3d ago

Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’

www.theguardian.com Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’

Emotional toll of constant negative news and unlimited access to ‘doomscrolling’ has led to record-high news avoidance

Emotional toll of constant negative news and unlimited access to ‘doomscrolling’ has led to record-high news avoidance

News has never been more accessible – but for some, that’s exactly the problem. Flooded with information and relentless updates, more and more people around the world are tuning out.

The reasons vary: for some it’s the sheer volume of news, for others the emotional toll of negative headlines or a distrust of the media itself. In online forums devoted to mindfulness and mental health, people discuss how to step back, from setting limits to cutting the news out entirely.

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I feel it. I know the news: the worst shit you can imagine, every day. Everybody is doing the exact opposite of the ethical or moral thing.
- God it's so sad but so true, I always think of that scene in shawshank where the guy is about to get raped and the camera pans away with the narrator saying " I wish I could tell you the good guy won". That's just our society, the bad guys almost always win and we keep going down.
- I've been consuming the news daily since 2015 with a heavy focus on politics as well as history for additional context. It's been a rough decade and I can acknowledge that it has always took a toll on my mental health in the past, but the last year it has felt worse.
  Ever since Project 2025 and the November 2024 election, something inside me just changed or snapped or broke maybe. A substantial shift I felt for months, not just mere hours or days. A desire to give up. A need to stop. A hopeless feeling of is anything even worth it anymore?
  This was a state of a few things for me looking back reflectively, I can see the cause and effect within myself with a lot clearer eyes than before.
  I still read the news daily, even at the toll of my mental health because I can't hide or run or deny what is objectively happening in reality. I can't let myself ignore people getting kidnapped, deported, shot and killed by "cops", the dismantlement of rights we've had for over a century, I just can't, nor I won't blind my eyes to what's happening.
  I did take a news break for a few months and it did vastly help my mental health, but it slowly took time to feel better. I am better now, but it's still very far from ideal. I take regular news breaks. I stray away from over-dramatic or sensationalized news bites than end up just being a twitter screenshot with nothing substanclian or proven, just noise. I rely on solid, proven independent journalists and outlet that aren't all backed by billionaires.
  I'm talking about ProPublica, Mediapart, The Texas Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 404 Media, and plenty of others I've got bookmarked as well as a few Podcasts, but those are left leaning for the most part because reality has a liberal basis.
  I will say one thing that's truly help. Whenever you're reading the latest headlines, just ask yourself this: is this news or is this noise?

Being on Lemmy, I’ve noticed BBC News posts a lot of good environmental and local stories (because people post them here). I wish we’d see that in the US. All we get for news out of our conglomerates is regurgitated press releases, fear, murder, and war. The local news is just repeats of the national news repeated seven times per day.
We do have some local freebie newspapers that actually run local stuff. That’s about it though. Everything else is owned by the giant corporations. Luckily these smaller outlets have RSS feeds.
- It's part of being a public broadcaster. How's your local public radio?
  
  Good point. We do get some good local programming out of our NPR station.
  As someone mentioned, that’s probably why they’ve been defunded recently. Can’t have anyone competing with the oligarch-controlled propaganda outlets!
  
  Gutted, and currently being shaken down for whatever remaining pennies might fall out of their pockets.

I tune out the new because a huge fucking portion of it isn't fucking news.
Biased opinion pieces and straight up ads make up the bulk of it.
- "X person gets SLAMMED by Y person" means Y person wrote a strongly worded open letter to X person.
- I don't even want to get going about the state of science news. It's no wonder our society doesn't care about things like the CDC or NASA anymore, there is no stable source of truth for actual developments and discoveries.
  When every goddamn news feed runs headlines like "SCIENTISTS HORRIFIED BY STRUCTURES FOUND UNDERNEATH MARS" or "ASTRONOMERS BAFFLED AT FLOATING EYEBALL PLANETS" (both actual headlines) is it any wonder nobody cares about funding missions to land probes on Europa or that people don't trust mRNA vaccines?
  I hate, hate, HATE when they've done to science reporting. I have to sit through employees and coworkers every day talking about real mermaids and the healing power of essential oils and magic water crystals curing cancer and so on. For the average person who can only get their news from a passing feed and has time only for headlines, why would we expect them to be able to discern the difference between scams and grifts and actual science? It's frustrating and will do far more damage to us than the political divide in the long run.
  
  Amen.
  Technology is as bad. It's all just ads for phones. There is fuck all concerning actual developments in.... you know. FUCKING TECHNOLOGY.

I just want healthcare, housing and education to be accessible, and the news seems hellbent on reporting on everything exceot that which could affect any of those issues in a positive way. They never do and that's one of the big reasons we're dealing with Trump.
- Because hardly anything is ever done to healthcare, housing, or education in a positive way. When it rarely happens we often miss it, but it's still rare to even happen.
  
  That's true as well, and that's sort of what I mean. People and outlets simply are not allowed to communicate ideas which might harm the interests of those who own or are invested in the channels. Or if they are, it's quickly overwhelmingly countered with a firehose of conflicting information. As a blatantly obvious example of this I always bring up Bernie Sander's Presidential campaigns. Whenever they televised a Sanders event or some event he was speaking at or attending, the media would run pro-private healthcare segments as often as they could. Commercials, opinion pieces, bringing "experts" on to provide commentary, it was just nonstop bullshit fear mongering attempting to terrify Americans out of voting for a more beneficial public system.

