Anxiously following the “Breaking news” satisfies our need to know, but we would get better information if we waited for a well-researched report the following day. We read Opinion pieces because we crave meaning in the world, but reading the analysis of the news, instead of the actual news, distances us from reality. In the switch from print to online news media, we’ve gained some, but we’ve exposed ourselves to danger, too.
On March 7, The New York Times published a story by Farhad Manjoo called, “For Two Months, I Got My News from Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.”
I read it online.
For two months, Mr. Manjoo avoided online news sites, avoided social media (like Twitter and facebook) and turned off news notifications that would pop up on his phone.
Instead he subscribed to the print editions of three daily newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and his local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle. He also subscribed to a weekly news magazine, The Economist, listened to podcasts, read his email – including email newsletters. And he read non-fiction books and “long form” journalism like magazine articles.
He didn’t unplug. He just plugged in to fewer sockets. In other words, he turned off the sources of news that come quick and fast and short, and turned to news sources that come slow and long and late. His news was a day old, or a week old, instead of arriving a few seconds after the news broke. Instead of responding to news alerts that demand attention, he let the news wait for him. He went to the news when he was ready to read it. Instead of engaging with the world through platforms designed for high emotion and short attention spans; he engaged with the world through formats designed for thoughtful engagement.
It sounds like a radical experiment. Which is amazing in itself.
I used to subscribe to a print edition of The Los Angeles Times. For most of the years of my life, there only was a print edition – of anything. Now, about three quarters of New York Times subscribers only get the digital version. The current CEO of The New York Times expects to continue to print a paper newspaper maybe for another decade. That’ll be good for saving paper, but what will it do to the rest of us?
I never had a New York Times print subscription but I’d often pick up a copy if someone had left one at a coffee house or the gym. Or I’d read it at the library. I’ve even fished a newspaper out of the trash if it looked clean enough. I would read the newspaper at Starbucks. Or I’d have a meal alone at a diner with the newspaper open next to me. Or I’d read the newspaper on a bus.
I read The Los Angeles Times nearly cover to cover every day since I was a teenager until I switched to reading it online. I read thoroughly, carefully, thoughtfully. I took my time. I trusted the editors that if they thought a story was worth printing it was probably worth reading.
Now I read The Los Angeles Times online. But it’s impossible to read the newspaper online as thoroughly as I did in print. You can’t read something cover to cover when it doesn’t have covers. You can’t just turn to the next page. You have to keep coming back to the home page. It’s easy to miss articles. It’s easy to skip over articles that aren’t immediately interesting. Your eye never leaps to the middle of an article where you can read a random sentence that makes you realize that the article might be worth reading in its entirety. It’s easy to click away from an article that starts to get boring. When you can’t visually see how much further it is to the end of an article, it’s easy to give up and move on to the next digital distraction.
I like the convenience of having digital news stories available wherever I am with my laptop or phone. I like that articles appear throughout the day and the news gets updated. I like that more news sources are available to me online than I could ever have access to in print. Many online sources aren’t printed at all. You can’t subscribe to a print edition of the Washington Post unless you live on the east coast.
But I miss sitting down with the paper and a cup of coffee and devoting the better part of an hour to reading the news. It used to feel like I spent a long time everyday with the newspaper, which felt like an indulgence. But maybe that time calmly reading could also be seen as a kind of spiritual practice. “Light shine in. Luminate our inward view.” “From all the fret and fever of the day, let there be moments when we turn away.”
Now I probably spend even more time reading news, but it’s spread across the whole day instead of one concentrated chunk. It doesn’t feel like a break. It feels like fretful monitoring. And though I spend more time, the truth is I probably read less. I go back to read latest updates of stories I’ve already read so I read fewer different stories each day. And I don’t explore into areas that I’m not already inclined to read.
Digital news comes to us in an instant and fluid environment. The home page of a website is endlessly and easily updatable in ways that the front page of a printed newspaper is not. An online newspaper never “goes to bed”. Digital news favors immediacy. It’s always, “the latest.” It’s always the “Extra! Extra!” edition. It’s about high emotion, not cool reason. Digital news tends to tabloid style even when it’s serious.
