Keeping up with the news can be overwhelming, but there are strategies we can employ to manage our media diet and become more effective and informed citizens.
Whether we get it through online articles, newspapers, or social media, most of us have likely felt fatigued by a seemingly endless stream of news — stories that simultaneously feel too important to ignore and like we are being bore mostly bad news.
A May 13 Pew Research poll found that 46 percent of Americans feel informed by news “extremely often or often,” but the “most commonly felt emotions are all negative ones … smaller shares say the news they get makes them feel hopeful (10 percent), happy (7 percent) or empowered (7 percent) extremely often or often.”
Moreover, the information-overload aspect of news-consumption has been leveraged by far-right political actors such as Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist for President Donald J. Trump, who was quoted in a 2018 Bloomberg opinion column by author Michael Lewis as saying “the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
The “flood the zone” strategy counts on information being too excessive to contextualize in order to disorient audiences and paralyze the media’s attempts to keep pace with it,
Bannon elaborated in a March 17, 2019 interview with Frontline that “The media […] can only focus on one thing at a time … every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never—will never be able to recover.”
One 2021 study, conducted in the Netherlands during the Covid-19 pandemic, found a causal relationship between increased media-consumption and negative mental well-being over time and positive mental well-being following a decrease in news consumption.
The study suggests that “concrete advice could thus be … to encourage citizens to consume fewer news, or only at specific times (e.g., Only in the morning), in times of crises when they feel overwhelmed by the situation.”
While the pandemic was an outlier period of exaggerated media consumption, the findings are good general advice when attempting to strike a balance between staying informed and managing information-overload.
It is not necessary that we oblige ourselves to be experts in every topic. Choosing instead only to follow only those issues which matter most to us and which we have the power to act on can guide us in curating a less overwhelming media diet, freeing up our capacity to act more than if we had instead become paralyzed by receiving a lot of information about many topics.
While other issues matter too, if many are devoting time to focused issues individually then a division of labor ensures that collectively the public can still be informed without being paralyzed by fatigue. Additionally, finding trusted sources on those issues one is not an expert on allows us to mitigate our cognitive labor by outsourcing it to others who we trust.
However, wisely choosing which sources we get our information from also has implications for avoiding news fatigue .
A Sept. 25 Pew Research social media and news fact sheet lists “about half of U.S. adults (53 percent)” as “at least sometimes [getting] news from social media.”
While social media contains veritable information, the platforms are also efficiently attuned to compete for our attention by playing into our biases, particularly for negative stimuli.
A Sept. 2024 Nature study concluded that “individuals are more likely to encounter negative news articles when accessing content on social media or through links embedded in posts.”
In light of this bias on platforms that are prone to producing other kinds of information distortions — such as bubbles, echo chambers, and increasingly AI-generated slop — it is important to keep in mind that news may be exaggerated or even fabricated and must be vetted accordingly as a corrective to those distortions.
Finding trusted sources that avoid playing into these practices, which stimulate negative feelings that can cumulatively lead to news fatigue, will also provide more trustworthy information.
Clarification: this story was updated on Dec. 2 to correct minor typos
