Journalist Amanda Ripley Avoids the News
Journalist Amanda Ripley has a "secret." She avoids reading the news. Here article is titled: "I stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or the product?"
Why are people avoiding the news? It’s repetitive and dispiriting, often of dubious credibility, and it leaves people feeling powerless, according to the survey. The evidence supports their decision to pull back. It turns out that the more news we consume about mass-casualty events, such as shootings, the more we suffer. The more political news we ingest, the more mistakes we make about who we are. If the goal of journalism is to inform people, where is the evidence it is working? . . .
I found that there are three simple ingredients that are missing from the news as we know it. First, we need hope to get up in the morning. Researchers have found that hope is associated with lower levels of depression, chronic pain, sleeplessness and cancer, among many other things. Hopelessness, by contrast, is linked to anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and … death. . . .
Second, humans need a sense of agency. “Agency” is not something most reporters think about, probably because, in their jobs, they have it. But feeling like you and your fellow humans can do something — even something small — is how we convert anger into action, frustration into invention. That self-efficacy is essential to any functioning democracy. . . .
Finally, we need dignity. This is also not something most reporters think about, in my experience. Which is odd, because it is integral to understanding why people do what they do.
