Should You Quit The News?

A guide to being less insane for fellow addicts.

Jon Stewart, circa 2014.

“Ben, I honestly think you think more about the election than you did about your last breakup,” my friend Jonah told me during our morning bagel and coffee ritual in late October.

“What?” I probably responded as I glanced up from my phone. “The new NYT poll has Harris up 4 in Pennsylvania.”

Jonah was right. I had taken almost two years off from engaging in the news or politics of any sort, but in the four months since Biden’s historically awful debate performance in June, I had been glued.

Few topics make me as obsessed as politics. Movies and filmmaking have rivaled it during periods of my life, but that particular obsession is much healthier and less all-consuming.

Why politics? Well, I grew up in a liberal household in Massachusetts, and my dad had the news on my entire life. NPR, CNN, and MSNBC were the constant hum in the background of my childhood. I used to run home from school in sixth grade to catch clips of Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. Like many people who were somewhat activist community adjacent, it felt like a civic duty to stay engaged, especially during the Trump years.

This attention was formative for me. I remember the morning after Trump’s 2016 win as clearly as I remember the day my grandmother died. I went to a school with a large immigrant population, and everyone had decided to come to school early. The library was packed by 6 AM, two hours before anyone needed to be there. Some people cried, some comforted, but I think most of us were just confused. It felt like we had entered another universe.

So for the next four years, as did many, I followed the news even more religiously. I learned as much as I could about our government and history, and I decided, in some abstract teenage way, that I needed to make it my life’s mission to turn the clock back and get back to the world I felt had gone by, or a world I felt should exist.

And then, in 2021, it ended. And honestly, the only thing I did the entire time that made a difference was vote for Joe Biden in a state that went for him by 1.2 million votes.

Sure, I had talked to a lot of people about the election. I’m sure I was as vocal then as I was this past year. I loved getting in fights with the Republicans in my dorm. I scrolled on Twitter and kept tabs on every major story. During the pandemic, locked in my room, I started watching Jon Stewart again for comfort. But did anything I was doing or reading or watching change anything? Was I changing anything?

I ask this because we’re staring down the barrel of a second Trump administration, and I’ve noticed that the left, which I’m defining broadly as anyone who feels invested in Democratic Party politics, has significantly quieted down about politics.

Everyone left Twitter. For the first time in my life, my dad doesn’t have Rachel Maddow on every night. And, since the day after the election, I haven’t opened a social media app outside of Substack. I check the New York Times for the crossword every Sunday. I unsubscribed from any lingering email updates from Politico and The Washington Post.

And I feel great.

I’m not writing this to try and convince you to put wool over your eyes and hide in ignorance about what’s going on in the world because you’ll be happier. Many people, myself included, have at least tacitly admitted that these actions—reading the news or scrolling through Twitter—are not entirely useful or world-changing.

Instead, they serve as a form of entertainment. And it’s a show we can stop watching whenever we want.

I’m writing this to propose that if you work like me and you have a habit of getting invested in politics to the point that it’s the background hum of every thought you have in a year that’s a multiple of 4, then we decide not to do that this time.

Attention is a powerful resource that I’m admittedly somewhat neurotic about. I don’t sleep in the same room as any electronics, and I’ve toyed with deleting my social media since at least five years ago. My phone is something I need to set boundaries with because I know that if I don’t, it becomes my life.

The news is also something to set boundaries with, as you might in a relationship or friendship.

That doesn’t mean you stop learning or stop being involved in your community, or even politics or campaigns, for that matter. It does mean prioritizing action and longer-form, less fleeting information dumps. Certainly, it means refreshing the page less.

The Anti-News Arguments

Quitting the news might calm your anxiety, but it has other advantages, and I’m not the first to think of any of them. As far as I’ve read, the best summation is by Rolf Dobelli, who outlined his thesis in a 2010 blog post¹ and a 2020 book².

Before I get into Dobelli’s arguments, it’s worth defining what we’re talking about when we talk about “the news”.

For my purposes, the news is any short-form piece of information about the world that is refreshed regularly and not confined to a particular topic. This includes social media news, news alerts on your phone, and any newspaper or news website, but for reasons I’ll outline below, it excludes long-form magazines, journals, and books.

