How I'm limiting my news consumption right now

Election "news" engagement bait is ubiquitous, but it's possible to keep our exposure to a minimum

This week a friend observed that he was buckling under the strain of election coverage overwhelm. It’s everywhere, he said, unmissable and unavoidable: blowing up his social feeds, swamping his email inbox, colonizing his YouTube page and all of his podcasts, and sneaking into his search results. Election-related ads have overtaken every page he visits, both on dedicated news sites and in places that ordinarily have no truck whatsoever with politics or national news. 

I mentioned to him that I have been on a news hiatus for several weeks, and that — depending on the results next week — that hiatus could extend a lot longer.

I’m not alone. The Reuters Institute’s 2024 Digital News Report revealed that a staggering 43% of Americans avoid the news in some form, a number that’s skyrocketed in recent years. For some, it’s the fact that the “news” has simply become an anxiety factory, fueling anger, stoking division, and perpetuating a culture of fear and helplessness. Others cite plummeting trust in mainstream journalism and news outlets.  

(As a former journalist myself, my own reticence tracks with the first of those reasons. I know most accredited news outlets and journalists do the best they can to truthfully and accurately report the news without fear or favor. The “gatekeeper effect,” on the other hand — selectively reporting only certain kinds of news — is another matter altogether, far more pernicious and widespread than simply falsifying facts, which is exceedingly rare among major outlets. Last week’s fiascos at The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times did no favors for those of us insisting legacy mainstream news outlets remain a largely trustworthy source of verifiable truth, at least in what’s actually reported.

My friend looked at me with curiosity. You’re avoiding all news? he asked. How do you even do that? What about all the email newsletters? Instagram? YouTube?? Just being online at all, he observed, is like a persistent full-body immersion in U.S. national politics. And that’s not even taking into account text chats with friends, the TV at his gym, and everything else. How, he asked, can you possibly avoid election news without becoming a complete hermit?

It’s not as simple as flipping a switch, I replied, and it’s not airtight, but it’s possible to come close. 

Before I explain my own strategy for sanity, it’s worth quickly unpacking why we find ourselves in this nearly impossible, and I believe untenable, situation. 

One Business Model to Rule Them All

By now, the world’s worst-kept secret is that the One Business Model to Rule Them All is based on capturing and keeping our attention online. In fact, nearly ALL of the business models in an attention economy are predicated on grabbing eyeballs, whether it’s for social media, video, news, music, search, discussion forums, podcasts, or any other information channel under the sun. (And all that effort is in the service of persuading us to buy more shit we don’t need, but that’s a post for another day.)

For social media platforms, this means their algorithms will amplify, reward, and encourage whatever content best grabs our attention — that is, whatever keeps users most “engaged,” in industry parlance. (If you’re interested in learning more about how social media hijacks our brains and our personal data, the best long-form explainer out there may be the documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix.) The next worst-kept secret is that, generally, the more appalling, outrage-inducing, divisive, hyperbolic and/or false the content, the more ‘engaging’ it is. 

The 2020 documentary “The Social Dilemma,” produced in part by the Center for Humane Technology, revealed how social media is reprogramming civilization — for the worse.

Nor does engagement always require hyperbole and doom. Pure nonsense will get the job done, too. 

What used to be called “clickbait” has now morphed into “engagement bait”; its job is not just to get us to click and move on but to stay — to watch, to scroll, to internalize, to identify with the content and and allow auto-play to lull us into its seamless, frictionless cocoon of anhedonia.

But this is not just true for social media platforms and their algorithms. It’s true of every site that depends on web traffic to pay the bills. SEO optimization is one of the biggest cottage industries on earth for a reason. Upon simply opening a browser tab or unlocking our phone, we are tracked and surveilled at every turn in service of this business model. 

Engagement bait has come to dominate not just social media but the entire online ecosystem, especially news. Where the headline for a Buzzfeed listicle once sufficed, now our feeds are stuffed with the shocking, the enraging, and the bewildering.  

The entire imaginable universe of human creative output has been reduced to “content” whose chief purpose is to serve as a substrate for SEO-optimized keywords. Whose chief purpose, in turn, is to grab our attention and keep it while serving us ads.

Sure, subscription dollars count for a sizable fraction of revenue for many online media outlets — streaming services, for example. But they, too, are incentivized to keep us glued to the screen or our earbuds. The more we use the service, the more likely we are to keep subscribing. If we’re not watching, we may be considering other ways of spending our time and money. In 2017 Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said the quiet part out load when he stated that the video streaming site’s biggest competitor was not another streaming service but sleep.

For-profit news outlets have always relied upon a combination of advertising and subscription revenue to keep in the black — at least until the early 2000s. 

I had a front row seat as the bottom began to drop out of the newspaper business. At the newspaper where I was a senior editor, a full 30% of our revenue came from the classified section — a section Rupert Murdoch once described as “rivers of gold. But around 2005, the arrival of free services like Craigslist decimated classifieds everywhere, a phenomenon that only accelerated with the rise of Google Ad Words, Facebook, and the rapid shift toward engagement-based online ads targeted directly to individual viewers. Who wants to pay for a half-page print ad when you can choose to pay only for a site visit from your ideal customer?

