"Quitting" the News
I stopped watching news channels on TV a long while back. Then the newspaper was stopped in Covid times; and we never renewed it. So my source of news are the websites of various news publications. This blogger named David Cain wrote about his experience of “quitting the news” . Like me, by that he only means news channels and Internet newscasts, not all of journalism. I could relate to most things he wrote of. First, he says, your mood improves: “The idea that you can get a meaningful sense of the “state of the world” by watching the news is absurd… What appears is whatever sells, and what sells is fear, and contempt for other groups of people.” Second, you realize that watching the news didn’t really benefit you in any way: “A month after you’ve quit the news, it’s hard to name anything useful that’s been lost. It becomes clear that those years of news-watching amounted to virtually nothing in terms of improvement to your quality of life, lasting knowledge, or y