Part One: The News Doesn’t Do What Everyone Thinks It Does

Why do we think we read the news? If you’re like my coworkers who I had drinks with last week, you’d say something along the lines of “It’s important to be civically engaged, and to do that, you have to be up to date on current events.”

So, does the news do that?

Probably not, at least not in a very effective or direct way.

First, the things you see in the news aren’t the things that are most relevant to your life or your community. Instead, the news prioritizes the sensational, the shocking, the graphic, and the new. If you tuned into any major network or newspaper last week, you’d see report after report about the latest terror attack in New Orleans.

But terrorism isn’t very impactful to your life, and there’s very little you can do about it unless you’re working for the FBI. In 2024, 8,352 people were killed in acts of terror globally, according to the Global Terrorism Index³, largely concentrated in the Central Sahel region of Saharan Africa. You can argue with this depending on your definition of terrorism, but it’ll probably be irrelevant because, by any metric, malaria is a far more prevalent cause of death in the world, killing almost 600,000 people in 2023⁴.

When was the last time you saw a front-page report about malaria? I bet it didn’t warrant three days of coverage.

This is partly because the news is prone to several kinds of bias: advertising bias, corporate bias, and mainstream bias.

Advertising bias is when advertisers motivate news outlets to omit or publish specific stories or cite different sources. This is despite journalistic independence, but because of incentives to keep advertisers. A 2011 Wharton study⁵ found that if a newspaper is funded mostly by brands largely bought by liberals or conservatives, the papers tend to be slanted in the same direction, whereas heterogeneity among ads increases moderation. While the cause-and-effect relationship is unclear, it does show a relationship between advertising and media bias.

Corporate bias is a form of bias where the business or advertising interests of a news outlet or its parent company affect how or if a story is covered. A 2017 paper from the University of Richmond⁶ found a pronounced effect when comparing the Wall Street Journal to other papers following its sale to Rupert Murdoch:

The editorial pages of both the WSJ and NYT were equally likely to address political issues throughout the examined time period, but the WSJ became increasingly more likely to feature political stories on its front pages following Murdoch’s purchase than the NYT, USAT, and the WaPo. Measuring political coverage using the percentage of political stories on the front page and the percentage of political stories above the fold reveals that the front-page coverage of the WSJ – which had historically focused less on politics than the NYT – was only slightly less focused on politics than the NYT following its sale.

The news is also susceptible to mainstream/audience bias: the news often selectively excludes stories that may offend its readership and includes stories that flatter its readership.

In The Market for News, a 2005 paper by Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer⁷, the authors investigate how the economy incentivizes newspapers to slant stories toward their readers’ beliefs:

Competition forces newspapers to cater to the prejudices of their readers, and greater competition typically results in more aggressive catering to such prejudices as competitors strive to divide the market. On the other hand, we found that reader diversity is a powerful force toward accuracy, as long as accuracy is interpreted as some aggregate measure of revelation of information to a reader who takes in all the news.

The news can’t help but service the market, which more and more is a hyper-specific audience of people who have the same views as you.

So, the news is biased toward the narratives that you want, the narratives that corporations want, the narratives that advertisers want, and above all, isn’t very relevant to your life.

But you still want to be civically engaged. The news doesn’t have to be relevant to you personally to help you help others. Theoretically, by consuming more news from a variety of different outlets with different slants, you can still get an accurate idea of what’s going on, according to Mullainathan and Shleifer’s research.

Dobelli would say that the anecdotal nature of the news simply isn’t very helpful for the goal of being informed and/or civically engaged.

Instead of providing an analysis of deeper trends or relationships between cause and effect, the news often simply reports facts. Even if your concern is specific to current events rather than long-term issues like combatting terrorism or malaria, the news is often bad at picking up signals in the noise, which only clear up in retrospect.

For instance, the first internet browser debuted to the public on April 30th, 1993, and may have been the most impactful long-term event of the decade. It barely made the papers.

It’s easier to cover anecdotes, gossip, fame, and the sensational rather than underlying trends, which are almost impossible to anticipate, but are likely more helpful in staying attuned to your civic cause of choice.

Plus, journalists are often bad at their jobs.

While that may be unfair, and there are plenty of great reporters in the profession, not everyone can be Woodward or Bernstein. And, as is increasingly clear in the age of constant attention to the 24-hour cycle, the news can be very wrong and is often updated after the fact. If you’ve been in the Los Angeles area in the last week, you know how hard it can be to find accurate information about the fires that aren’t being constantly updated to correct errors—and I would include that in the rare category of news information that is relevant to your life.

