What Happened When I Stopped Consuming National News
It felt like a radical decision, but it came down to how the news made me feel.
carlesmiro | Shutterstock Editor's Note: This is a part of YourTango's Opinion section where individual authors can provide varying perspectives for wide-ranging political, social, and personal commentary on issues.
“I don’t like the way the news makes me feel.” My son told me this on the way home from school last week. He was sharing a few stories he’d learned about from CNN 10, the 10-minute news program he watches in class.
“How does it make you feel?” I asked.
“It makes me worry about things that I can’t control,” he said. I told him I know exactly what he means.
Since the re-election of Donald Trump, I’ve more or less stopped consuming national news for exactly this reason.
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I’d already cut back on my consumption of international news years before. Back in my 20s, when I worked at National Geographic, I felt that it was part of my job to be “informed,” to keep up on world news. I envisioned myself at work gatherings, sounding oh-so-smart as I remarked on the plight of coca farmers in Bolivia or debated the origins of the War in Darfur.
All too quickly, I found myself feeling depressed and overwhelmed. Global news, as I discovered, has an even stronger “bad news bias” than national news, and it seemed that everywhere I turned, people across oceans were fighting, starving, getting sick, or dying gruesome deaths.
And when it came to global news, there was just so much of it. For every story I read, I knew there were millions of stories that had never been written, millions of stories I would never know.
We live on a planet of eight friggin’ billion people. We simply cannot know everything. What we do know has historically been filtered through the lens of what mostly white men deem “important” and “newsworthy.”
And even though social media has somewhat democratized the news, its algorithms delight in paranoia, rage, and disinformation — across the political spectrum.
Struggling news outlets are more concerned with luring eyeballs than informing the public, and as social media posts become national news stories, the lines between the two channels are increasingly blurred. Meanwhile, Big Tech makes obscene profits off our deteriorating mental health.
I took all of this into consideration when I made a conscious choice to stop consuming national news, but really, just like my son, it came down to how the news made me feel.
The week after Trump was re-elected, I unsubscribed from The New York Times’ “The Morning” newsletter, which I’d been starting my day with for several years. I’d gotten into the habit of reading it in bed and then found myself fighting an overpowering urge to simply hide under the covers for the rest of the day. I’d get up feeling helpless, hopeless, and heavy.
I tried saving the headlines for later in my day, but I quickly found there was no good time to read them. I didn’t want to feel helpless, hopeless, or heavy just before starting work, or in the middle of my workday, or just after work, or before dinner, or before bed.
Along with The Morning, I unsubscribed from all the breaking news alerts. I removed the “top news” widget from my phone and deleted the Facebook app from my home screen (yes, yes, I’m a Xennial … I was still on Facebook). I changed my Substack settings to focus just on people I was following, and I became judicious about editing my feed.
Some people would equate all this to sticking my head in the sand. Correction: Some people have equated all this to sticking my head in the sand. They have told me I’m choosing to be willfully ignorant and uninformed. That I’m retreating into my bubble of privilege without regard for our country’s most vulnerable.
I recognize that there are lots of good arguments for keeping abreast of national news. This story isn’t really intended to convince ardent national news consumers to stop, or even to convince them that I am “right” for making the choices I’ve made.
It is, however, intended to make the case that I am not wrong. I know I’m not the only one who has opted out, and I believe my reasons for doing so are sound. While national news consumers may feel outraged by what I’m not doing, there is typically less attention paid to what I am doing.
As I’ve intentionally opted out of the news, I’ve also intentionally opted in — here are five things I’m doing instead:
1. I follow and support local news outlets
After unsubscribing from The Morning, I immediately subscribed to a daily email from my local NPR station, limited to news in my state, and an email from one of the few remaining city news sources that still does investigative reporting. I’ve also since begun supporting both outlets with a monthly donation.
