregman doesn’t acknowledge the direst trend occurring today: global warming. Human-caused climate change may prove to be humanity’s greatest failing, but why is that? I’m inclined to think it’s at least partly due to the “cynicism, misanthropy and pessimism” that Gerber attributes to mean-world syndrome. Might we be better able to deal with climate change if we weren’t conditioned to think the worst of each other by our daily diet of the wrenching and shocking — and unrepresentative — stories that pervade our news media?

As I noted previously, I’ve cut back on my news consumption, but I wonder whether I’m still getting more than I need. Checking in on the news is like rubber-necking as we pass a car wreck — it’s hard to resist. But I’ve increasingly come to think that anything I might learn on Meet the Press Daily or in the Washington Post’s daily Coronavirus Update email can wait until I read the paper the following morning.