Since the presidential election more than two weeks ago, it has been common to hear certain kinds of left-leaning, reflective New Yorkers declare that they were breaking up with the news. The prospect of a second Trump administration with all the anticipated chaos felt like too much — they were drained, exhausted, resigned, ready to choose a plaintive ignorance. These were high-information voters who mainlined political coverage through every available 21st- century platform; a month ago they would have been able to give you the over-under on statehouse races in rural Ohio.
But now they questioned whether consuming so much news was good for them, whether it was really a civic virtue or something to be fought like any other addiction. Where had all that passion and all that focus on the constant phone alerts ultimately landed them? It was the other side, they thought — the side that had come out on top — that had been fasting from legitimate news all along.
When I spoke with a friend in Brooklyn a day or two after Donald Trump won, he told me he had committed to reading only the print paper — and just in the morning, forgoing any possible all-consuming afternoon digression into whatever might be up with Tulsi Gabbard. When I checked with him earlier this week, he was still maintaining the ritual and it felt good, he said.
But in a city where so many of us are animated by the competitive urge to know more than the person on the other side of the room, I wondered how long he could pretend it was 1982 — and how long so many people like him, up and down Prospect Park West or Riverside Drive, all so impressively well versed in the political discourse, could manage to sit things out on the sidelines.
Four years ago, a Swiss philosopher and businessman named Rolf Dobelli wrote a book called “Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life.” A decade earlier he had eliminated newspapers, television news and related apps from his life, which he later described in a TED Talk as “one of the best decisions” he ever made. In an interview with The Irish Times when his book was published, he lamented that his news-obsessed friends had lost the ability to read more than 10 pages of a book at a time. He remained informed by organizing regular “news lunches” with experts in different fields, which is something he believed, however implausibly, that regular people, without TED Talks, could also do.
Whether the liberal MSNBC audience has turned to group lunches or just drinking alone in the dark, the sense that people are shying away from the political conversation is showing up in ratings. In the week following Election Day, the network averaged 500,000 viewers a day, a decline of 39 percent compared with average viewership in October. On Nov. 11, “The Rachel Maddow Show” had roughly half the viewers, on average, than it had a month earlier.
Some of the falloff is expected in the aftermath of elections, which, with some exceptions — in 2000 and 2016 — are a lot less exciting once they are over. But the retreat was also fueled by the feeling that there was no war of resistance left to fight. Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote, but this time Mr. Trump had improved his standing even in intensely Trump-averse New York City. “If it felt a little more in my control, I’d be just as engaged,” Emily Listfield, a writer and novelist, told me. “But this feels so massively out of my control.”
The night after the election, she bottomed out in her East Side apartment — she found herself yelling at her phone as she listened to “Pod Save America” while she was brushing her teeth. She decided that she was too angry and that it would probably be better to take in a lot less of what was happening in the world. “I was going to a movie with a friend last weekend, and she asked which of three releases I was interested in,” she told me. “I had to explain that I couldn’t risk looking — opening the news app to see reviews — so she would have to summarize them for me.”
The director of the Minnesota Journalism Center and a professor of political psychology at the University of Minnesota, Benjamin Toff, has built a career studying how we consume the news. Earlier this year he and two co-authors published a book, Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism. A number of studies tell us that people back away after a major event, he said, typically because it makes them too anxious. This happened to some extent after 9/11. In his research, Mr. Toff interviewed one news addict who experimented with giving up news for Lent, four years ago, and found that he was so much happier, so much more connected to his family, that he kept going past Easter.
Mr. Toff’s work also revealed that many people avoid the news because they grow frustrated with the lack of resolution — conflict and craziness that go on and on, miseries that seem insurmountable. “None of the stories feel like they come to a conclusion in a satisfying way,” he said. Reality was now subject to the plot structures of narrative television. Streaming, and the practice of binging series in particular, was habituating people toward an impatience. His subjects might complain about the violence and horror in the news as the reason to skip it — but then talk enthusiastically about the crime shows they watched and liked, despite the bloodletting, in part, because everything tied up so neatly.
Whether the current state of affairs will genuinely test the news lover’s tolerance for mess and disorder is still unclear. “I think a lot of people struggle with this norm that you should be on top of everything at all times,” Mr. Toff said. “But just because we can consume news every waking hour, doesn’t mean that we should.”
Higher levels of news consumption track with higher levels of income and education. In big cities, where information is currency and knowledge is status, there are social costs to not keeping up. For that to change, everyone in your circle would have to take a pledge of obliviousness. You might feel that it is time to silence the noise, but your text group will almost certainly have different ideas. Two minutes in someone is going to write and ask if you have heard about Mehmet Oz.
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