Five Things You Notice When You Quit The News

David Cain:

Every minute spent watching news is a minute you are unavailable for learning about the world in other ways. Americans probably watch a hundred million hours of news coverage every day. That’s a lot of unread books, for one thing.

Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world. Watch news all day for years and you have a distant, water-cooler-level awareness of thousands of stories, at least for the few weeks each is popular.

I haven’t watched televised news in years. I’ve just recently reduced my news intake to the printed NYT and a couple of magazines and I’m very happy with my decision.