I realized I’d been so distracted by all the shenanigans in Washington that I’d totally lost track of who was on our city council or what regional issues might be on the next ballot. It even took me a hot second to remember the names of our mayor and governor.
As I set to work reacquainting myself with local politics, I realized something: Good things sometimes happened, and were reported on, right in my own backyard.
There were volunteers gathering to help Northern red-legged frogs safely cross a highway during their annual migration. A beloved bike shop was on the brink of going under when the community rallied and fundraised over twice their initial goal. A local utility, which had announced a city council-approved plan to cut down 400 trees from a city park, had to backtrack after five hours of public testimony from concerned citizens.
Of course, there’s plenty of local news that’s not so good, but the difference between bad local news and bad national news is that I actually feel empowered to do something about it. I can’t do something about everything, and it’s not my actions alone that will turn the tide, but there’s a far greater chance I can make my voice heard.
As a related aside, after a 15+-year career in the nonprofit industry, I now only donate to local nonprofits with boots on the ground. I’ve experienced firsthand that tipping point at which large nonprofits become more concerned with sustaining and promoting themselves than with actually solving the problem they claim to be addressing.
I know my actions will have more impact and my money will go further at the local level. Not only that, it will directly benefit the community in which I live, work, and raise my children.
More recently, I subscribed to a weekly newsletter from one of my city councilors—a teacher and mother whose political platform is based on community and care. Her newsletter reminds me that there are still true civil servants in this country who are practicing democracy in the service of their communities. It’s the best email I get all week.
2. I’m picking a thing
“You do not have to do everything. You do not have to know or be good at everything. Find one thing and do that.”
This was Zawn Villines’ excellent advice following Trump’s re-election, and I heartily concur. Truth be told, I also struggle with it. I typically pick lots of things, way too many things, and I spread myself too thin. After all, that’s what I was told to do in high school to prove to colleges that I was a “well-rounded” human. In college, I was given the same advice so that I could build an “impressive” resumé.
But I’m doing my best to hone in. We need people engaged in deep work right now, not people flitting from one thing to the next and never truly landing.
As a co-owner of a worker-owned cooperative, my main “thing” is building a local community of co-ops and inspiring more business owners, especially those on their way out, to sell their companies to their employees. The way I see it, while our national democracy is disintegrating before our eyes, cooperatives offer a powerful means of practicing democratic principles daily — and in particular, practicing them at the workplaces where most Americans spend most of their time. (I’d like to change that, too! Maybe that can be your thing?)
I could easily dedicate the rest of this story to the power of employee ownership, but the point here is that sustained attention to a specific local cause matters. (And if you’d like to learn more about employee ownership, I’ve written about it here.) One fellow Substacker told me her thing is improving pedestrian safety in her neighborhood by lobbying for crosswalks and other traffic calming measures.
A friend’s thing is heading up the PTA at our kids’ school. My mother’s thing is organizing neighborhood clean-ups. These things might seem small, but let’s not conflate deep with “small.” I know what large-scale impact work looks like: It’s broad, but shallow. It likes to dress itself up in bells and whistles. It pursues growth for growth’s sake because it erroneously assumes that big is inherently better.
Let’s also not forget that anything that builds, supports, and protects in-person communities is an act of resistance. Justice, like wealth, never trickles down. It’s built from the ground up. The Powers That Be want to keep us isolated and divided because we’re easier to control when we’re holed up at home with our phones. Which brings me to point number three:
3. I prioritize small acts of service
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Picking a thing doesn’t mean we can’t show up in other ways. I’m making a concerted effort to prioritize small acts of service whenever I can. I applied for a permit for a neighborhood block party and stapled flyers up and down our street. I volunteered to hand out burritos at back-to-school night. I joined the tech committee for the recovery group I attend weekly, and I volunteer every now and then to chair our meetings.
This isn’t about finding or building new communities; it’s about serving the communities that are already serving me. It’s about showing up. We are all embedded in some form of community, even if it feels fragmented and frayed at the edges. Maybe it’s a school, an apartment building, an exercise class, or a neighborhood association. Let’s be part of the fabric that holds it together and makes it stronger.
