Jack Baty's Weblog Archives (2000-2020)Ethics in news consumption | The Outline
…more and more I am questioning the news cycle and my relationship to it. There is so much news, and almost none of it is important, but you would not know that from a visit to social media, the grotesque excuse for a piazza where we are supposed to connect with people who are yelling at us, or any of the 24-hour websites that provide us with an overwhelming deluge of inanity.
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As such, I have come to believe that an essential form of self-care is consuming as little national news as possible, and I will argue that this is an ethical choice.
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the general idea that Joe Citizen can and must do something about a horror that is being perpetrated beyond his control — and can be successful in halting that horror — is not just psychically harmful but logically backward