Since 2005, more than two-thirds of newspaper jobs have vanished. And of the staff reporters that remain, each one is on the hook every day for exactly how much engagement a given story they write generates, with detailed analytics for each measured down to the click. If you think that’s a recipe for editorial excellence, you couldn’t be more mistaken. On the other hand, if that strikes you as a perfect way to incentive the sensational and the superficial, bingo.

What remains of the news media has collapsed into little more than a national outrage and celebrity-fawning machine, desperate for our attention, feeding us whatever algorithmically personalized pablum will confirm our most cherished beliefs, feed our dopamine fixations, and keep us clicking and scrolling.

The division and polarization we’ve witnessed over the past decade are not an accident of history; they are inevitable outcomes of a business ecosystem that prizes engagement and eyeballs over literally everything else. 

Such is the clickability of the current electoral horserace, and the associated polling, and the fear-mongering and doomsaying from both sides, that right now — and probably for the foreseeable future — we are inundated with election-related content. Following the election, we will continue to be inundated with the existential threat the “other” side poses to the American way of life, democracy, decency, and final outcome in the the epic battle of good versus evil. Or so it’s framed for us. Because that’s what gets the clicks.

So, yes, I have elected (pardon the pun) to opt out of this dysfunctional, masochistic game. I don’t need to follow every screaming development in the election cycle to be able to make an informed, responsible decision on how I’ll vote. I know who I’m voting for, and it’s not the candidate who spews hate, grievance, racism, division, vitriol, misogyny, xenophobia, lawlessness, and retribution. 

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The Strategy

The way I limit my news consumption works for me, but your own mileage may vary. I’ve cobbled my strategy together through experimentation and from sources like Cal Newport, Catherine Price, Jaron Lanier, and many other smart unpluggers. But there’s far more than one way to dial it back and save your sanity.

1. Unsubscribe to everything not absolutely essential

I bring a Marie Kondo philosophy to my inbox every day. I am a ruthless unsubscriber to anything that does not bring me immediate and unambiguous value. That means I get personal emails, work emails, some Meetup announcements, the handful of Substack newsletters to which I subscribe, and little else. I love it. Inbox zero is nearly always an easy few clicks away for me.

2. Ditch the news apps on your phone and disable notifications

I have no news apps on my mobile devices at all, and therefore no notifications to hijack my attention. In fact, I’ve disabled notifications for essentially everything on my phone. If I use an app, it’s usually* because I’ve made a conscious, intentional decision to do so, not because I was dragged away from whatever else I was doing by a distracting alert begging for my attention. (*Hey, I’m as human as the rest of us.)

If I feel a need for news, I will navigate directly to an authoritative source for it on my laptop — and I will prioritize longform explainers and contextualized information over breaking news. As author Rolf Dobelli has observed, breaking news is to the brain what sugar is to the body.

Of the ­thousands of news stories you may have read in the last 12 months, did even one allow you to make a better decision about a serious matter in your life?

3. Delete your social media accounts. Your relationships will thank you

I killed my Facebook account eight years ago, and I never looked back. I use Instagram occasionally, but the only accounts I follow there are: a) my very closest friends and b) several hundred visual artists, none of whom post any political or news content. The instant someone does post such content, I quietly unfollow them without guilt or hesitation. 

It’s perfectly possible to keep up with all my friends without social media. I’ve lived outside of the United States — in Asia, Australia, and Europe — for 12 out of the past 17 years; I have friends all over the world and I keep up with them all. But I do so by prioritizing direct connections: text messages (both individually and in group chats) and actual phone calls every few weeks, with or without video. Both of which mean far more to them than a DM or a public “status update.” I am confident my friendships are far stronger without social media than with it.

4. Relentlessly curate your algorithms where you can

I curate my YouTube watching as ruthlessly as I do my emails. I work hard not to view videos relating to news, but even so, YouTube’s algorithm will inevitably “recommend” a news-related video in an attempt to break through my resistance and get me hooked. Screw that. I click on that hamburger icon and select either “Not interested” or “Don’t recommend channel.” 

“I have friends all over the world and I keep up with them all. But I do so by prioritizing direct connections: text messages and phone calls, which mean far more to them than a DM or a public status update.”

5. Invest in a good ad blocker

Finally, I use an ad blocker. (I’ll be writing about the abundantly clear moral and ethical justifications for ad blockers in a future post.) I pay for a good one — in my case it’s Adblock Plus Premium, for which I pay a reasonable $40/year to install it on all my browsers on all devices. 

Apart from blocking personalized advertising on every site I visit (I can choose to allow ads on sites I wish to support), Adblock Plus zaps all those irritating floating videos, newsletter pop-ups, survey requests and site notifications — engagement bait, all of it. It blocks cookie consent pop-ups so I don’t have to go through the trouble of clicking “manage my cookies” or “reject all” to prevent my personal data from being hoovered up by thousands of “third party partners” and resellers of data I own and that I should not be compelled to share at scale. And it prevents social media icon buttons from following me around the web, which is their whole purpose.

There are lots of other approaches. Many have found following individual reporters and commentators, instead of the media sites that employ them, to be useful, especially as good reporting becomes disintermediated from the large legacy news outlets. There’s also value to be had in time blocking your news consumption for certain periods of the day or week, though that requires a lot of willpower. Find what works for you. I did.

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