Acts of service aren’t just about altruism. Every time I reach out or show up, I’m expanding my own support network. This is helpful in the here and now, but I’m also thinking ahead to even darker times. In Rumaan Alam’s chilling apocalyptic novel, Leave the World Behind (also a chilling movie of the same name that I think you’ll only appreciate if you read the book first), we’re led to believe that the world is ending, but neither the readers nor the characters ever find out why.
It’s a baffling and unresolved story, and what stuck with me long after the fact was the sense of profound isolation and pervasive mistrust that permeates the pages. No one knows what’s going on, but more crucially, no one is joining forces to offer comfort or figure things out.
When the shit hits the fan, I want to know who to trust. I’m not going to trust anyone, and no one is going to trust me, if I don’t show up now and extend a hand.
4. I read books
Speaking of books, remember those? The things with pages that you turn with your fingers? (Okay, maybe you listen to books or read books on a Kindle. That counts, too.)
I find it ironic that people who chase every breaking news story are considered “informed,” and someone like me, who looks to history and fiction to make better sense of the world, is accused of willful ignorance.
I already know the major plotline of nearly every breaking national news story: a disaster, an act of violence, something that might kill me or my children, a racist or sexist or homophobic or xenophobic thing someone with power did. But the news tends to operate outside of any historical context. It’s only in books that I can begin to make sense of it.
Some of the outrage Americans feel about the rise of fascism is that we simply can’t believe this is happening. And yet, when we read books, we’re reminded that this absolutely can happen, and has happened, and will inevitably happen again.
After Trump was re-elected, I read Marjorie Agosín’s excellent young adult novel, I Lived on Butterfly Hill, to my son, which is based on her own childhood during General Pinochet’s rapid rise to power in Chile in 1973. The timing was unintentional, and reading the book made me feel ill at ease, to say the least. But it gave me a glimpse of what we might need to prepare for, and more crucially, how it might be perceived and experienced by a child of my son’s age.
Also, we can read books just for pleasure. Sometimes stories offer an escape, and that’s fine too. There’s more to life than news stories. All stories—whether in the genre of mystery, erotica, science fiction, fantasy, literary, or humor—remind us of the vast spectrum of human experiences that can unfold against any political backdrop.
And while we’re on the subject of pleasure…
5. I seek pleasure and spiritual embodiment
I have a bad habit of getting too caught up in my head, of mentally spiraling about what the future might bring. As a big-picture, future-oriented thinker, national news may send me spiraling more quickly and more deeply than it does for people who can stay more grounded in the minutiae of the present.
As such, I am actively seeking the embodied, spiritual experiences to which Jamila Bradley refers in her excellent piece, Joy Is a Strategy: The White Leftist Struggle with Spirit. Let’s face it—white folks like me are typically not that great at embodiment. We’re not that great at spirituality. We’re not that great at joy. Over the centuries, we’ve been a pretty grim-faced bunch. We’ve pursued head over heart, reduced spirituality to a dreary set of dos and don’ts.
Living in the Pacific Northwest offers me abundant opportunities to retreat into nature, which I take advantage of whenever I can. I always come out feeling better than I felt when I went in. Trees and rivers and songbirds remind me that there’s a lot more to the world than the shenanigans of a bunch of self-involved humans, and the world will persist in some form or fashion even if (sigh… when) we humans bring about our own extinction. In the meantime, there is so much soul-soothing, awe-inspiring nature going on about its business, thrumming with ancient rhythms that have no regard for profit or power.
We can connect with our bodies and our own spirituality in urban settings, too. As a single mother to a tween and a teen, I work an evening shift after my day job as an unpaid chauffeur. I don’t really like driving, and I especially don’t like driving along a particular street near my house that’s a wasteland of used car lots, strip clubs, and fast food chains. Unfortunately, it’s the only street that will take me where I often need to go.
