Another Monday? In This Economy?
The news must be good for something, but what?
I met a guy in a bookstore this weekend who was holding my book in his hand. “I wrote that!” I squealed. “Wow, good for you,” he said, as he put the book back on the shelf. “I can’t read it because I gave up reading the news.”
“It’s not really the news,” I said. “It’s more like a framework for understanding the bigger picture the news was missing over the past decade.”
He gave me a very sweet look, the way a grandpa might look at a toddler using a spoon for the first time. We exchanged cards and he said he’d read this newsletter, but he didn’t buy the book. LOL. Life is hard.
I don’t know about you, but the past month leading up to midterms has been a tad stressful. If you’ve felt that, too, I’d be curious to know: where do you *feel* stress? In the film Clueless, beautiful Beverly Hills popular girl Cher (Alicia Silverstone) tells the viewer that she holds a lot of tension in her back. It’s why she has to get weekly massages. It’s hard, after all, to be a human —even when you’re a rich white American girl like Cher whose main problems in life are that she can’t pass a drivers test and she’s in love with a gay guy (we’ve all been there, girl).
I carry my tension in my gut. And in my blood. When I’m anxious, or filled with dread, I can feel the blood inside my veins quiver. Sometimes I tell people I have the “blood shakes” and I am pretty sure they know what I mean, right? And my lower abdomen gurgles, filled as it is with its miles of intestines and pair of ovaries and bubble of uterus and vestigial organs like a spleen, seems to swirl, like water spinning down a funnel. Unfortunately, there isn’t a masseuse who can treat that.
This past month, whenever I encounter “the news,” my blood and my guts have begun to slosh like crazy.
THE RED WAVE IS COMING! Slosh.
LAYOFFS IMMINENT! Slosh.
INFLATION BAD! Slosh.
HOUSING MARKET CRASH! Slosh.
THE RED WAVE IS HERE! Slosh.
“I don’t listen to the news,” a Lyft driver named Kimberly told me the other day when I commented how nice it was to hear music on the radio rather than news for once. “It makes me feel sad.” She turned up the music and began to sing along.
Like a little David Brooks before me, I immediately noted this interaction down to share with readers: WHAT WE CAN ALL LEARN FROM THE LYFT DRIVER WHO OPTS OUT OF THE NEWS CYCLE.
We drove with the windows down singing easy listening tunes at the top of our lungs to the passing cars on Highway 280 into downtown San Francisco. I felt the dread ebb. I thought to myself: I should stop listening to the news so much, too.
Especially when it comes to political reporting, which has dominated the front pages for the past few months, the main point seems to be to evoke feelings in news consumers. Those feelings are not intended to be all that complex. If you’re a Democrat, the red wave headlines are intended to strike fear, sadness, or dread. If you’re a Republican, they are meant to evoke hope, gladness, contentment.
But the point of news should not be to make people FEEL things. The point is supposed to be to inform people.
When it comes to elections, there are some very important things news consumers want to know: who is running, what the candidates will do if they are elected, how to vote, what political issues will be determined by who wins, how the various approaches to those issues will impact the lives of readers.
What we get in America instead, as the brilliant Judd Legum explained in Popular Information last week, is soothsaying.
Political reporting is now fortune telling. And as the midterms revealed, it’s not even very good at telling the fortune. Political media stories focus on who might win and who might lose. Depending on your party affiliation, these stories are designed to make you feel dread or hope.
Neither of these emotions is useful on an individual level or a societal level. We all lose.
In my day job I run a program with my boss, Joan Donovan, for news executives (disclosure: Judd was one of our news leaders last year) where we discuss how media manipulation occurs, how to avoid disinformation, and how to optimize their coverage for what Joan calls T.A.L.K., Timely, Accurate, Local, Knowledge.
What do you need to know today? Probably not a lot about Elon Musk. Probably you need to know about things like road closures and holiday school schedules and when the snow is coming and where you can find a doctor who can see you before 2024.
The news people consume should add up to knowledge about the things happening in their life that will impact them and which they need to understand in order to make informed decisions. That doesn’t mean all news needs to be “service journalism” — it means all news should be adding knowledge, whether that knowledge is about where to find affordable gas or how the people of Ukraine are surviving the cold during a time of war.
What the news shouldn’t do is just make you feel feelings. That’s what poetry and drugs are for.
What kind of news do you need? I would love to hear from you about the types of information you seek out on a day to day basis that actually help you live your life.
On a daily basis, how many of the following do you seek out?
Advice
Local Reporting
National Politics
Geopolitics
Weather
Consumer Shopping, like sales, recommendations or tips
Crime
Interesting Stuff, like scientific discoveries, ideas, entertainment or events
Social Trends
My answer surprised me: It’s 2. The first is “Local Reporting,” because I want to know what’s up with construction projects and road closures and the fight the guy at the fruit store is having with the guy from the other fruit store. And the second is “Interesting Stuff” because my brain seeks stimulation. Usually when I go seeking interesting information, what I find is stuff from all the other categories, plus opinion and snark and lies and reporting local to other places, and TikTok videos, and I let it all wash over me, evoking feelings and blood shakes and all that, only to be forgotten when the alarm goes off and it’s time for me to make dinner.
Tonight my whole family is sick so we are going to eat noodles and butter and call it a day. It’s Monday, after all. Something’s gotta give.