Breaking News is Breaking Us.

**On news fatigue & how to stay interested when everything’s falling apart.**

The late Mary Oliver left behind a slew of beautiful poetry. One my favourites is:

It’s difficult to imagine what Oliver would have made of the state of the world in 2019. How can anyone, let alone observant and sensitive types, overlook the growing furore over climate change? Even New Year’s Day started with an environmental loss when the last surviving Hawaiian tree-snail died. March saw the catastrophic Cyclone Idai claim upwards of 1,000 lives – a natural disaster that appears to be linked to global warming. In the past few weeks, Extinction Rebellion ramped up their calls for civil disobedience as a means of forcing governments to recognise climate change as a global emergency.

Without denying the importance of reporting each of these events, it is worth noting their cumulative effect. Oliver’s ‘rich lens of attention’ fogs up thanks to the constant onslaught of information. The 24-hour news cycle ensures we learn about loss in real time, making it hard to dismiss the feeling that we are careering toward chaos. While being well-informed is a fairly basic component of feeling connected to the world around you, the sheer pace and volume of news can prompt a paralysis of inaction among consumers. Each week, fresh narratives of tragedy jostle for our empathy. BBC News ranks the most read ‘top stories,’ shelving disasters according to the number of clicks each story receives. This valuation has consequences, and politicians can exploit our hesitancy to care for multiple causes. How else do you explain Trump’s repeatedly calling upon the tired trope of pitting veterans against immigrants? Ironically, those who have the sense to ignore inflammatory headlines are often left equally furious to live alongside such people who readily incite hatred. When newspapers become complicit in polarising politics, the practice of paying attention to as much as possible can bring an ever greater sense of world weariness.

Oliver argued that, ‘Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter.’ So, what happens when our empathy reaches its limit? During the run up to the 2016 election, psychologist Dr. Steven Stosny coined the term ‘election stress disorder’ in the Washington Post. In the aftermath of the election, this term soon morphed into ‘headline stress disorder.’ Though these terms may seem unscientific or politically motivated, studies suggest that people from across the voting spectrum are presenting worrying levels of anxiety over current affairs. According to Healthline, seven out of ten Americans feel overwhelmed by the amount of news that is available to them. Public issues exacerbate private concerns, prompting a measurable spike in cortisol. When you factor in the strain divisive events such as Brexit can place on IRL relationships, it’s easy to understand why the news cycle is grinding people down. What is more, the spread of disinformation and ‘fake news’ has left people warily trying to separate fact from propaganda. Few have the energy or resources to verify their newsfeed, and this weakness is exploited in instances such as the Chinese government generating thousands of fake social media posts as a weapon of distraction.

So, what can we do? As a child, fiction provided me a form of escapism in which even the characters shunned the real world. One particular exchange between a boy and his grandmother in The Children of Green Knowe stuck with me:

“Do you want to read the newspapers now?”

“Good gracious no, child. What should I do that for? The world doesn’t alter every day. As far as I can see, it’s always the same…”

I have outgrown this idea with age, mostly because avoidance is no longer a feasible option. You can silence breaking news alerts, but the outside world will seep into your life one way or another. Clickbait headlines such as, “How I Stopped Reading the News and Cured my Anxiety” only end up inadvertently confirming the misconception that young people lack emotional fortitude.

Instead of simply avoiding negative news, I navigate stories about our socio-political landscape by adding positive news. Traditional news’ historical bias skews to prioritise the shocking and sad, all the while employing superlatives to enhance the impression of catastrophe. Outlets such as Tank’s Good News and The Good News Network are invariably uplifting. Another strategy to combat the depressing effects of the news cycle is to digest the week’s events retrospectively, perhaps even paying for a weekly periodical. I find that, much like the bizarre quirks of predictive text, speculative commentaries can set you thinking about unlikely and unhelpful outcomes.

On a serious note, there is something morbid about watching a death toll rise in the wake of a tragedy, as if you were checking the cricket score. Sometimes I find it helps to focus on what a terrorist attack means and what can be done about it, rather than immersing myself in the horrifying details of the event. I have also installed a newsfeed eradicator extension on Facebook, and in doing so, cut out the updates which (though framed as ‘news’) constitute little more than empty noise. Neither you nor I are contractually obligated to provide an arbitrarily witty comment on our friends’ new profile pictures: Facebook is not a mainstream news outlet and your updates do not constitute a national event. Another important tool? Consider how you can campaign most effectively. Sharing a petition can definitely amplify a cause but protesting IRL also often does more than writing ‘activist’ on your Insta bio.

As is often the case with poetry, Oliver’s words aptly pinpointed a fear I already possessed but had previously failed to articulate. Her ‘Instructions for Living a Life’ prompted me to reflect on my own fraught relationship with news, and how excessive information can obfuscate aspects of our daily lives.

By Cara Nicholson

Oxford student, expert procrastinator, last living fan of gluten.