[Jiri Hrdina]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

We need to recognize that the people crafting our news content have one aim, and that’s to grab and keep engagement. By far the most effective way to accomplish that is to foster anxiety and outrage. That task is made easy by our communications platforms - the most sophisticated engagement tools ever devised, with tens of billions of dollars and some of the smartest minds in the world behind them. It shouldn’t surprise us that most of the tech overlords who created these tools do not let their children use them.

I’m a former journalist, and I’ve steered my teenaged kids away from following the news. This would have astonished my 30 year old self. But I genuinely believe that until they’re adults, at least, they’ll have a more accurate picture of the reality if it’s based on what they see around them. The benefits of having a more expansive outlook isn’t enough to justify the fevered, unrelenting, anxiety-inducing distortions of our media environment.

If you really do feel you need to keep engaged with current affairs, choose one or two sober, trustworthy sources of news (I like About That on CBC), and limit yourself to accessing them a few times a week. Our parents and grandparents managed to be well-informed citizens by watching the nightly news for 20 minutes a few times a week and maybe flipping through a broadsheet newspaper for 5 mins a day if they were a real keener. There’s nothing so urgent happening that we need updates many times a day.

We should also keep in mind that most people don’t have much trouble disengaging from the news. Only around 30 per cent of people follow current affairs closely. People who are temperamentally anxious are more susceptible to doomscrolling. That means managing media consumption needs to be part of a broader strategy of managing anxiety.

I don’t agree with all of this but to offer another suggestion…consuming news from BBC is also an alternative for a more balance perspective