News Is Entertainment
Consuming news has great time cost, doesn't inform you very well and is bad for your brain. It's not anyone's fault, and you can change what you do.
At some point, years ago, someone said to me that news is a waste of time. It felt intuitively correct, and I stopped consuming news. I tried to write about it a few months ago in a way that would be persuasive, but it was difficult for me to get to a coherent position. Sam Atis’ monthly “interesting things” post mentioned it and prompted me to listen to a podcast (news is discussed in the first 40 mins of the episode) which caused me to then read (listen to) a book (2.5 hr listen). I recommend listening to the book. It’s scathing, comprehensive, full of different ways to think about this and if you act on it, will save you a lot more than the time it costs you.
Here are some things I want to say about the news.
It’s usually better to be reasonably thoughtful and deliberate with your time rather than thoughtless. We’ve all scrolled social media for longer than we want to and know the feeling afterwards. I’m making an assumption throughout this post that people would prefer to use their time in a way that they would approve of if they were looking back at it a day later.
Opportunity Cost
It might make sense for some people to consume news, but it doesn’t make sense for me. Sam Atis makes this point: if you’re scrolling instead of reading news, you’re probably better off reading news. Before I read Stop Reading the News, I agreed with one caveat: one of the downsides of news that you don’t get from scrolling is that you’re awash with negativity - if you find that affects you, you’re probably better off on Tiktok. I don’t have time to do a bunch of the things I actively want to do, let alone scrolling - the only thing in that category for me is checking cricket scores too often when a match is on. I’ll even admit that even though I’d like to be writing more, there are times where I’m not in the headspace for it (usually in the evenings or after a hectic day at work), but there are still low mental effort things I’d rather do like read fiction. So there’s really nothing I do at the moment that I would readily give up to read the news.
OBJECTION! It’s a moral imperative to be responsive to things happening around you so you can vote and stuff..
Rebuttal: Is reading the news the best way to achieve this? In terms of actions you take, for how many is reading the news the cause? On average, people see 20,000 news articles in a year. How many do you act on? I bet that for you, over 95% of the news articles you read, you take no action on. The news articles are practically irrelevant to you. I would argue that reading a single book on an event is likely to have you better informed about it than “keeping up with it” as it’s happening. Or read the wiki page. Or look at Our World In Data. And that’s just about knowing what’s going on. When it comes to the action, voting is nearly useless. In my federal seat, it’s been effectively Labor held for 30 years. The 80,000 hours podcast I listened to mentioned it was way more effective to write a letter or attend an event held by a local member than the teeny tiny chance reading the news would change your vote for the better multiplied by the teenier tinier chance that your vote actually swings an election. I want to make a segment in this substack called “Letters to a Senator” which does exactly this. Maybe if you’re concerned about being a good citizen, you could decide to cut your news reading time in half and use the extra time to write an email to your federal/state/local member each month. Which is to say, what is your current ratio of time spent reading about things and time spent taking action on things? What do you want it to be? What should it be for the perfect “moral citizen”? Probably not 99% of time reading news, 1% taking action, which it’s probably worse than. Remember, an hour consuming news a day out of around 8 non-work waking hours is around 12% of that time.
Bad business model
The news media business model is rubbish. Most journalists are good people who want to do good things, but their task is not aligned with that. Revenue is a function of eyeballs and everyone knows that the stories that get eyeballs aren’t the most important things happening. From a business perspective, the purpose of every news article is to get people to spend more time on that news website. It means news organisations are biased through omission of important but not very interesting things (assuming people want to know important things, which I think they don’t). I will admit that if everyone decided to stop consuming news, there would probably be a bunch of downsides like actual important things going unreported. For example if the PM thinks news matters and doesn’t, I dunno, peel babies because he’s worried about the bad press, then that disappears when there is no press. But I’m not arguing for everyone to stop reading news, I’m just saying it makes sense for me and you should think about it making sense for you too.
Everyone within the media system is acting according to their incentives. The publications are catering to the desires of the audience. The journalists are doing what their employers ask. The audience is clicking on what they feel like clicking on. There are a bunch of systems within which each person is rationally responding to their incentives, yet the outcome is that they are all worse off. For more, read Meditations on Moloch.
It's mentioned in the podcast that many news articles aren't actually very good because it's not worth the author spending the time to understand the topic deeply. This happens when you need to write many new things each day that get people to read then go back to the home page. Eyeballs = profit. This becomes obvious if you read an article about a topic you understand deeply. Often you realise the article’s actually not that good and you probably wouldn't send it to someone to understand the topic. I felt this during The Voice referendum. Certainly not that I understood the topic comprehensively, I clearly didn’t, more that many of the writers didn’t know what they were on about. It seemed to be a grade 10 level analysis written by someone who’s a great writer. Again, I don’t think this means journalists are bad or incompetent or anything, they’re just being asked to do a bunch of things outside their expertise and responding rationally to bad incentives. If the business model was different, each journalist would be writing one fifth the number of similar length articles, exclusively on topics they understand well. If someone refreshes the news site page after an hour and there would be no new stories and that would be fine.
