Now we can concentrate on doing a year-end retrospective. Mine is best summarized with a period. Maybe I should consider putting a bow on it. What’s your year 2023 been like, if you had to put a label on it?
Meanwhile, here’s Andrei Mir writing at Discourse Magazine about the ups and downs of news avoidance. Some of us are here because we agree that the daily news is too overwhelming, too negative, and too much a combination of those two elements. And yet an open, democratic society relies on a citizenry that is broadly well informed about events in the nation and the world.
News avoidance reached its peak in 2022, totaling 38% of all people globally and 42% of Americans, according to the 2022 Digital News Report by Reuters Institute. The 2023 Digital News Report finds that globally, people most often avoid news about the war in Ukraine (39%), national politics (38%), social justice issues (31%) and crime (30%). In the U.S., the structure of selective news avoidance is slightly different, with Americans avoiding news about national politics most often (43%), followed by social justice issues (41%), entertainment and celebrity news (40%), the war in Ukraine (32%) and climate change (30%)
News avoidance is an understandable reaction to the always-on media, the proliferation of news through social media, and the increasingly hysterical nature of media that has to shout at you to get your attention by wrestling it free of all the other distractions. It all leads to news reporting that is highly emotional, almost exclusively in upsetting and disturbing ways. So it makes sense for us to want to avoid the news for the sake of our own sanity.
The media are trapped in a bad news cycle and so is their audience. Most bad news is repeated constantly, emotionally draining the readers, viewers and listeners. “When we ask people why they are actively avoiding news, they’re saying a few key things: they are put off by the repetitiveness of the news agenda, they feel worn out, and they feel that the news is bad for their mental health,” says Kirsten Eddy, a researcher at the Reuters Institute. They might be sympathetic, but since they can change nothing, they feel helplessness, anxiety or anger. Most frustrating, perhaps, is not even the news itself but the reactions of others who get it “wrong.” This is the so-called third-person effect. Everybody thinks that everyone else but me is easily deluded by the media and propaganda.
Bad news cycles don’t just put us in a bad mood, they create a psychological issue that threatens to grow into a psychiatric one.
And so on. Read it and weep, uh, I mean, uh, well—just read it.
Hi everyone! I just saw the Wonka movie. It’s very fun, and I recommend that you see it if you have time.
Year 2023 can be summed as "the circle of life." My husband lost his father in April and our daughter had a baby in October. Life ends and life begins.