Opting out of the news-catastrophization industrial complex

Eliminating news from our media diets is the new therapy (and what even is 'the news' anymore?)

On January 20, about 90 minutes after Donald Trump was sworn in as America’s 47th president, the news explainer outlet Vox debuted a new daily newsletter called The Logoff. Its tagline: “to help you stay informed about Trump — without letting the news take over your life.”

On the same day, I could scroll through social platforms from TikTok to Reddit to LinkedIn and come across dozens of posts expressing despair, horror and burnout with “the news” and fleeing it with every manner of fast, purge, and detox imaginable. People are suddenly breaking up with what’s left of the Fourth Estate using the same language you’d expect to hear from someone dumping cigarettes or Tesla stock.

It’s tempting to chalk most of this up simply to post-election disaffection on the left, where millions of shiny new Bluesky feeds overfloweth with pledges to cancel CNN and keep their fingers in their ears while singing LA LA LA LA LA LA for the next four years. And yes, it’s certainly that. January was a long year, and February already looks like a purgatorial eternity.

But Vox’s new newsletter (not named “The Logoff” for nothing) is also a savvy business acknowledgement of a broader cultural shift that many of us have been clocking, and in some cases living, since well before the 2024 presidential election: News has, for millions, begun to feel like an existential threat to our mental health. Eliminating it from our diets seems to have become the latest flavor in self care.

If the preponderance of that is due to the recent elevation of Donald Trump from knuckle-dragging secessionist and convicted felon to unfettered king of the multiverse, that’s still roughly half of the United States — to say nothing of the rest of the world’s horrified onlookers — who are keening for ways to log off and reclaim some morsel of sanity in a rapidly enshittifying world barrelling toward what often feels like Biblical-level catastrophe.

No wonder so many of us are turning on, tuning in, and dropping out in a modern day retelling of Timothy Leary’s urgent 1960s-era message to the counterculture. Psychedelics are cool again, we’re all manifesting our authentic selves according to our Energy Types™, and we’re opting out of anything that doesn’t bring us joy (Amazon Prime excepted).

When “Doomscrolling” broke into the cultural lexicon in 2020, we were in the midst of the global Covid pandemic, a comically incompetent and basic-science-denying response from the first Trump administration, frenzied Black Lives Matter protests, and a worsening climate crisis. Since then, doomscrolling has become almost synonymous with virtually every effort to engage with current events. Seriously: is there any other kind of scrolling nowadays?

In the meantime, more and more of us have announced (I include myself here) a deliberate and calculated pullback from the news-catastrophization industrial complex.

And yet even before last November, there was a marked uptick in posts filled with teeth gnashing over news overwhelm and burnout.

Since November 6, it’s only become more urgent. Attempting to navigate almost anywhere online without also being served a heaping helping of U.S. national politics with a side order of ultraprocessed apocalypse for either Team Red or Team Blue has become virtually impossible.

This is, of course, exactly how Trump rose to prominence. He craves the spotlight as perhaps no human being in history ever has. Because he will say and do literally anything to assure he’s never not the center of attention, news outlets cannot resist him. Every word and gesture is like uncut fentanyl for both the outraged and the jubilant in today’s pathologically bifurcated electorate. His ignorance, his cruelty, his venality, his insults, his shamelessness — they all keep the clicks clicking and the Toks Tiking in daily, even hourly, cycles of outrage and schadenfreude.

For any website that’s even slightly adjacent to the news and current events, that’s like dangling a raw T-bone in front of a wolverine and expecting it to look the other way. Trump = clicks, and clicks = ad dollars, regardless of the platform. Dedicated news outlets, social media sites, and news aggregators are just the tip of this ecosystem. It extends to every online destination where people find current events, from the weather, tech, financial and sports news to entertainment and even reference sites. At the time of this writing, “fascism” is the second most searched definition at Dictionary.com.

Is it any wonder we want to tune out?

The trouble is that, given the proliferation of the news-adjacent ecosystem, it’s become all but impossible to know what “news” even is anymore, much less to identify the online places and spaces we’re unbookmarking.

As we saw in the many postmortems of the U.S. election, this click-chasing collective of newsish influence has absolutely exploded. Where Americans get their “news” (a word whose meaning balloons by the hour) today has taken a hard pivot away from traditional media sources and toward what are being dubbed “nontraditional” sources: on TikTok, on YouTube, in podcasts, on Instagram and Threads, yes, on Substack, and for all I know subliminally encoded in breathy ASMR vids.

Pew recently found that 20% of Americans now get their news from social media influencers, a number that rises to 37% for everyone under 30. Most news influencers (77%) have zero affiliation or background with an actual news organization (which does make one wonder how they are doing any actual reporting). And a significant majority of them (63%) are men of the chest-thumping, gun-fetishizing, crypto-shilling, immigrant-dehumanizing variety.

But this is only the latest swerve for the news industry, which has essentially been riding a Tilt-a-Whirl for the past 20 or so years. Its legacy business model was disrupted into laughable obsolescence by the rise of targeted online advertising. We watched as the once proud Fourth Estate was all but eaten alive first by Craigslist, then by AdWords and social media platforms, and finally fed its own AI-summarized entrails for dessert. It sat by, impotently, as whatever teeth it had remaining were removed by a legion of wild-eyed bloggers “flooding the zone with shit.” And now by podcasters HQ’d in their parents’ basements, barely pubescent TikTok newsfluencers, and a dark army of hyperpartisan trolls and Russian bots who’ve assumed control of our social feeds and every algorithm within spitting distance.

