[Nattering Nabob]

At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, news is a product meant to grab our attention so that we will watch the commercials...what is not so obvious is it's ill effect on us...

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier


News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether


Rolf Dobelli


The Guardian, Friday 12 April 2013 15.00 EDT

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.


News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That's the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it's dramatic, it's a person (non-abstract), and it's news that's cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.

We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.

News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what's relevant. It's much easier to recognise what's new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we're cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.

News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists' radar but have a transforming effect. The more "news factoids" you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. If more information leads to higher economic success, we'd expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That's not the case.

News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.

News increases cognitive errors. News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact." News exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. It also exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that "make sense" – even if they don't correspond to reality. Any journalist who writes, "The market moved because of X" or "the company went bankrupt because of Y" is an idiot. I am fed up with this cheap way of "explaining" the world.

News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it's worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory's capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a certain amount of slippery data. The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must pass through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension. Online news has an even worse impact. In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an intentional interruption system.

News works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists used to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It's not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It's because the physical structure of their brains has changed.

News wastes time. If you read the newspaper for 15 minutes each morning, then check the news for 15 minutes during lunch and 15 minutes before you go to bed, then add five minutes here and there when you're at work, then count distraction and refocusing time, you will lose at least half a day every week. Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind?

News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can't act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is "learned helplessness". It's a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if news consumption, at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression.

News kills creativity. Finally, things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas. I don't know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don't.

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.

I have now gone without news for four years, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first-hand: less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, more insights. It's not easy, but it's worth it.

This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre.

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The Psychological Effects of TV News

Negative news on TV is increasing, but what are its psychological effects?

Published on June 19, 2012 by Graham C.L. Davey, Ph.D. in Why We Worry

We’ve known for a very long time that the emotional content of films and television programs can affect your psychological health. It can do this by directly affecting your mood, and your mood can then affect many aspects of your thinking and behaviour. If the TV program generates negative mood experiences (e.g. anxiety, sadness, anger, disgust), then these experiences will affect how you interpret events in your own life, what types of memories you recall, and how much you will worry about events in your own life.

Why have I singled out negative news bulletins for attention here? Well, there is good reason to believe that the negative sensationalism in news has been gradually increasing over the past 20-30 years. So first, we’ll have a look at what negative news is, we’ll then examine the reasons why the broadcasting of negative news has become so prevalent. Then finally, we’ll look at some of the ways in which viewing perpetual negative news might affect your mood, and particularly your tendency to worry about your own specific problems.

There are a lot of bad things that happen in the world, and it is probably right that people should know about these things through their reporting in news bulletins. These ‘bad things’ include crime, famine, war, violence, political unrest, and injustice, to name but a few. But there is also an increasing tendency for news broadcasters to ‘emotionalize’ their news and to do so by emphasizing any potential negative outcomes of a story no matter how low the risks of those negative outcomes might be. This is basically ‘scaremongering’ at every available opportunity in order to sensationalize and emotionalize the impact of a news story. Because we now have 24-hour news coverage, gone are the days when a correspondent or journalist’s role was simply to impartially describe what was happening in the world – because of satellite TV we have an almost immediate visual record of what is happening throughout the world. So the journalist’s job then becomes one of ‘evaluating’ the news story and it is only a small step from ‘evaluating’ a story to ‘sensationalizing’ it. As professor of journalism studies Bob Franklin wrote some years ago:



“Entertainment has superseded the provision of information; human interest has supplanted the public interest; measured judgement has succumbed to sensationalism.” Franklin, B, Newszak and News Media, 1997, 4.

News bulletins also have to compete with entertainment programs for their audience and for their prime-time TV slot, and seem to do this by emphasizing emotionally relevant material such as crime, war, famine, etc. at the expense of more positive material.

In the knowledge that the proportion of negatively-valenced emotional material in news bulletins was increasing, in 1997 we conducted a study looking at the psychological effects of viewing negative news items. We constructed three different 14-min news bulletins. One was made entirely of negative news items, one was made of entirely positive news items (e.g. people winning the lottery, recovering from illness, etc.), and one was made up of items that were emotionally neutral. We then showed these bulletins to three different groups of people. As we predicted, those who watched the negative news bulletin all reported being significantly more anxious and sadder after watching this bulletin than those people who watched either the positive or neutral news bulletin.

