News is toxic to your body because panic stories release cortisol and put your body in chronic stress. Information is no longer a scarce commodity, what about attention? News is misleading, it doesn't represent the real world, only the highly visible. We need reporting that polices our society and uncovers the truth like Watergate. News is to the mind what sugar is to the body but you can't physically see the saturation. News separates reputation and achievement. Fame and relevance are two different things. Most journalists improvise and copy existing content, few write original stories, almost none are investigative. You can't identify the value of a piece of news before seeing it. It's easier to identity what's new than what's relevant. News increases cognitive errors due to confirmation bias (your belief are true) and story bias (this happened because of X). News kills creativity. The more we know things, the less we are creative. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always. Did they anticipated WW1, the Great Depression, the fall of Europe's birth rate? News is costly because it consumes time, it's a tax on productivity. You pay when you read, when you refocus, when you think about it later that day. News makes us passive with a fatalistic outlook about things we cannot influence (learned helplessness). A pessimistic worldview doesn't help to fight depression. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk regardless of its real probability, no matter your intellectual sophistication. The news gave us a wrong risk map: terrorism is overrated and chronic stress is underrated, the collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated and fiscal irresponsibility is underrated. News gives us the illusion of caring. Ceaseless bombardment of image and verbiage makes us impervious to caring. What makes us really connected isn't a feeling, it's interactions and trade. News changes your brain's structure, it makes you want to know how the stories end and to know about more stories. The brain is programmable and we are training it to pay attention to crap. News is entertaining but irrelevant. How many stories you've read over the past 12 months helped you make a better decision in your life? News floods you with a worldview that is not relevant to your life. Concentration, and therefore memory, takes at least 10 minutes. Even reference links are distractions to the brain because he has to choose to click or not. News is manipulative but we can't detect it as easily as we would face-to-face. Stories are selected to please advertisers and the owner without offending anyone. Do you really want news reporter to set the public agenda? News limits understanding as it doesn't explain anything. Facts are epiphenomena of deeper causes, the thread connecting the news is what matters. The important stories aren't stories but slow powerful movements. Go without news, make it as inaccessible as possible. The little thing you can keep is 5 minutes per week on a single page summarizing what happened. Want to read? Read books. It's hard at first, but resist your brain's built-in tendency for a month and you'll be free.
Rolf Dobelli