Staying Informed Without the News
As a kid, I didn’t have a television and my parent’s didn’t subscribe to any newspapers. When I encountered the news while visiting someone else’s house, I saw it as ‘That boring part of TV where some person who looks like a mannequin is talking’. My parents listened to the news on the radio, but I generally tuned out the talking bits of radio, unless it was something funny like The Royal Canadian Air Farce or Monty Python sketches.
But I was still exposed to a lot of information and ideas. As a family, we went to the library regularly, where I checked out pretty much every single nature documentary I could get my hands on, and any book at all that I wanted to read. I learned about environmentalism at school and in Girl Guides. My parents own the entire Bloom County and Calvin & Hobbes collection, and so I was got a weird comic panel education on politics, philosophy, and pop-culture. And at the age of 14, I experienced the Internet for the first time, and thus gained a new source of information.
After graduating high school, when I began to work with an organisation that did advocacy training and outreach with youth living in care or in custody, my understanding of the world expanded further. It was jarring to see how my working class, white upbringing shielded me from understanding the impacts of class, race, and gender in our wide cultural context. This was a totally new experience from reading a book or finding a resource page online. I had to learn how to listen and hold others’ experiences as sacred, to absorb information by hearing lived experiences that differed from my own.
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s, when I moved to the UK, that reading or watching the news became a regular part of how I got information. This is because the BBC is very nice as a news source. It’s easy to navigate their website and I never found their reports inflammatory or righteous. It’s simply informative—nothing more, nothing less. When I started going to the BBC I didn’t think of it as choosing to watch the news when I hadn’t before. It was just another source of information, like the library or the personal stories of people I knew or the blogs I read.
My choice to stop including newsmedia sources in my daily information consumption, however, was very deliberate.
As Brexit and the 2016 presidential campaign unfolded, I became aware of how the news was shifting, as well as the impact it was having on me. The news, as a source of information, was setting off my nervous system too much, too often, depleting my energy and therefore reducing my capacity to engage skilfully in the world.
There is only so much we can do in a day, in a month, a year, a lifetime. For me to contribute what I can, to stay engaged and do my part to support our collective awakening, I need to notice my edges. I can certainly grow them (and I have done a lot thanks to my meditation practice) but I need to give that growth time and account for what is fuel for that growth and what is going to deplete me emotionally, mentally, and physically.
I realised I was being bombarded with more information in a day than my brain could process in a month. I was also learning about how we cannot control the way our brains store the implicit messages we are all bombarded with, messages that help to reinforce systemic and social inequalities. The hyper-connectivity of the information age contributes to a near-constant sense of urgency. Maintaining our energy and ensuring we are caring for our mental and physical health matters more than ever. It’s important to filter how and where we gather information, as well as how much we are taking in. Bearing this in mind, and as an act of self-care, I realised I needed to be as discerning about what I watch, read and listen to as I am about what I eat and drink.
For some folks, watching the news galvanizes and supports them. They can navigate those waters and stay afloat. But in recognising my own capacities, I accepted that for me, watching and reading the news on a daily basis was toxic. This became even more important to me when I moved to the United States. I’m fully aware that news media in the US is particularly inflammatory. We did a unit on it when I was in high school. Trevor Noah talks about it in his stand-up. British comedians mock it. But for all the laughter, it’s a valid reason not to watch any source of news coming out of the US. By mid 2016 I was feeling increasingly traumatized from consuming the news, the stability of my mental health threatened. So I chose to cut that source of information out of my life.
But here’s the thing: I am still informed.
The news has never been my single source of information, nor the best source. There are an abundance of alternatives we can turn to, and we must turn to if the news is rendering us incapable of responding in meaningful ways and having an adverse effect on our well-being.
I listen to Podcasts like This American Life and Resistance to get human stories that demonstrate the impact of discriminatory and hateful policies and find a sense of community with activists around the world. I watch video essays by F.D Signifier, Natalie Winn, and Ian Danskin, to better hone my social and political awareness. For intersectional and predictive information, I follow the Disability Justice community on Twitter. I subscribe for the curated lists offered up in Roxane Gay’s Audacious Round Up and Imani Barbarin’s Disability Download. And I’m on mailing lists for Color of Change, the Unist'ot'en Solidarity Brigade, and the Movement for Black Lives, all of whom keep me informed of racial justice and decolonial efforts throughout Turtle Island.
And of course, I read. I read a lot.
All of my sources not only give me information, but also help me build my capacity to be present and engage in the work of social change. Instead of numbing out or succumbing to overwhelm, I’m curious as much as I am informed. I’m more aware of my own shifting identities and the confluence of those identities with the world around me. I’ve been able to adapt my language, become aware of views entirely different to my own, and gain a stronger understanding of what serves. All without watching the news once.
You are not a bad person for not watching the news. It is not a mark of unchecked privilege to want to limit the volume of information you consume or the sources from which it comes. If anything, it is a sign that you recognise the limits of your capacity to bear witness to suffering, and that is a noble thing. It benefits no one to push ourselves beyond the limits of our capacity.
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