How To Go on a News Diet
3 rules to let you get some sleep, from Heather Cox Richardson
The news is keeping me up at night. All day there’s the news and the noise. For anyone paying attention, there’s a stream of stories full of facts and fact-free quotes, and always the great roiling sea of opinions. It’s too much to digest at night.
Besides the online newspapers, we have what we used to call TV news, MSNBC, Fox “News”, CNN, PBS Newshour. Opinion flows through all of this, in op-eds, in the selection of quotes, and in the quotes themselves.
Heather Cox Richardson recognizes how stressful it is to try to keep up with the news. Last week she described how she plans her news-reading time as a professional historian.
First, I’ll paraphrase how in this Politics Chat Richardson sums up where we are today in America.
Steve Bannon has been clear about his belief that the world is in a new global conflict.
Some [Trump] people believe they’re in a holy war to preserve what they call “civilization”; this is a worldview in which a small group of people should have control of the world’s power and money, because they’re the ones who know what to do with it.
They’re against people like me who believe that we should have a say in how we’re governed, and that a lot of voices should have equal rights.
Then she says her readers often ask, “How can we cope with the barrage of news stories coming at us all the time?” Here are her guidelines:
I don’t read stories about what might happen, but rather what is happening, and how that has played out in the past.
I don’t spend a lot of time on stories that don’t seem to be part of the larger argument about what kind of world we should live in.
I try to pay attention to stories based in facts instead of just whipping up [feelings], because today we’re in a war about the way people think.
Richardson says “we’re soldiers in a war between two worldviews”. And I realize that being a good citizen doesn’t mean reading all the news just to “be polite”, as she puts it.
I can choose to read the news stories that matter. I can ask, “Will this story and this reporter’s viewpoint help me learn how to speak out for our democracy?”
When I add my voice every day in defense of democracy, the nighttime shadows will lose some of their power.
Thanks. Very helpful!
Thank you, Deda- maybe I’ll get some sleep now!