Is the News good for us?

As Christians, we need faith, love and hope to live. Faith gives us the assurance that we are not alone, that God is there and that he makes all the difference. Love tells us that God genuinely cares about us, and he wants us to care for each other. Hope reassures us that God’s plans for our good are solid: we can entrust our future to him. These are the interior pillars that help us to survive the challenges and stresses of life. Given their importance, we should ask ourselves whether the things we do in our day build up the faith, love and hope that we so badly need.

There is a habit that many of us have: paying attention to news. News purports to tell us about the wider world, beyond our own personal experience. Traditional news is mediated by a newspaper or a broadcaster. Modern news is more often mediated through social media. Each claims to be a true picture of the world. But is it?

In traditional news, we are getting the viewpoint of the newspaper or the media channel, and also the viewpoint of the individual writer. It is rare that either is impartial. In the case of social media news, there is a sort of illusion that it is somehow more grass-roots than traditional news because it seems to have input and contributions from many individual people. Certainly it has an abundance of other peoples’ opinions. But not all the “people” on social media are genuine: it is easy to fake a person on social media, and sometimes there is good evidence to think that some social media accounts are fabricated. Moreover, some people on social media, even if genuine people, have been persuaded for various reasons to promote mistaken ideas, and they spend large amounts of their time echoing and reinforcing those ideas, sometimes by unreasonable means, like harassment or bad faith arguments. Finally, even though social media news isn’t necessarily mediated through a newspaper or broadcaster like traditional news, the social media platform itself uses algorithms that have been chosen by the tech company who runs it. Those algorithms are designed to increase engagement by trying to cause people to “keep scrolling”, to read more and more content on the platform. Techniques for doing this include amplifying disagreement, so we will become invested in staying to argue our point. Or they might heighten shock, to get our attention. They may try to leverage “confirmation bias” by showing us viewpoints that they think align with our own, in order to make us feel comfortable about our beliefs and about the social media platform itself. Or, alternatively, they may try to evoke tribalism (creating an “us vs them” attitude) to try to get us to defend our side (our “tribe”) against all opposition.

When we are engrossed in news, it is easy to forget God is present. The troubles we see in the news seem daunting, overwhelming, and often relentless: they rarely engender faith in a good God who is with us. All too often, they make us feel isolated and alone in a hostile situation. Nor does being engrossed in news encourage love, especially in the case of social media: any moments of genuine human connection that we may find seem to quickly be swamped by dissent and disagreement. There seems to be little place for love in the news: at best, love seems a sweet but naive desire; at worst, love is viewed as a sort of weak-minded folly, the empty refuge of losers and victims. Finally, there seems no place in news for hope: the future generally looks worse than the past, we are overwhelmed by negative predictions that seem inevitable, and our best chances for survival seem to be short-term at best. From the news, we can easily conclude that our only recourse is to distract ourselves for as long as we can, until we are unavoidably overwhelmed.

Faced with this dismal picture, it is helpful to remember a couple of things. The first is that news is not set up for our good, it is set up for the commercial good of the companies who produce and distribute it. The second is that news, even social media news, is not really a necessity. It doesn’t help us understand the world as much as we might think: in some ways it hinders us by giving us a false vision of what is happening. So do we really need it? Maybe a little bit is fine, especially if we keep in mind what news is and what it is not. But the truth is that nothing particularly terrible will happen if we broadly dispense with news altogether. We don’t really need it. Most of the things it talks about are negative and often distressing things, none of which we have any ability to do anything about. So why not let it go? Yes, it’s easy to be drawn in. But just because something is easy doesn’t mean it is good. News often isn’t. Preoccupation with the news can become a bad habit, difficult to break.

The best way to drop a bad habit is to substitute something else for it. We need things that build up faith, love and hope, not things that tear them down. So what should we substitute for social media news? Given that Jesus is the one in whom our faith, love and hope are rooted, we can focus on him, through prayer, through reading the Gospels, and through learning about him through the Church. Keep in mind that the Church has two millennia of wisdom about Jesus, to share with us. Since faith comes through knowledge of Jesus, the more we focus on him and the more we learn about him, the better. As we learn about him, we remind ourselves of his love for us, and we ourselves learn to love through imitating him. Moreover, in him, we have good hope for a good future, one that is founded on God and his love for us. If we choose, we can made a deliberate choice to wean ourselves off news, particularly social media news, and focus our attention instead on Jesus himself. This is not the easiest choice, but it may well be the best one for our good, because it builds up in us the faith, love and hope that we need to survive and thrive.