The News Today, Oh Boy

Audacious, provocative, and utterly persuasive, Stop Reading the News does what a vast majority may be secretly contemplating, but often lack courage to do not just what is possible, but what is increasingly necessary. A rare book that sets out to argue a point that you are likely not to have a deeply settled opinion on, but forces you to work through a series of interconnected views and assumptions to take a call. Witty, clear, and concise, even when the narrative may fail to convince the die-hard news lover, it succeeds in making one think—on how to avoid both reading and watching news for a happier, calmer and wiser life.

Having banished news reading and watching from his life for over a decade, Swiss journalist Rolf Dobelli provides a guide on following his footsteps to reward oneself with less disruption, more time, less anxiety and more insights. The economics and politics of news generation have made the output so addictive that before one realises, news bec­omes to the mind what sugar is to the body. Digitalisation has made news even more potent, its corrosive impact sidles into the brain. The all-you-can-eat-menu of the daily news has become a toxic but compulsive diet.     

Stop Reading the News peels many layers of news production and its persuasive marketing which forces the reader into believing that without the news our life would be worse off. Despite most of what one reads or watches is superfluous, one doesn’t realise that news is opposite of understanding the world. It only reports events—events without contexts. Yet it remains dangerously add­ictive; the illusion of empowerment is overwhelming!

Dobelli propels readers to the compelling need to build one’s own ‘crap detector’ as the media has gradually stopped acting as a filter for its readers, listeners and viewers. Confirming Sturgeon’s Law, which states that ‘ninety per cent of everything that is published is rubbish regardless of genre’, the media has only degenerated to the extent of losing its relevance. Sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon faced condemnation for his sweeping statement, but Ernest Hemingway had little doubt on the “need for having a built-in automatic crap detector” as the media’s business model involves shovelling the greatest possible magnitude of rubbish over the greater possible area.

The trouble with news is that our brains are deluged with information on which we have a remote possibility of acting upon. Once our impulse to take action fades, we not only become passive but assume the role of a victim, defined as learned helplessness. Dobelli’s intuitive but engaging style of writing asks questions on our obsession with the news at the cost of inner peace and creativity. The theoretical basis for banishing news is as compelling as the proposed thirty-day plan to take the mental step of staying away from the news. The news-contaminated lifestyle needs time to detox. Once out of it, the book lists myriad other ways of engagement that could be mentally more nourishing.

Stop Reading the News would not have come about had the author not been invited to talk to internationally acclaimed journalists at The Guardian newspaper, precisely critiquing a subject they spent days producing. On the following morning, Dobelli’s arg­uments appeared under the title News is bad for you on the newspaper website. It was amongst the most-read newspaper articles for 2013. It is interesting to note that Dobelli could tease the bunch of distinguished journalists by concluding that “what you are doing here is basically entertainment”, without anyone contesting it.   

Dobelli has dealt a complicated subject in its entirety, taking the discerning reader into a world of dangerous possibilities for which most of us have unknowingly put our life at stake. It is light reading on a serious subject, insightful and reflective. It is a timely book on a subject that is affecting our lives and causing disturbing influences on our society and polity. Anybody reading this book would think twice about switching on the television news or glancing through the pages of the newspaper.

(Sudhirendar Sharma is an independent writer, researcher and academic)