Emotional toll of constant negative news and unlimited access to ‘doomscrolling’ has led to record-high news avoidance
News has never been more accessible – but for some, that’s exactly the problem. Flooded with information and relentless updates, more and more people around the world are tuning out.
The reasons vary: for some it’s the sheer volume of news, for others the emotional toll of negative headlines or a distrust of the media itself. In online forums devoted to mindfulness and mental health, people discuss how to step back, from setting limits to cutting the news out entirely.
Being on Lemmy, I’ve noticed BBC News posts a lot of good environmental and local stories (because people post them here). I wish we’d see that in the US. All we get for news out of our conglomerates is regurgitated press releases, fear, murder, and war. The local news is just repeats of the national news repeated seven times per day.
We do have some local freebie newspapers that actually run local stuff. That’s about it though. Everything else is owned by the giant corporations. Luckily these smaller outlets have RSS feeds.
I stopped watching because they don’t hold our politicians accountable especially when they lie to our faces. 16 year old vloggers do a better job on TikTok. I canceled two newspapers. I’ll get my news from The Daily Show.
My goal in November 2024 was to tune out of all politics as i had been overwhelmed.
Then the nazi’s voted for the con man and ruined everything. Now i have to constantly keep tabs on stock market, trump news, his stupid fucking tweets that change the ENTIRE stock market, what new tariff he imposed because he is angry that day, or what right of mine is now gone.
If you don’t keep on top of the news theses days, you cannot stay a step ahead of the dictatorship and his gestapo. It’s exhausting and it’s meant to be this way. Putin has taught him well on how to be a puppet and a POS.
Probably bc a few billionaires bought all the media in this country and now all the media is unreliable garbage. Hope all of these news organizations fail so we can get some actual news reporting again
I bet the Germans did too
Apathy has set in HARD. I’m having trouble paying my own bills. How the hell am I supposed to influence something on a national scale? I have to limit my exposure to anxiety inducing material. American news media is 100% trash now anyway.
It’s a lot easier to ignore because so many news sites have pay walls now, so if you really want to know about the topic you put the effort into finding another source or using an archive service. If you’re not interested enough, you just let it go.
I couldn’t take the obvious insane bias anymore. Unsubbed from NYT about 6 months ago, and WP immediately after Lord Bezos put the kibosh on their Harris endorsement.
And this is why my family didn’t know about the laws my wife and I left our home state over until we explained it to them
I switched to largely an RSS feed and it’s much much better.
There is “tuning out from news because all they report is bad news”, and then there is “tuning out from news because all they report is bad news and I missed out on major events.” I had a colleague who stopped watching news precisely for the anxiety it gives her, but she falls on the latter camp and only found out two days later that Russia invaded Ukraine 🤣🤣
Two days doesn’t seem that bad TBH.
Even reading these comments gives me rumblings of anxiety. What s would!
I think its best to take the news in doses
Annecdotally. I used to watch Phillip de Franco almost every day just to catch up. As soon as trump got into office in Jan I stopped watching him. I knew it would just all be horrible and terrible and so i avoided it.
I feel a lot of people keep up with the news just so they gave something in common to talk about, but since all the news these days is so depressing and realistically a average person is very much powerless to do anything about most of it, so I think people just ignore it, at least that’s what I’m doing
