Day 99: Why Reading News Isn’t Good for You

Yes, I only learned about the Thai soccer team in the cave after they’d gotten out of the cave…

Shame on me, right? Not so fast!

I also only learn about a lot of things, not through reading news, but through words of mouth from family members, colleagues, friends, cab drivers, baristas and those whom I casually converse with on the street. The news, if they’re relevant to me, will come to me regardless, I believe.

I don’t consume news. Period.

One time, one of my good friends even madly freaked out when I told him about the fact that I haven’t been reading news for almost three years, that I don’t have a Facebook account, and that I do not intentionally consume any forms of news at all. “How do you even survive?”

Well, truth be told, I have survived — and have been happy.

First, most of the news, to me, are not relevant to my personal life. Second, knowing that news are made overly sensational to sell, I don’t see the point of consuming them.

As a famous Zen monk once said (and I paraphrase this from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth), “events are not personalized, so there’s no point in engaging in human drama” (especially knowing that they’re made sensationalized at the expense of your emotion), I find even more reason to not stay away from intentionally consuming news. Does this make sense to you?

Research for this post comes from these literatures.

At first, I actually didn’t think it made much sense to me either — until I found some key ideas from some of the key thinkers about the dark side of news that resonated with my very own. Let’s start with that of Rob Dobelli. 

News reports do not represent the real world.

Our brains are wired to pay attention to visible, large, scandalous, sensational, shocking, people-related, story-formatted, fast changing, loud, graphic onslaughts of stimuli. Our brains have limited attention to spend on things that are small, abstract, ambivalent, complex, slow to develop and quiet, much less silent. News organizations systematically exploit this bias.

I agreed with this statement but I honestly didn’t truly understand what he meant at first. It’s until I spoke to a well-known journalist at one of the most respected newspapers (of course I won’t tell you which newspaper this was). What’s said to me was frank, vivid, and appealing:

We know that every event has at least two sides of the story; the problem for us — who need to sell news for living — is that if we were to truly investigate all sides of such event, you can bet that such event will be no longer newsworthy. You won’t understand us unless you’re in the business of journalism.

That is, for this senior journalist to produce enough news for the said newspaper to actually get himself paid a salary, he needed to turn a blind eye on what he knew for sure would add depths, and more importantly the notion of truth and balance, to the story. But not all truths are sensational — usually they aren’t. He’s basically saying that “everything can go” if he can sell the news. They’re just facts that all of us can understand, empathize and even sympathize.

So, those won’t sell and therefore won’t be included in the news. I am not saying that all journalists operate this way, but there’s some truth in it. Think about it. What would you do if you’re in his position.

Again, Dobelli summarizes the following points:

As a result of news, we walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our head.

• Terrorism is overrated. Chronic stress is underrated.

• The collapse of Lehman (one of the world biggest financial institutions in 2008) is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is underrated.

• Astronauts are overrated. Nurses are underrated.

• Britney Spears is overrated. IPCC Reports are underrated.

• Airplane crashes are overrated. Resistance to antibiotics is underrated.

You get the point.

All of the “overrated” events above have the much less chance of happening statistically, but they’re “sensational.” News direct us away from the “underrated” events that are much more relevant to our lives — how many times in this life you’ll be talking to a nurse than to an astronaut? How many times do we see any news agencies’ reporting the skillfulness of an airplane pilot who shrewdly land a plane, and therefore saving hundreds of innocent lives? Zero. A plane crash, on the other hand, is “overrated” and repeatedly reported to the point that many of us could have a screwed view of aviation industry. What good does that do?

I wrote a while ago about how our brain is prone to make a decision based on a mental shortcut (known as “heuristics”). The path of this shortcut is built by the availability of the information that we have about something.

So, you’ll tend to the think that the world is unsafe, if the television that you’ve been constantly watching is showing a lot of news about terrorism — when we know that which is not the accurate portrayal of the society, but, rather and sadly, what sells. The “availability bias,” what the psychologists would call this phenomenon, pave the way to our misleading view of the society. Think about how this could lead to a much more serious problems in communication, in organizational management. Would you like to live in the world in which everyone bases their judgement on the very little knowledge that they have? So, why continue to be a victim of such thing?

In Enlightenment Now:The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, the psychologist Steven Pinker shows us the data to support his claim that:

Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.”

