Weekend reads: The relentless news cycle

Why unplugging from the news makes for better journalists

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I recently received an email from a longtime reader. He shared how exhausted he was by politics and told me that he’d just undergone a four-week news fast. He’s not alone; I hear this sentiment more and more from the public. And unsurprisingly, it is reflected in the data. According to a recent global study, 39 percent of people now actively avoid the news, saying that it is relentless, depressing, and boring.

The reader’s comments got me thinking about the never-ending nature of the news cycle, and how this daily onslaught can blind us to the goodness in life.

It’s something that the journalist Amanda Ripley explored a few years ago in a Washington Post column on why she stopped reading the news. On the Lean Out podcast, she told me she first noticed the impulse to avoid news during the 2016 election. “There were just so many headlines that were about terrible things that might happen,” she said. “You know, speculative worry — which I think is the definition of anxiety.”

“Slowly, I came to this realization that part of it is me, for sure, but part of it is also the way the conventions of journalism have not evolved for the modern world,” she said. “And certainly not for what we know about human psychology.”

In her Post essay, Ripley proposed a new model for coverage that emphasized hope, agency, and dignity. “Those three things seem to be most often absent from our stories, but present in the lives of real people,” she told me. “And those are things we know now — which we didn’t know 50 years ago, 100 years ago — that people need in order to get up in the morning. In order to take action. In order to feel like they matter in the world. In order to function and collaborate in a diverse world, saturated with information. Hope, agency, and dignity are essential.”

I was reminded of Ripley’s comments this week, as an action-packed summer news cycle came to a close.

Summer used to be the slowest time of the year for journalism. A TV interview show I was once a producer on took a full four months off from production every summer. And when I was a producer in radio, most of the shows were in re-runs, and the network building was dark and cool and empty and quiet. Even on the local current affairs show I often worked on — which still had three hours of programming to fill every single morning — the tone was lighter. We did stories about pop-up restaurants, and fashion trends. About venturing into the outdoors, and beach reads, and meditation, and esoteric hobbies, and volunteerism.

This fallow period gave the audience a break from the doom loop. But it also allowed us journalists to exhale, to rest our weary brains and cortisol-addled bodies, and to turn down the temperature in our own lives. We went for morning coffees after our story meeting; we ate lunch at places other than our desks; we left right at five and headed out to cycle or take a yoga class or meet friends and family. When we returned in September — always a high-octane month in news — we were revitalized.

But what happened this year? For many in the legacy media, there was no rest whatsoever. The Trump assassination attempt dominated the news, and then the Republican National Convention, and Trump picking J.D. Vance as a running mate. And then: Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race, Kamala Harris emerging as the Democrats’ candidate, the introduction of her running mate, Tim Walz, followed by days of headlines from the Democratic National Convention.

This summer was an around-the-clock, all-hands-on-deck roller coaster ride, and every journalist I’ve spoken to recently has said they feel strung out and exhausted.

This is not good for our journalists, of course. But it’s also not good for the news. When the news cycle is a perpetual five-alarm fire, journalists put everything else in their lives on hold. They neglect their friends. They don’t eat or sleep well. They stop exercising. If they are single, they don’t have time to date. If they have a spouse, they see them solely at breakfast and bedtime — if they’re lucky.

There’s no time to cook dinner with loved ones. Or stop and chat with the barista while grabbing a morning coffee. Or make small talk in the hall with an apartment neighbour. Or linger over chats at the dog park after work.

This is critical because it is, in fact, what keeps us journalists sane. It’s what gives us perspective, and stops us from feeding into the panic and urgency and intensity of the news cycle. But it is also what keeps us connected to the general public. Without time and space to lead full lives, we journalists retreat further into our media bubble. Before we know it, we are speaking only to each other.

Returning to Amanda Ripley’s three characteristics for healthy news coverage — hope, agency, and dignity — one can see why overworked journalists might have trouble offering this.

How do we convey hope when we feel paralyzed and powerless ourselves? When we are, as Ripley put it in her piece, constantly “marinating in despair”?

How do we highlight the power of human agency in stories when we feel none ourselves — when our own lives are constantly upended by events beyond our control?

And how do we stress the inherent dignity of all individuals, on all sides of a story, when we have little contact with those who possess different worldviews?

Sometimes the best thing we can do as journalists is untether ourselves from the news cycle and take a moment to breathe and experience the goodness of the world around us, including all its humans.

Sometimes the best way to step up our coverage is to step away from it.