Reflections on time without news

 Recently one of my friends proposed to me that I try to go without intentionally consuming news for a while and see what I take away from it. The proposition was that most news is very low quality information and that by cutting it away I might have more time for the more important things, or maybe just not have my mind polluted with the crap that’s put out. It’s been three full weeks now, and here’s what I’ve gleaned from my experience:

• First, I definitely need some more news. There’s a curfew in place right now and I’m anxious to know the moment it ends or is pushed back.
• Second, aside from coronavirus info, my brain is not telling me that I’m missing anything. Whether this means that I shouldn’t be consuming it might be a separate issue – my brain might not crave broccoli or chips either but that’s separate from whether or not they’re good or bad for me
• I haven’t found any other noticeable changes in my mental state that I could attribute to quitting news. I’m thinking back to quitting/severely limiting social media like Reddit and Instagram, where I noticed a significant drop in anxiety due to all the negative takes on the news from that social media (especially Reddit)
• The reduction in idea and fact discovery is significantly less than I thought. The amount of news that actually has any long term impact is really very minimal. I think the actual informational value of most news is, as my friend predicted, very low
• I’ve definitely had more time freed up to do other things – mostly reading different types of content like getting back to a book that’s been on my bedside table for longer than I care to admit, as well as some other blogs I enjoy.

Overall, I think I’ll be going back to news, but just from one source – Desautels le dimanche. I’ve listened to this podcast for years now and I’ve found the quality of the reporting to be very high and minimally sensationalist. It both investigates current events and ongoing trends, stories, and cultural events locally and from around the world, though usually with a bias towards finding a francophone angle even in places you might not expect. Still I think this source is the best for me in terms of delivering locally relevant news as well as the important stories from around the world and exposing me to things I never knew I never knew.

Also, it’s just a weekly podcast, so it’s frequent enough to get me information in a timely manner (important for Covid) but infrequent enough that most of the chaff gets filtered out. Its inclusion of things that aren’t strictly “news” also helps filter out unimportant information and filter in more important things that might actually matter. Of course the information quality and relevancy is still less than perfect, but I’m judging its balance between quality, relevancy, and timeliness fits my needs.

The only issue is that the format is two hours (even at 1.75 speed it clocks in at just over an hour with the ads cut out) – it would be nice to have a program that was perhaps just one hour a week at regular speed. As it stands I’ve cancelled all the other newsletters and podcasts and subscriptions and Feedly feeds and whatever else I would use to consume news. I don’t suspect I’ll miss them. My one apprehension going forward is that only listening to one source of news might leave me open to bias when it comes to perspectives on current events. As far as bias in news goes though, I will credit Radio-Canada as being a remarkably straight shooter (though it doesn’t have a rating on Mediabiasfactcheck.com at the time of writing which disappoints me) so I could do significantly worse. Still I’m all ears for recommendations on what might be even better.