I was feeling so grumpy about driving up and down this street every day, so I decided to do something about it. Now, when it’s just me in the car, on the way to a pick-up or after a drop-off, I’ve started blasting music and dancing in my seat. I sing off-key, and I couldn't care less if other drivers see me. In fact, I hope they do. I hope they either giggle or feel inspired to start dancing, too.
Dancing, singing, creating art—let’s not forget the power of getting outside our heads! When I recently got sucked down too many Charlie Kirk rabbit holes (yes, some news is impossible to escape), I started feeling tremendously icky. A friend asked if I wanted to join her at an 8 am hip hop dance class on a Saturday, and I said YES. I was so done with the hot takes and think pieces, all trying too hard to lure eyeballs by saying something new and profound. So I moved my uncoordinated body and shook my middle-aged ass and got all the ick out of my system and reclaimed my joy.
These are five things I’m doing, but nothing in this story is prescriptive. These aren’t the only five things to be doing, nor are they the essential steps you need to follow to be a better person or live a better life. A wise friend and colleague, Danielle Marshall, whose DEI work has been profoundly impacted by the current administration, recently told me that she “microdoses” national news. Other people I know severely limit their time on social media, or get off it altogether, and are highly intentional about their national news sources.
If there’s one thing I’d explicitly call on you to do, it’s to reimagine what it means to be “informed.” Is it more important for you to know the latest unhinged thing Trump posted online, or to know that your next-door neighbor’s car engine is on the fritz, and he can’t get to the grocery store?
There are vulnerable people all around us, but we can’t support or defend them if we don’t know who they are. Two of my son’s close friends have first-generation immigrant parents. I have friends and coworkers who are part of the LGBTQ+ community.
I know people nearby with physical health issues, people with mobility issues, people living paycheck to paycheck, people struggling with mental illness, and addiction. As my own biracial, Black-presenting kids get older, I’m acutely aware of the danger they face now that society no longer deems them “cute.”
Of course, we can know the national headlines and know our neighbors. It doesn’t have to be an either/or. But I worry that the doom-scrolling consumes so much of our attention, and leaves us feeling so icky, that it’s hard to find the time, or summon the emotional energy, for Robert next door.
I was reminded of the hysteria the national headlines can stir up when multiple people texted me over the weekend to ask if I was okay. They had heard about the President sending troops to my hometown of Portland, Oregon.
I had spent the morning on dappled paths amongst Douglas Firs and Bigleaf Maples at the park near my home. I took a phone call from a recovery group friend who was struggling and needed someone to talk to. I started a load of laundry, RSVPed to this month’s local co-op meetup, read the weekly update from my son’s school principal, walked to the mini farm near my house to pick up my weekly CSA box, and drove my daughter to her volleyball game.
I texted everyone back from the bleachers as I waited for the game to start: “No troops at the high school gym.” Then I realized I’d forgotten to change the laundry.
I’m not being blasé about the fact that the President is sending troops to my city. It’s absolutely insane, but it doesn’t surprise me. In fact, it only makes my mission to create “safety and abundance,” as Bradley puts it, on my streets and in my neighborhoods all the more urgent.
Maybe one of these days, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, the troops will show up at my doorstep. In the meantime, there’s laundry to do, love to give, people to laugh with, people to cry with, bread to break, paths to walk, books to read, music to blast, and booties to shake.
This isn’t about toxic positivity. I’m not in denial about the state of our country and world. Quite the contrary, in fact. I’ve fully accepted it, and I don’t need the daily or hourly play-by-play.
Resistance movements aren’t built from hashtags. They are built when we connect, care for one another, and create together.
The joyless men in charge don’t get to dictate the terms of my well-being. If you, too, are struggling with the headlines, I’d gently encourage you to let them relinquish their hold on yours.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Mom, Interrupted.
