The News Cycle

Staying informed without drowning in despair

Category: The Digital Age

This booklet is for people who’ve realized that staying informed feels like drowning. You check the news. The news is bad. You check again. It’s worse. You keep checking because you feel responsible. Because you’re supposed to know. Because being informed is civic duty. Except the informing is destroying you.

How It Starts

You check the news. Once a day. Reasonable. Responsible. Then something big happens. A crisis. An election. A disaster. You check more often. The checking increases. Multiple times a day. Every hour. You’re refreshing. Scrolling. Looking for updates. You can’t stop checking because what if you miss something?

The Doom-Scroll

You start doom-scrolling. This is different from checking. This is hours. Late at night. Early in the morning. You’re scrolling through bad news. Story after story. Crisis after crisis. The scrolling has momentum. You can’t stop. Each story is terrible. You keep reading. Keep scrolling. The consumption is compulsive. Joyless. Mandatory-feeling.

The Mood Change

Your mood changes. You’re anxious. Depressed. Angry. Helpless. The news is affecting you. Profoundly. You’re different now. Heavier. Darker. More scared. Less hopeful. The news has colonized your emotional state. You’re carrying the world’s pain. That fraction is still too much.

Good Company

Amusing Ourselves to Death — Neil Postman, 1985
Postman saw, before the internet, that an endless stream of news reorganizes the mind into something less able to hold any single thing. The book is forty years old and the diagnosis is more accurate every year.
Network — Sidney Lumet, 1976
The film that called the news cycle by its name before it had its current shape. Howard Beale’s breakdown reads now less as satire than as documentary, and the film’s central question, what happens to a person who absorbs the world’s noise as a job, still has no good answer.
OK Computer — Radiohead, 1997
The album made just as the speed of information was about to change. It sounds like the inside of a head that has read too much, too fast, and is trying to find the off switch, which is to say it sounds like most of us at most times.