This all, of course, tracks awfully closely with the legions of formerly extremely online people now announcing they are ‘quitting’ social media and reclaiming their lives. Many of these farewells cite the well-documented unique harms social media platforms are inflicting upon individuals and communities and society as they’re signing off.

And I’m here for it, believe me. Social media platforms have earned every ounce of the opprobrium heaped on them in the last several years. They have destroyed individual lives, relationships, families, civil society, shame, rational thought, and any chance of seeing a new movie without knowing the twist ending in advance. They fully deserve to be broken up and ground into a gritty powder that is used to lubricate daily colonoscopies for their owners for the rest of time.

But social media platforms are not, in fact, unique either in their function or impact. Just like the news, they are all part of what MSNBC host Chris Hayes calls “competitive attention markets” in his new book The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource.

A key point Hayes makes in his book is that the weekday program he hosts on MSNBC, All In with Chris Hayes, is competing for our ears and eyeballs in the attention marketplace in exactly the same way as Instagram and TikTok are. And this is true of every source of information today, as much for producers and peddlers of what we call “the news” as for anything else.

“We think of information as the defining feature [of modernity], but information is limitless. There’s tons of information. The thing that’s scarce and valuable is attention. So everyone has to fight over that. And the more information there is — the lower the barriers are to get it in front of someone’s face — the more competitive it becomes. And I think that we’re in a position now, as more and more of the world moves from industrial modes of production to post-industrial modes of production, that the one thing that’s left that’s scarce, that’s finite, that’s the most valuable, is our attention.”

It’s all just information. And when information becomes for all intents and purposes infinite, attention itself becomes the most precious resource — a resource that competitive attention markets will do anything to capture and exploit. And yet we’re all giving it away not just for free but we’re paying to do so with our data, our privacy, our sense of self worth, our mental health, and in many cases with actual money.

Hayes also observes that it is easier to get someone's attention for a moment than it is to hold their attention, a truth that has pernicious and wide-ranging implications for us all.

“This is a central dynamic of the attention age. It's replicated in the slot machine design of the algorithmic feed, where you just grab, grab, grab, grab, grab. You never hold attention. Everything’s short. You go to the next one. Trump has the exact same approach to this. And that’s because interruption and compelled attention are the circuitry that is easiest to fire in us.”

Notice that Hayes cites “the algorithmic feed” here, not social media platforms. Therein lies the real rub.

As tempting as it is to believe we can isolate and eliminate these harms by “quitting” social media in the same way we might, say, eliminate refined sugar from our diet, that’s a naive and myopic view of the real problem. Because news is just as much a product of the algorithmically driven competitive attention marketplace as the rest of the informational internet. It’s cut from the very same cloth as social media, even if it shows up in a different outfit.

Ever since the news media migrated online in the mid-oughts, it’s become a zombified click-chasing machine that — just like social media — feeds mostly on fear and outrage instead of brains (well, brains, too).

And I say this as a former full-time journalist and editor with a J-school degree who participated in that migration, and ultimately left because of it.

At the most granular level, when you’re actually scrolling and reading ‘the news,’ nearly all of what you’re seeing has been algorithmically selected for your personal eyeballs, whether that’s on an aggregator like Google News, Yahoo News, or Apple News, or a social media platform like Facebook or TikTok, or YouTube, or podcasts or a dedicated news app. What you see is almost certainly different from what someone sitting next to you will see, even on the same site or app.

There’s the filter bubble effect, of course — where you’ll see only content that perpetuates and validates your pre-existing biases and interests and ideological leanings.

But it’s also serving you content that it knows will grab your attention and keep you and people like you clicking and scrolling, glued to the platform so it can serve you ad after ad and hoover up all your data.

News sites do not care if they hold your attention (again, not new; journalism’s inverted pyramid style has the same purpose, and dates to the invention of the telegraph). What they want is to capture your attention over and over again, all the better to keep you clicking.

This is still true even if you’ve made the herculean effort to navigate to an actual news organization’s website or opened their dedicated mobile app (which, problematically for real news organizations, is becoming less and less common a way for people to get their news). Even there, recommendation engines, again, are relying on algorithms to push content at you that’s calculated to keep you (based on everything it knows about you, which is a great deal) most engaged with their content and their ads.

They have no choice. Subscriptions alone will not come anywhere near paying for a newsroom staff and all the rest.

News has become a zombified click-chasing machine that — just like social media — feeds on quick hits of sensationalism, fear and outrage.

And at still another level, well upstream of what the algorithms are serving us at any given moment, news publishers know what the algorithms are looking for, and what will bring the clicks. That data is measured meticulously for every piece of content from every writer, editor and reporter every minute of every day, and it determines what’s actually assigned and reported, as well as the form it takes when we see it.

That larger financial imperative shapes the overall content of ‘the news’ far more than any single reporter or op/ed writer or assigning editor, and certainly more than whatever existing news article or video the algorithm selects to push at an individual in any given moment.

Just as Marshall McLuhan said more than a half century ago, the medium is the message.

Just like social media, most of what we see as news has been algorithmically curated for each of us, whether we’re getting it from a newsfluencer on a social platform, an aggregator, or straight from the tap. The business model is the same for them all: clicks and eyeballs and advertising.

You only read news that’s behind a paywall, you say? Have a look right now. I’ll bet you’re seeing ads there, too, right? See above.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Vox grokked the dark vibes around news consumption first; it’s been at the leading edge of changing trends in news since it emerged in 2014 as the standard bearer for explanatory journalism. But you can bet they won’t be the last to capitalize on our growing need to opt out of the news-catastrophization industrial complex this year.