Finally, the news has a major opportunity cost to your focus on other things, whether that be work, a cause, or your life, especially for those of us who consume it compulsively.

Dobelli thinks about this in three ways: consumption time, refocusing time, and the time taken up later by recalling any of this information.

Consumption time is the time taken up reading, watching, or listening to what may effectively be a series of inaccurate, biased, irrelevant anecdotes. Refocusing time is the time it takes to divert your attention away and onto something else. If you’ve ever unwound after a TikTok binge, you know this feeling. “What was I trying to do again?” Recall time is any time taken up by this information popping into your brain, which, if you’re like me, tends to happen throughout the day while you’re trying to get something done or be present.

This Wednesday, when the fires hit Los Angeles, I spent six hours on my phone trying to get information about what was going on. I had already left the city, but it felt important to gather information to decide when I should return home. Even though it became clear that this was a decision I had to make based on my personal risk tolerance, I still spent hours anxiously reading about the topic, and even now, the anecdotes pop into my head. I’m sure we all had similar experiences during COVID.

In retrospect, this news binge only succeeded in spiking my anxiety and left me with a vague feeling of knowing more, despite that I can’t tell you much more about wildfires now than “if there’s a lot of wind, it makes it hard to contain them.”

If I had spent that time going for a run, reading a book, or working, I would have probably left the day feeling more fulfilled. If I had spent time finding out how to volunteer, and better yet, actually followed through, I would have alleviated my anxiety and helped in the cause I was anxious about. In this case, the news cost me hours I could have been engaged in my community.

Reading the news, at best, isn’t a very effective way to be civically engaged and is distorting your view of reality toward the dramatic, inaccurate, and anecdotal. Even worse, it makes you feel like it’s not doing this, wasting valuable time that you could be doing something else, and for many people, replaces the act of being civically engaged entirely.

Part Two: The News Is Bad For Your Brain and Body

So, the news isn’t helping you be civically engaged, and worse, it gives you a feeling that you are when you aren’t.

But it’s also just bad for you.

First, somewhat obviously, the news increases your stress. One 2020 study⁸ found that consuming news via television and social media was tied to increased distress and that information-seeking behavior in general, including via newspaper, was also tied to emotional distress.

The news is constantly triggering your limbic system, spamming you with panicky stories, and releasing cortisol. While this is bad for your physical health, it can also increase fear, aggression, tunnel vision, and desensitization.

News consumption also greatly increases our tendency toward confirmation bias. We’re hammered with so many headlines and stories that we can’t possibly take them all in. So, we sort them into categories that we already believe in. This is especially pronounced in politics, where we tend to have strong pre-defined beliefs.

The YouTuber Veritasium put together a great explainer on this before the election⁹ based on a 2013 study¹⁰ that tested subjects’ numeracy, a measure of their abilities to make use of quantitative information.

When asked to analyze a set of data evaluating the effectiveness of a fictional skin cream, those high in numeracy were able to more accurately say if a skin cream was effective or ineffective than those low in numeracy, as you might expect. Democrats and Republicans, as you might also expect, score about the same here.

But what happens when you change the study from being about skin cream to gun control?

If the table has been arranged to agree with a conservative or liberal’s pre-existing view on gun control (i.e., gun control measures would increase crime according to a conservative and decrease crime according to a liberal), subjects with high numeracy score better than those with low numeracy, just like the skin cream study. However, if you arrange the data to be counter to what subjects might politically expect, numeracy didn’t help subjects at all. Those with the highest numeracy from either party were unable to give the correct answer more than 50% of the time.

The biggest difference in performance here is actually among the most numerate people, who score a lot worse than they should be: low numeracy people are 25% less likely to get the right answer if that answer contradicts their political stance, but high numeracy people are 45% less likely to get the right answer if it contradicts their political stance. The results replicate across a range of issues, including fracking and global warming.

Even smart people are really bad at breaking down information when it disagrees with their political tribes, and we prioritize conclusions that allow us to keep believing what we already believe, especially if we’re not forced to marinate in the new information for very long. Consuming more news likely won’t change your opinions and might create a false sense of knowledge, reinforcing your existing beliefs instead of challenging them, no matter what you’re reading.