These not-amazing articles mean most of the things in the news aren’t worth knowing. If there are particular topics you think are worth knowing about, then just look at those topics, probably by reading a book or some long-form journalism. Fine.
Quick thought experiment: if there was four times the population and four times the news, would you consume all that extra news by increasing your news consumption time by four? Probably not. So is your current consumption arbitrary? It’s not really important in any way, it’s just a way to pass the time? If so, no shade, just know that it’s only entertainment and there are other, better ways to be entertained.
The news is bad for you
The news makes you feel bad. Did you read that report saying death from heart disease is falling to as low as it’s ever been? Or how safe the world has become? I didn’t because I don’t read the news and you didn’t because people aren’t as interested in good things as they are in bad things, so feel good statistics don’t get reported as much as feel bad ones. I just looked up a bunch of news websites in Australia and literally all the top stories were negative stories from shark attacks and murdered babies to a killer fever and flood damage. I don’t want to spend my time on that. And if I was currently reading news for an hour a day, would I prefer to just do it for 10 minutes to keep nearly as up-to-date and spend the rest of the time doing something else?
News articles are also bound in length by the expected attention span of the reader. The other things I do with my time require relatively longer concentration and I certainly feel like I’ve adjusted to that now. Meaning that I think attention span is worse when you regularly read many three minute articles rather than fewer ten to twenty minute articles.
“News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. Appetising, easily digestible and extremely damaging.” - Rolf Dobelli. I can’t honestly put all my weight behind it being extremely dangerous, but he does talk about the downsides a lot more and I’m on board with many of them. For example he goes into the details of news causing stress: reading about the bad things produces cortisol (stress hormone) in your brain, which has negative side-effects. Also the reduced ability to concentrate (reduced size of the anterior cingulate cortex) and the doom cycle of stress causes less willpower which causes doing things that are bad instead of good, for example consuming news which causes more stress then even less willpower and so on. Your brain adapts to what you’re doing. Short form articles effective train our brains to become shallow thinkers, whereas reading long form journalism, essays, blogs or books does the opposite - read The Shallows for more.
There's a bunch of other great stuff in the book about Stoicism, circle of controls, sphere of influence and other things.
What works for me
Here’s what I actually do that’s relevant (not to say this is what anyone else should do at all, more that I’m justifying my position).
Have kids so I have very little time without kids when I can do things like consume news. This makes that time precious.
Go to bed at the same time as my kids so I have no time to myself in the evening when my brain doesn’t work to do things like consume news, watch TV or scroll.
Enjoy things like reading non-fiction and writing: things that only really work for me before about 3pm. There is an effectively unlimited amount of time I’d like to spend doing this. If I have only a small chunk of time and don’t want to dig into either of these things, there are many more substack posts I want to read than I have time for.
Listen to loads of non-news podcasts and books when commuting either on my bike or in the car. I love This American Life, Hardcore History, Making Sense, Freakonomics, Planet Money, The Indicator, Against the Rules, Cautionary Tales, Mindscape, What’s Your Problem, Revisionist History, Common Sense, People I Mostly Admire and NADDPOD. I barely have enough time commuting each week to keep up with all of these, and when I do get through everything, I have Audible to read more non-fiction books than I have time for. I don’t want to trade any of this for news.
Hopefully when I get back from travel I will have enough time and gumption to start “Letters to a Senator” and actually take some of that action I’m talking about.
In summary: for all the time when my brain works and I have my hands free, I’d rather be doing something else. For all the time when my brain doesn’t work and my hands are free… there is actually zero time like that because kids.
OBJECTION! How is Chris listening to podcasts for entertainment any better or worse than someone reading news for entertainment?
Rebuttal: maybe it’s not better or worse, but it’s certainly different! (I can’t honestly see how someone would rather listen to a news podcast and find that more interesting, important and profound than a random This American Life episode, but some people prefer news and that’s fine!) These podcasts are about how things work, not just what happens. This is the difference between news journalism and investigative and explanatory journalism. Am I just saying that news journalism kinda sucks? Maybe, it depends on how much other types of journalism rely on it, which I suspect is a decent amount. This all reminds me of a quote mentioned in the gossip trap. “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” - Eleanor Roosevelt. We make progress when we talk about ideas rather than events or people.
What do I think you should do about this if you are a journalist? Firstly, probably don’t take my advice because I really don’t know anything about journalism. Then, determine if all this applies to you. Is your role at your organisation one which encourages you to write quickly and shallowly? Maybe not. But if it is, maybe invest in investigative or explanatory journalism skills and make a plan to do more of that. You might be screaming “but the average human doesn’t want to read long articles about how things work, nerd!” or “you have no idea how any of this works!”I have no rebuttal to that, but please tell me the assumptions I’m getting wrong. I clearly care enough to spend time thinking about it.
For news consumers: can you really say that reading the news for 30 minutes a day makes your life and the life of people around you better than if you spent that time meditating, reading books or even playing games with the people around you? Which would make you feel happier? More content?