An old history professor of mine once confided to me how happy he was to live in a time of open news. It would never happen again, he told me confidently: the repression, the censorship, the ignorance. Knowing so much, we will never be fooled again.
Unfortunately, it seems like the opposite is true. I know personally that, awash in information, I know nothing and understand even less. It is, of course, possible to find better quality news sites, which are more reliable, more objective or less corrupt. But that still leaves the question of how to deal with the trauma that the news invokes and find a place for it in our life. Here, somewhat imperfectly, are some of the routes I have attempted:
The Boycott: This was the way I chose after reading Herman/Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent“[1] or “why not to bother reading the news at all“. Manufacturing Consent explains how all our news is filtered through five filters and so by the time it has got to the page, all its juicy, real, challenging qualities have been squeezed out. In the same way that you don’t need to read the ingredients to know what kind of food you are getting if you’re standing in a McDonalds, you can bet that any news which has made it onto mainstream channels will have about the same intellectual integrity as a Big Mac has nutrients. So why not avoid it totally and save the effort of brainwashing yourself?
The Positive Angle: Peter Diamandis writes about the news through the focus of “abundance“[2]. And he’s bloody positive. He writes about the amazingness of the world we are living in, all the scientific, technological and social miracles around us and how we cannot even keep up, because of the incredible pace of change. Diamandis also explains our obsession with bad news by the existence of a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is our primal method for spotting danger and avoiding it. Unfortunately, mainstream news triggers this fear mechanism non-stop, blinding us to the amazingness of our time period. The trick is to keep the amygdala alert but calm and open your brain to the good news.
The Tragic Angle: Alain de Botton compares our nightly news to the horrors of a Greek Tragedy, except missing a cathartic ending. There is a reason why we keep going back to the horrid headlines, the bloody, violent pictures of war and destruction. We are searching for the message, the redemption, which ties it all together and allows us to live. It is bad enough that the news provides scraps of superficial information where deep, expert knowledge is needed. But it also gives us all the blood and fear without a hint of the wisdom needed to make sense of it. De Botton suggests we take from the news what we might take from Oedipus: deep, sad, self-reflection and the awareness that “how easily I, too, might have done the same“[3]
The Local Angle: Local news is the total opposite of mainstream news; nice, normal people enjoying the normal treasures and trials of life. A visitor of mine to our small Devon town arrived to the front page headline “Missing Hamster Found Safe“. That’s news you can live with. It’s also more realistic – huge events are rare but the trivialities of life are everywhere.
In the end, I think any boycott can only be temporary. Even if the sources are imperfect at best, we do need to know what’s going on. But even more, we need to understand it within a framework small enough to live with and take positive action. For each terrifying world news story, be it climate change, political corruption or the refugee crisis, there is a graspable detail in our own community. Whether to take it tragically or positively is up to us.
[1] Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky,
[2] Peter Diamandis, http://www.diamandis.com
[3] The News: A User’s Manual (2014), Alain de Botton,
Natalie Czaban 
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