News overload

Headline clippings from newspapers

(Image credit: Sean Gladwell / Getty Images)

All across America, people are turning off the news. Some of them are liberals still traumatized by the election, for whom the idea of hearing about President-elect Donald Trump's latest ALL-CAPS pronouncement is just too triggering. Some are right-leaning bros, who believe that traditional media outlets have become too "woke" and that only moon landing-skeptical podcasters can be trusted to tell it like it is. But a good number of those tuning out, I'm confident, are doing so because they feel like the firehose of breaking news is drowning them. It is our curse to live in interesting times — just consider all that's happened in the past few days. There was an attempted coup in South Korea; a resumption of civil war in Syria; a U.S. president pardoning his prodigal son, after repeatedly promising not to; and a whole convoy of Trump-related happenings, from his nomination of a MAGA vengeance artist as FBI director to his suggested annexation of Canada.

In normal times, any of these stories would dominate the headlines for days. But these are interesting times, and so each shocking development gets only a brief moment on the chyron before being pushed aside by yet another world-shaking story. We are not designed to cope with such an onslaught, and so our caveman brains tell us to seek safety — or at least to switch off CNN, delete that news app, and take up whittling or some other adrenaline-reducing activity. Such a flight response is understandable but not conducive to a healthy democracy, which requires an informed citizenry. Yet being informed is not the same thing as being overloaded. Fewer of us would suffer from news fatigue if we weren't being blasted from all directions and at all hours with news alerts and updates: On our phones' home screens, in our email inboxes, on our never-ending social media feeds, and even on TVs at the bar. No news is bad news, but too much news is simply exhausting.