Stop watching the news

Reflections on noise and the search for depth

Oct 18, 2024

🏷️ Categories: Attention, Decision making and biases

The media don't tell you what to think, but they tell you what to think about.

It was 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, news about the virus was everywhere: television, social networks, conversations with friends and family. At first, like many, I kept myself informed, being alert to every new piece of information, but I soon realized that it wasn't doing me any good.

I couldn't stop thinking about the one topic: it had exhausted me and was affecting me mentally.

We consume news as if it gives us control over the situation, but, oddly enough, the more we devour, the less we understand (Li & Jager, 2023). Each headline further clouded my view of the big picture. I was only thinking about the issues I was being shown and needed to be alert because the news was ephemeral, some lasting minutes before being disproven or obsolete.

News lasts a breath.

There is so much information and everything happens so fast that there is no time to reflect.

Could it be that, instead of knowing more, we should know better?

Turn down the volume of all that noise. Not everything that is urgent is important.

The problem of news

Immediacy over quality: News comes to us instantly and is ephemeral, there is no time for reflection or fact-checking. It matters more to be the first to react to events than to be right. There is no incentive to produce contrasted and deep news, the majority public consumes fast and speculative information (Saisho, 2020).
Biased vision: The media choose what topics to cover and how to present them, which limits the topics you think about. This produces two major biases (among many others): the availability heuristic and the confirmation bias: Just because something is in all the media does not mean it is important (or important to you), and just because the media have the same opinion as you does not mean they are right (Brugnoli et al., 2019; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973; Modgil et al., 2021).

The business is not to seek the truth, it's to sell your attention: Most media depend on your attention in order to make a profit through advertisers. If they have to write misleading headlines and controversial information to attract your attention, they will do so.
Pessimism: Saying that something is business as usual is not news and saying something positive generates fewer clicks than talking about disasters, violence and conflicts. That's why the bad is given much more voice than the good. Both good and bad news affect us emotionally (Ferrara & Yang, 2015), but as the negative abounds, a pessimistic view is encouraged (Rozado et al., 2022).
Narrative over reality: There are always interests at stake. In an ideal world, journalists would follow the truth wherever it is. In reality, journalists are not in the truth business. Theirs are flashy stories that fit narratives or ideologies that it is in their interest to promote (McCombs & Shaw, 1972; Brugnoli et al., 2019).

The result is simple.

We are “informed” at all times, but we rarely know enough about what is going on to make an informed opinion.

So what do I propose?

Elevate your judgment through deliberate consumption

The solution is not to avoid information, but to consume it with intentionality.

You don't need to be opinionated and informed about everything, seek to understand in depth what matters to you. Seek depth rather than breadth and privilege timeless wisdom over ephemeral updates. You become what you pay attention to, again, it is essential to choose elegantly.

Curiosity broadens perspectives, echo chambers do not.

If you inform yourself less, you will have more time to reflect.
If you are concerned about your diet, do the same with information: stop the informative diet based on quick information and look for a varied and quality diet.

And how do you know what is quality?

Is this something that can be leveraged or is it just empty speculation?
Is it loaded with proven facts or unfounded opinions?
Does it give concrete details and lessons to take away or just superficial ideas?
What is its expiration date? Will it still be important next week? What about next month? Next year? It's the Lindy effect.

The easiest way to become informed about the present is to wait until it becomes the past, all the hustle and bustle dies down and the dust that has been kicked up dissipates.

That is when the information emerges and the noise disappears.

✍️ It's your turn: What criteria do you use to choose where you pay attention? I stopped watching the news and if something interests me, I watch it months later, when detailed analyses come out that state the facts more clearly and objectively.
💭 Quote of the day: “Newscasts have no intention of suggesting that a news story has implications, because that would force viewers to keep thinking about it when it's over and thus prevent them from attending to the next news story.” Neil Postman, Amusing Yourself to Death.

See you soon, take care and reflect a lot! 👋

References 📚

Brugnoli, E., Cinelli, M., Quattrociocchi, W., & Scala, A. (2019). Recursive patterns in online echo chambers. Scientific Reports, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-56191-7
Ferrara, E., & Yang, Z. (2015). Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media. PLoS ONE, 10(11), e0142390. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0142390
Li, T., & Jager, W. (2023). How Availability Heuristic, Confirmation Bias and Fear May Drive Societal Polarisation: An Opinion Dynamics Simulation of the Case of COVID-19 Vaccination. Journal Of Artificial Societies And Social Simulation, 26(4). https://doi.org/10.18564/jasss.5135
McCombs, M. E., & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), 176–187. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2747787
Modgil, S., Singh, R. K., Gupta, S., & Dennehy, D. (2021). A Confirmation Bias View on Social Media Induced Polarisation During Covid-19. Information Systems Frontiers, 26(2), 417-441. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-021-10222-9
Rozado, D., Hughes, R., & Halberstadt, J. (2022). Longitudinal analysis of sentiment and emotion in news media headlines using automated labelling with Transformer language models. PLoS ONE, 17(10), e0276367. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0276367
Saisho, R. (2020). Speed vs Accuracy in Time of Crisis. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/speed-vs-accuracy-time-crisis
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207-232. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9