Following these stories can be addictive. Your attention becomes set on the new and sensational, and you hunger for more data about these topics, even if you can’t pinpoint why they’re important.

They also don’t store very well in your memory. As explained by Nicholas Carr¹¹, the news, and the internet in general, is an information faucet and puts stress on our cognitive load by overwhelming and distracting us. We struggle to turn new information into meaningful understanding when we’re constantly distracted, which weakens both our learning and overall comprehension.

Overall, Dobelli argues, because we’re being bombarded with information that we mostly can’t act on, that we’re addicted to, and that lowers the quality of our thinking, the news makes us passive. We start viewing our lives through a filter of bad things going on outside of ourselves that we have no control over.

Part Three: You’ll Be A Cooler and Funnier Person At Parties

Let’s be real. You want to be original and have original things to say. We all do. Reading the news all the time is probably making you more boring and conventional!

Dobelli’s number one worst thing that the news is doing for you is killing your creativity. The news exposes you to stories and narratives you already know and information that you barely process. The news distracts you, increases stress, and decreases your ability to think deeply about topics that others aren’t thinking about in the same way.

In other words, you’re going to have the same things to say about the world that everyone else does at a party. And you don’t want that. I don’t want that for you. I want you to be fun and engaged in interesting and novel solutions to problems! I want you to be learning about things that you’re deeply interested in and not just clicking on the same links everyone else is! I want you to be a curious, insightful person who doesn’t have the urge to check poll results at a social event (guilty)!

There are better ways of doing and engaging than reading the news. Long-form articles and studies, like those in The New Yorker or a scientific review, aren’t vulnerable to the same attention traps or as many factual errors. Reading a book on a subject you’re interested in will make you think more deeply and for longer about it than a news article. It will make you less anxious because you’re less distracted and more purposeful. You’ll have more time to think about cognitive biases you might be applying and engage with an author’s ideas rather than quickly shuffle them into a pre-existing bucket in your head. You’ll have a wider breadth and depth of knowledge, rather than just breadth, and it will probably be more relevant to your life because you sought it out intentionally.

It’s okay if the news is entertainment for you, too. But know that that is what it is. And, like other forms of entertainment, too much of it changes the way that your brain works.

And perhaps most importantly, prioritizing long-form learning and deeper activities will provide you with a much more solid grounding to tackle the real stuff.

Prioritizing Action

A professor at my old college, Eitan Hersh, proposes similar frames to Dobelli for thinking about the news in a political context. I’ve never met Professor Hersh, but he did tweet about me once when I was working on a local school committee race!

Hersh is the author of Politics is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change¹², in which he coined the idea of political hobbyists: people who are emotionally invested in politics and read the news but don’t take meaningful action to advance their chosen causes. Like many of us, they treat the news as entertainment.

He proposes a different way of thinking about politics: actions you take to make real change in the causes you care about in the places you care about.

Instead of watching CNN, you might start attending city council meetings, learn about the issues affecting your community, and build local consensus to improve the place you live, where you have significantly more control compared to national or global issues. Go deep on the history of a particular subject, or read books about topics that interest you. Be curious.

The book was a huge inspiration to me in 2020, when I began working on local campaigns to increase my impact in my community.

Hersh’s thesis doesn’t only have to apply to politics, either. You can be engaged in a cause (take your pick) without necessarily absorbing “everything” there is to know via social media or short-form information that facilitates a narrative. It will probably make your participation in said cause more meaningful, creative, and effective. That counts for your work, a passion project, or local activism.

Go deep, not shallow.

My Rules For The Next Four Years

In March of 2018, The New York Times published the story “The Man Who Knew Too Little,”¹³ about a man named Erik Hagerman, who, since Trump’s election in 2016, had completely tuned the news out from his life. He didn’t even let his friends and family talk to him about current events.

I don’t know if Hagerman read Dobelli, but I’d imagine the writer of the article hasn’t. There’s a tacit assumption throughout the piece that what Hagerman is doing is making him stupider, less engaged with the world around him, and denying what is simply before his eyes. The subtitle, which refers to Hagerman’s life as a “liberal fantasy,” certainly implies a kind of lack of engagement with reality.