The urge to be on top of a breaking story, means there’s a incentive even for the most sober news sources to publish stories before the facts are all in. This means our news sources are plagued with rumors and theories. The “breaking news” is often incomplete or actually wrong and has to be amended or corrected later.
A print news source though, has the luxury of being a day late. There’s time for reporters to actually do their work of tracking down multiple sources and fact-checking their stories before they’re in print. There’s time for journalism, instead of reaction/response.
Digital news sources feed our emotional need for immediacy. Print sources address our thoughtful need for accuracy.
Breaking news alerts on our phone have only the space for a headline and are intended to create anxiety that will lead us to click to the full story. But if we don’t read the full story all we are left with is the headline and the anxiety.
The first time Farhad Manjoo heard about the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, was when he opened his newspaper the following day. He was presented with a carefully reported story, not a breaking news alert. His first exposure was to journalism that had already had a day to sort through the facts. Instead of spending a day of increasing anxiety, getting updates that often contradicted earlier news, he spent a day serenely oblivious to the news as it happened, and then he got his information the next morning in a reliable, thorough, and calm form.
He sacrificed immediacy for thoroughness and thoughtfulness. Who got the better bargain?
Farhad’s story made me notice my own reactions to digital news. I see the alerts on my phone, or I check in on the news sites I monitor, and I feel an instant increase in anxiety. “What’s happening? Oh no! Did he really say that?” Then I enter an anxiety loop. The quick pace, and unreliability of digital news creates anxiety. Where do we go to ease our anxiety? Well, for many of us information is the antidote to anxiety, so we go back to digital news, where we only encounter more anxiety. The constant anxiety is good for getting eyeballs on digital ads, but it’s terrible for the mind and spirit.
As spiritual people who follow a reality–based religion, we want the facts, because we want to be connected to the world around us. “What happened? What’s going on?” Our need to know is part of our free and responsible search for truth and meaning. So we open an app on our phone, and click to a website. But the digital news of a breaking story is hurried, and incomplete. It doesn’t satisfy. Even as we’re reading we know that this isn’t the whole story and we’re going to have to check back later. Meanwhile there are other headlines clamoring for attention promising more information that we also hope will fulfill our need for connection to reality, but which are also hurried and incomplete.
Wouldn’t it be better for our spiritual health, to take a breath and give the journalist a day to do their job and then read the story the next day?
The world of digital reporting attracts us because it promises to soothe our anxiety by giving us the connection to reality our spirits crave. But it fails to deliver. So the rise in digital news and the concomitant rise in anxiety, has forced an even more disturbing evolution away from journalism to opinion.
I used to read a news story because the news would answer my questions about the way the world really is. My anxiety would be relieved because I felt the news gave me good information that strengthened my connection to reality. I could trust the facts as reported. My spiritual need was soothed. My feet were back on the ground. Good or bad news, at least I knew what was going on. That felt good.
That’s the feeling that I used to have sitting with a cup of coffee and spending the better part of an hour with a newspaper. That’s the feeling that Farhad Manjoo re-created for himself during his two-month experiment.
Digital news doesn’t give me that same sense of satisfaction. Although I still read good reporting, from trusted news sources, our news environment is now bombarded by the breaking news and endlessly updated environment of digital news. The digital news environment raises my anxiety. So I am tempted to look elsewhere to ease my anxiety. And, increasingly, that means instead of reading the news, I’ll turn first to the opinion piece about the news.
A headline or a news alert gives me a quick sense of the news. My anxiety goes up. But, instead of reading the news story, I’ll click on the analysis of the story. The opinion piece does the job of lowering my anxiety because reading some smart person telling me what the news means makes me feel like I understand.
Of course, it’s a false comfort. Because what I actually understand is this person’s opinion. I don’t actually understand the facts because I’ve never read the facts. I’ve only read the selected facts as presented and interpreted by a person making an argument. The goal for the opinion writer is not to connect you with objective reality, but to connect you with the writer’s subjective interpretation of reality.
There’s nothing wrong with an expert explaining a complicated reality to you. A sermon is an opinion piece of a kind. But in the context of worship it’s clear what the sermon is doing. You want a minister to help you interpret our shared experiences into theological meaning. But, increasingly in digital news media, including cable news channels, the line between journalism and opinion is blurred. The opinion makers aren’t transparent about the difference between their opinions and the facts. And they present themselves as experts, when often they’re just entertainers. Instead of encountering reality, we’re increasingly forming relationships with opinions once-removed from reality. That’s spiritually troubling.