But what was more interesting was the effect that watching negative news had on peoples’ worries. We asked each participant to tell us what their main worry was at the time, and we then asked them to think about this worry during a structured interview. We found that those people who had watched the negative news bulletin spent more time thinking and talking about their worry and were more likely to catastrophise their worry than people in the other two groups. Catastrophizing is when you think about a worry so persistently that you begin to make it seem much worse than it was at the outset and much worse than it is in reality – a tendency to make ‘mountains out of molehills’!

So not only are negatively valenced news broadcasts likely to make you sadder and more anxious, they are also likely to exacerbate your own personal worries and anxieties. We would intuitively expect that news items reflecting war, famine and poverty might induce viewers to ruminate on such topics. But the effect of negatively valenced news is much broader than that – it can potentially exacerbate a range of personal concerns not specifically relevant to the content of the program itself. So, bombarding people with ‘sensationalized’ negativity does have genuine and real psychological effects. Given this ‘cascading’ effect of negativity into people’s personal lives, should TV schedulers be required to consider such effects when preparing and scheduling programs containing emotively negative content?

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[AFAIK]

If your attention span can handle it try reading Alain De Botton's News: A User's Manual.

I found the conclusions of these articles to be pretty obvious and everyone should be aware of this from their own personal experience (although it is good to article these ideas clearly). I've never really followed the news because it is mostly tedious gossip or fragments of a story devoid of context. Books are the best source of information as they provide depth and analysis. I don't mind being a couple of years behind the headlines.

If I do pick up a paper I usually focus on news analysis and opinion pieces concerning current affairs. A good headline usually summarises the whole article accompanying it such as "The govt announces x" or "A plane crashed in y". No need to read beyond that unless it is of personal interest.

[defrank]

News are not only bad for you, it´s a propaganda tool, psychological warfare to change and distort public perception of reality.

[QatzelOk]

One of the reasons both the news and the "entertainment" are so stressful and oriented towards fear is because this type of filler really makes the commercials feel like a "relief."

And this feeling of relief helps products "feel" more positive in the media viewer's mind.

It's brainwashing 101. Emotional transfer.

[Ozzie]

Mainstream news is for morons.

I wouldn't even call eight per cent of it "news" but rather schoolyard gossip between pseudo-intelligent people, clad in suits and expensive dresses, hair all done up, make up, etc.

Australian news media, for instance, is heavily influenced by America. Especially during the day, where you experience Dr. Phil-like segments and Hollywood gossip. Throw in some TV shopping products and a garbage segment about what women find attractive about men and that is basically the definition of "news".

The evening news is slightly different. Instead of talking of pointless garbage, it spreads panic. Drunk drivers, ISIS militants, Ebola, local burglaries, suspected arsons, you name it; it is there. A popular topic is shark attacks and cars crashing into houses. Lovely stuff. All is forgotten though, when the sports segment arrives. It is just so crucial that we win the cricket.

[blackjack21]

Yeah. That's why I've just changed my attitude about it and gotten more into schadenfreude. The ISIS stuff makes me belly laugh. Our so-called elite is absolutely retarded.

[SolarCross]

You get what you pay for.

News is most typically provided "free at the point of use", because news consumers want someone else to pick up the tab. For news providers scrounging for a dollar to keep going another day that means getting commercial advertisers and government agencies to pay them instead.

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Commercial advertisers want ratings to know that their expenditure is worth it. Making ratings often means appealing to the largest market of news consumers: the dumb people.

Government agencies want news stories to function in a propaganda capacity.

Maybe someday a news outfit will gamble that they can make a living selling real news to the consumers without taking a penny from government agencies or commercial advertisers? If they did would any of you support that?

[anarchist23]

Private media decide what is newsworthy and the public media fall into line. This is as bad as the brainwashing content of the news. The private media sets the news agenda.

[Ozzie]

It's great we have the internet, isn't it?

We can look for alternative news, but we must remember that independent/alternative isn't entirely trustworthy either. People often have agendas of their own to push, they just don't have the upper hand. Discernment is needed.

[anarchist23]

Just because we have many many news outlets doesn't mean that the public gets enlightened. No, all it means is that individuals choose a news outlet that reinforces there predjedices. Thus the news creates a more bigotted general public. Racists become more racist, the sexist becomes more sexist, and so on.

[QatzelOk]

...individuals choose a news outlet that reinforces there predjedices. Thus the news creates a more bigotted general public. Racists become more racist, the sexist becomes more sexist, and so on.

Yes, and those who obsess about other people's racism and sexism also have their own media outlets that cater to their own perversions of normal human thought.

This is what commerce did to civil society (through media ownership): turned into a mall of ideologies that turned into a race to the bottom of human cooperation and good will.