I'm just tired of corporations and useful idiots getting to dictate what I get to see.
News outlets never show source material. It's always some dipshit telling me what to think.
- At the airport, there was a bar and it was playing Fox News. They were using tweets as their news source.
  Yeah fuck them
- Seriously, the number of articles with wild headlines and text that describes a video or picture - WITHOUT SAID VIDEO OR PICTURE - is too damn high. Really the number of "news stories" that are just this is too damn high to say nothing of the fact that anything actually useful or critical just isn't going to make the news in favor of whatever corporate BS they are shilling.
  I mostly opted out a long time ago and while I'm often out of the loop on lots of things I generally can't avoid hearing big news and have more room for other things that I actually care about.
  
  Especially on the Internet, where hyperlinking is a thing. That I can see an article about Congress passing a bill by a vote total and have to do my own search to find the bill text and who voted for it is ridiculous. Usually the only links they include are links to themselves and even then they're frequently topic links for the word rather than actual links to past reporting.

I stopped watching because they don't hold our politicians accountable especially when they lie to our faces. 16 year old vloggers do a better job on TikTok. I canceled two newspapers. I'll get my news from The Daily Show.

My goal in November 2024 was to tune out of all politics as i had been overwhelmed.
Then the nazi's voted for the con man and ruined everything. Now i have to constantly keep tabs on stock market, trump news, his stupid fucking tweets that change the ENTIRE stock market, what new tariff he imposed because he is angry that day, or what right of mine is now gone.
If you don't keep on top of the news theses days, you cannot stay a step ahead of the dictatorship and his gestapo. It's exhausting and it's meant to be this way. Putin has taught him well on how to be a puppet and a POS.

Probably bc a few billionaires bought all the media in this country and now all the media is unreliable garbage. Hope all of these news organizations fail so we can get some actual news reporting again
- Yes. I have no respect for the people working for these organizations.
  They're part of the problem, and they're only doing it for a paycheck.
  
  And most of them would admit that they are not allowed to report the way they want to and it's "not what i was told in college."
  You get your job and the first thing you do is read a massive contract about what you can and cannot do and who you can and cannot talk about.

I bet the Germans did too

Apathy has set in HARD. I'm having trouble paying my own bills. How the hell am I supposed to influence something on a national scale? I have to limit my exposure to anxiety inducing material. American news media is 100% trash now anyway.

It's a lot easier to ignore because so many news sites have pay walls now, so if you really want to know about the topic you put the effort into finding another source or using an archive service. If you're not interested enough, you just let it go.
- I couldn’t take the obvious insane bias anymore. Unsubbed from NYT about 6 months ago, and WP immediately after Lord Bezos put the kibosh on their Harris endorsement.

I switched to largely an RSS feed and it's much much better.
- Tips on how to get started with that?
  
  Pick a reader (I use feeder on Android, seems good enough for me) and then try to add a couple of websites.
  I have 404 media, guardian US, and a few other news sites. I also subscribe to Corey Doctorow's blog pluralistic. Then I have personal interest sites like pitchfork and the rolling stone.
  Many times you can subscribe by just entering the website URL, and I feel like with some of them (like the Atlantic, which is mostly dreck anyway IMO) don't even know that they're essentially giving you a free subscription. Occasionally, you'll find articles that cut out after a time unless you're a subscriber, but for the most part you get a lot of freebies.

Profits above all. And the news agencies, mainstream ones anyway, need clicks and views. Gotta sensationalize everything and generate click bait and tell flat out lies to get the views to increase profits. Which then we get flooded with stories that do nothing more than increase stress and anxiety. Oh and maybe that one heartwarming story about how 30 employees gave up 4 years worth of vacation so their coworker can have a life saving surgery…totally heartwarming and not showing how broken the medical system is.
Oh and Trump and friends basically control the media at this point, so much propaganda now.

And this is why my family didn't know about the laws my wife and I left our home state over until we explained it to them

Of course this is a bullshit headline. People are tuning out various types of mainstream news, not all of the news in total.
- Yep, it reads like an intro for an ad for ground news or something. People are more starving for information than ever. Our problem is that information is being curated by algorithms and user-biases and we don't have shared realities anymore. That's a way different problem than people "not reading the news because it makes them anxious."

There is "tuning out from news because all they report is bad news", and then there is "tuning out from news because all they report is bad news and I missed out on major events." I had a colleague who stopped watching news precisely for the anxiety it gives her, but she falls on the latter camp and only found out two days later that Russia invaded Ukraine 🤣🤣
- Two days doesn't seem that bad TBH.

I wish things were going well enough that I could tune out the news.

Even reading these comments gives me rumblings of anxiety. What s would!

Annecdotally. I used to watch Phillip de Franco almost every day just to catch up. As soon as trump got into office in Jan I stopped watching him. I knew it would just all be horrible and terrible and so i avoided it.
- I'm still getting Philled in. Yeah it's a lot of Trump stuff, but he does his best to throw in some non-doomer stuff. IMO, Phil delivering the news is enough to take the sting off to make it bearable. No shame for tuning out though. Shit's definitely anxiety inducing.
  
  Yeah I miss the bamf segments an stuff. Ill prods come back in a while I just remember trumps first term and the show just felt draining to know how bad everything was made in such a short space of time.

I think its best to take the news in doses

I feel a lot of people keep up with the news just so they gave something in common to talk about, but since all the news these days is so depressing and realistically a average person is very much powerless to do anything about most of it, so I think people just ignore it, at least that's what I'm doing

47 comments