When I used to read the front section of The Los Angeles Times the actual news stories came first, and the opinion pages came at the end. That’s the proper order. Read the facts. Then look for some help with analysis and interpretation. And there were 20 or so pages of news stories before you got to two pages of opinion. Now, on the home page of the website of The New York Times the news stories on the left and the opinion pieces on the right each take up exactly half of the page. And on the left half of the page there are links to three news stories, and on the right side of the page there are links to 14 opinion pieces.
Why are opinions so attractive?
Even more than connection to reality, our spirits crave meaning. More even than knowing what is, we want to know why does it matter.
I don’t need to know the contents of the Iran Deal. I just want to know what the Iran Deal means. Reality connects with facts. Meaning connects with values. And values are more important. In fact, what is valuable and what is important are the same things. I want to understand the effect the Iran Deal has on the values that are important to me: fairness, tolerance, respect, peace. I don’t really need the facts, just tell me what it means. And then, of course, the temptation is to start with the meaning that you need, and then find the supportive facts.
When the news was breaking about the shooting at the high school in Parkland, I scoured the breaking news like everyone else (except Farhad Manjoo). I wanted to know the facts. But I really wanted to know the meaning. What would comfort me on that day of anxiety would be understanding the shooter’s motivation. Not what did the shooter do, but why did he do it? Not knowing the facts created some anxiety that day. More troubling was not understanding why.
Because opinion pieces address the why, opinion pieces are better at relieving anxiety than news stories. And the best opinion pieces, if you’re hoping to relieve anxiety, are the opinion pieces that affirm the view you already have.
When I go to The Washington Post home page, I glance at the news stories at the top of the page and then immediately scroll down to the opinion pieces. And there I have a few choices. I avoid the opinion pieces that look like they will challenge my view of the world. So I click on the opinion pieces that will confirm my views. I’m looking to ease my anxiety, not raise it. I go toward comfort. I avoid conflict. I don’t have time to engage with diverse opinions; there’s more news breaking. And so I feel comforted, but my reading is increasingly partisan. My world-view is increasingly narrow. My connection to the truth of reality is increasingly filtered through people who only see the slice of the world I already live in.
This digital news environment we’ve created, which is increasingly a digital opinion world, has had multiple troubling consequences for our society.
Conspiracy theories and fake news abound. Partisanship abounds. A deep distrust that anything like a shared, objective reality can even exist. Talk about anxiety!
To work your way out of this trap. You have to be deliberate. It’s hard to do. The media is no longer designed to help you find stories about subjects you aren’t already interested in, or expose you to diverse opinions that might challenge what you already believe. You bookmark the news sources that express your point of view. You follow the twitter feeds of the people that can intelligently express your own opinions. You unfollow facebook friends that irritate you.
Digital media is designed for the quick reaction. For the anxiety that will make you keep reading. For the passion that will make you care, but also make you partisan. Opinion pieces call louder than news stories, and even news stories come with comments underneath as a forum for yet more opinions.
Opinions are not journalism. News alerts are not journalism. Spiritually grounded people need journalism.
Here are the three simple rules Farhad Manjoo recommends. In my opinion, he’s right on.
He says: Get News. Not Too Quickly. Avoid Social.
Get news means real news stories. Not opinion pieces. Or at least get the news first before you go to the analysis.
Not too quickly means avoiding the enticements of breaking news. Turn off the alerts. Give it a day. Wait for real reporting.
Avoid social means remembering that facebook and twitter are not news sources. They are media for sharing reactions, hot takes, outrage, offense, and propaganda. And that’s just from my friends! I still post vacation photos on facebook, but facebook is not a platform for connecting to reality or meaning-making.
Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid Social.
Connect to reality. Make your own meaning. Slow down. Cultivate peace. Seek the truth. Beware opinions. Resist the exciting temptations presented to you by corporations that crave your clicks not your spiritual health. Know what your spirit needs and go to it without distraction. Leave the rest for another day.