Like Pinker, Dobelli himself has carefully studied this phenomenon and his understanding was aligned with what I heard from the senior editor of a respected newspapers to whom I spoke. He writes: “Some journalists take time with their stories and try to think things through. But like any profession, and probably more so than in any other profession, journalism has its incompetent, unfair practitioners who don’t have the time – or the capacity – for deep analysis.” Here is the truth of capitalistic news-making:

Often, they are paid by the piece, the line, or the word. You might not be able to tell the difference between a polished professional and a rushed, glib, paid-by-the-piece writer with an ax to grind. It all looks like news.

Scary, right?

So why are we continue to read whatever “all looks like news?” Are we that innocuous, naive, or stupid? Or, it’s because there’s a certain belief that whatever is in the news, at least, do have some truth in it? In his study, Dobelli argues that “Fewer than ten percent of the news stories are original. Fewer than one percent are truly investigative.” Dobelli, like the psychologist Steven Pinker, doesn’t hate news completely. Neither do I actually.

He, in fact, argues for the “hard-core journalists digging into meaningful stories. We need reporting that polices our society and uncovers the truth.” He claims, and I agree, that Watergate a good example, but truly this kind of investigative journalism takes time, efforts, and a lot of balancing to see the whole picture clearly so that the event can be reported with the fullest sense of journalistic responsibility. I totally agree. I think there’re areas of the society that the authority doesn’t want us to know, so they buy out every effort that could bring them to life. We need the Boston Globe-typed “Spotlight Team” to help uncover them, showing us what the society is like.

 

 

The movie Spotlight won the most prestigious award of 2016’s Oscars, the one for best picture. The movie is based on a true story about journalists of The Boston Globe and their investigation which uncovered sexual abuse. If you haven’t see the film, I highly recommend. The spotlight team who uncovered an important truth within the Archdiocese of BostonEditor of the “Spotlight Team” of The Boston Globe for Fairpress: “A healthy, free press is also vital to a free society.”

You might be aware of the fact that what these investigative journalists are doing are much less of presenting a “dark side” of the society and the world as such, but showing what lies beneath the seemingly benign surface of events, things, and people. Again, I do hope that this is the only kind of journalism that exists. Unfortunately, tabloids, commercial newspapers, etc, are still the standard, and our brain are wired by wanting to “hear stories” (read or listen to Jonathan Gottschall’s Storytelling Animal podcast) to the point that we find them addictive.

By the way, we haven’t even begun to touch upon the topic of “fake news” (which, by the way, is the new word has made its way into the Oxford Dictionary this year) in this post.

In short, Dobelli argues that news (as they’re presented to us 99% of the time today) isn’t useful because (and be ready): News misleads us systematically, limits understanding, massively increase cognitive errors, makes us passive, and kills creativity.

There’s another thing.

Our brains have very limited capacity to store data to be processed, so the more you know doesn’t necessarily mean the more you would be able to make use of what you know. In fact, there is a very accurate psychological fact about this notion of the brain that is best expressed, surprisingly, by one of the favorite fictional heroes, Sherlock Holmes. Here’s his conversation with his buddy Dr Watson in A Study in Scarlet (and this just show that the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle knew about this fact all along even before he constructed the character Holmes):

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty laying his hands upon it.

Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.

It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

 

 

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle.

So, there you have it: Why I don’t read news and why I am still doing just fine with my life and maintaining my livelihood. News, as Dobelli says, is like sugar to the body. It’s sweet and it plays with the part of our brain that makes us feel addicted (for more on sugar, I recommend an episode of Freakonomics Radio called There’s A War On Sugar. Is It Justified?). Our body doesn’t need sugar. It doesn’t need the kind of artificial neuro-stimulation that will end up giving us weight gain, blood sugar problems and an increased risk of heart disease, among other dangerous conditions. Yep, why don’t you try putting in “the benefits of sugar” on your Google Search — you’ll find nothing.

My good friend rebutted his argument that knowing some trivial facts “helped to generate conversations, small talks, and positive gossips (by which he meant a harmless gossip that bond people together.” True, but is there such thing as a “positive gossip?”

Again, the words of Holmes (actually, of Doyle’s) ringers, and remember them, “It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

So, let’s stray away from useless facts — and most of time, as journalists love to report, the useless not-even-facts, and return to great books, classics, scientifically-proven research and ideas. They aren’t sugar, and they will certainly equip you with the knowledge that you will need to make your life in this world more meaningful in a long run.