Some of the arguments in the article, like that Hagerman can only make this lifestyle work from a position of privilege, hold some water for me, but I remain skeptical of them. Specifically, the author cites that people threatened by Trump’s immigration policies may need to pay more attention to the news around this topic. I would hesitantly agree, although I’m not sure the New York Times front page is necessarily the best place to get this information, and certainly falls into the category of “information that is relevant to your life,” that the news does not provide for the majority of readers.

More importantly, I don’t think Hagerman is disengaged with reality. The article cites that he’s friendly and creative and knows his neighbors well. He bought a defunct lake property and is singlehandedly making it a public park. Are these the kinds of things that a stupid and unengaged person does?

Frankly, the article is condescending and assumes that what makes someone civically engaged is the mere action of reading the news. Not only is this wrong and mean, but I think it’s demonstrative of the kind of hole the left has dug itself into more broadly. We assume that being aware is more valuable than action, and even in 2018, the writer is quick to make Hagerman some kind of oddity, an outsider from the mainstream. Despite this, Hagerman’s park will probably have a more lasting impact on his community than any article you read this year.

Finally, it’s abundantly clear that Hagerman cares very deeply about the world around him. And, if you’re reading this, I’m betting you do too.

That’s good. The world needs people who care deeply. It will never stop needing people who care deeply. And it needs those people to do something. It does not need those people to read more articles or have more conversations about the government in coffee shops. I, for one, am over that kind of engagement for 2025.

So, here are my rules for the next four years, which may or may not be helpful for others.

1. Cut out short-form news, at least to the point where I’m comfortable saying I’m not addicted to it.

2. Get engaged with my local community wherever I’m living.

3. When curious about a subject, go deep. Prioritize long-form and conflicting perspectives.

4. Spend more time being bored. You’ll notice more and it’ll make you more creative and curious.

5. If you’re anxious about a problem in the world, locally or globally, decide if it’s within your scope to help. If it is, help. If it’s not, make peace with that.

As always, a photo from my week:

My friend Patrick, 12-26-24. My brother’s apartment.

And, a new part of the blog! I’m going to be adding the song I have on repeat every week and my favorite verse, for a little more flavor. Prepare for these to be 50% Bruce Springsteen. But not this week! Because it’s The Replacements time.

Song of the Week: Can’t Hardly Wait - The Tim Version by The Replacements

I’ll be sad in heaven

If I don’t find a hole in the gate

Climb on the top of this scummy water tower, screaming:

“I can’t hardly wait! I can’t wait.”

1. Dobelli, Rolf. Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet. 2010. https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf.

2. Dobelli, Rolf. Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer, and Wiser Life. Sceptre, 2020.

3. Vision of Humanity. Global Terrorism Index. Institute for Economics & Peace, 2023, https://www.visionofhumanity.org/maps/global-terrorism-index/.

4. World Health Organization. Malaria. World Health Organization, 30 Nov. 2023, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria.

5. Gal-Or, Esther; Geylani, Tensev; Yildirim, Pinar. The Impact of Advertising and Media Bias. University of Pennsylvania, 2011, https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/AdvertisingandMediaBias_11draft.pdf.

6. Archer, Allison M.N. and Clinton, Joshua D., "Changing Owners, Changing Content: Does Who Owns the News Matter for the News?" (2017). Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications. 252. https://scholarship.richmond.edu/jepson-faculty-publications/252

7. Mullainathan, Sendhil, and Shleifer, Andrei. The Market for News. Harvard University, 2002, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/market_for_news.pdf.

8. Hwang, J.; Borah, P.; Shah, D.; Brauer, M. The Relationship among COVID-19 Information Seeking, News Media Use, and Emotional Distress at the Onset of the Pandemic. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 13198. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182413198.

9. Veritasium. “On These Questions, Smarter People Do Worse.” YouTube, uploaded by Veritasium,

10. Kahan, Dan M. and Peters, Ellen and Dawson, Erica and Slovic, Paul, Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government (September 3, 2013). Behavioural Public Policy, 1, 54-86, Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 307, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2319992 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2319992

11. Carr, Nicholas. “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains.” Wired, 24 May 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/05/ff-nicholas-carr/.

12. Hersh, Eitan. Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change. Scribner, 2020.

13. Dolnick, Sam. “The Man Who Knew Too Little.” The New York Times, 10 Mar. 2018.