In one of my intermittent attempts to be a better person, I decided some months back that I would try to read more news in a more systematic way, rather than trusting to the ergodicity of Twitter and Facebook to bring me anything resembling a representative sample of what matters. In practice, this has largely meant taking a few minutes to scan through the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post on the web every morning. Or almost every morning— I don’t always remember to do it.
This has been an eye-opening experience, not because of the incredible stories I’ve learned about by this method, but because of how few of the stories that are up there are things that make me say “Wow, I have to read that…” Most of the time, I feel like just scanning the headlines is enough to get the point.
(Clicking through to the “World News” tabs of both of those papers is a little better, in that they often have stories I wouldn’t’ve encountered otherwise. Still a lot of headline-skimming, though.)
I’m actually better about always looking at our local paper, the Schenectady Gazette. This is partly because it’s a more well-established habit (I started reading it daily back in 2016), and partly because it’s often kind of charmingly parochial— big stories about potholes on city streets, and that kind of thing. Even there, though, the result is largely the same— just scanning the headlines is enough for most stories.
To a large degree, the problem is the same at both the national and the local level: most of the top stories are big and slow-moving things, ill suited to the time scale of a daily paper. The top Gazette story this morning is about a proposed construction project that’s in the early stages of an approval process that will take months if not years; the NYT and WaPo lead with stories about bills in Congress and pandemic updates, both of which have a natural time scale of weeks. This isn’t to say that incremental updates aren’t useful, mind, just that they’re incremental. These aren’t rapidly-evolving stories that urgently need reading right now— in fact, a lot of what’s in these is sort of transient noise. They’re snapshots of long processes of negotiation, and a concern raised by some individual legislator that’s a front-page story today will be basically forgotten by next Tuesday, let alone the time anybody votes on anything.
In terms of conveying useful information, most of these stories would be adequately served by a weekly podcast sort of format (in fact, part of the reason I don’t feel hugely compelled to read the very latest on the infrastructure bill is that I get updates on that stuff via current events podcasts). Looking in about once a week smooths out a lot of the more ephemeral bits of the daily churn of stuff that happens but isn’t actually significant.
Of course, if daily newspapers are poorly matched to the time scale of significant events, well, just think of how badly 24-hour news networks fit. Let alone Twitter, with its minute-by-minute updating. There just aren’t very many stories that genuinely demand updates at that frequency (and on the rare occasion that they do arise, a lot of what’s delivered in the minute-by-minute updates turns out to be wrong).
There’s a phenomenon in digital signal processing called “aliasing” where something at a very high frequency can do bizarre things when sampled at a low rate— it can create spurious signals that seem to be at lower frequencies, and that sort of thing. This is one of the things that drives audiophiles to vinyl records— digital music files and even CDs filter out some of the high end of the frequency spectrum so as to avoid weird noises caused by aliasing. (The audiophiles aren’t actually right about this making a meaningful difference in the sound quality, but that’s a different religious war…)
A lot of what makes the current-events side of social media so exhausting is a kind of inverse aliasing of news: sampling slow-moving events much too rapidly. Most events that matter involve giant complicated processes with a bunch of moving parts, whose end result is to move something very significant along at a stately pace. The actual progress of something like legislation is much too slow to change meaningfully in minutes, though, so updates through the day on Twitter are about as meaningful as regular updates on the position of an individual piston in the engine of my car as I drive the kids to camp.
This time scale mismatch drives a lot of needless angst on social media, and to some extent within traditional 24-hour news media. It’s also, I think, partly responsible for the other really striking feature of the newspaper pages I look at, namely how much of what they feature is just punditry. Big chunks of both the NYT and WaPo front pages are given over to links to explicit opinion pieces, and a lot of other stories are analyses that are basically opinion in disguise. Those serve the need for regularly updated content, because opinions genuinely can change daily or even hourly, in the case of yelling-head shows on news networks. They’re also self-sustaining— today’s opinion column generates a response piece tomorrow; an interview on a morning show is fodder for a segment on the afternoon chat show, and so on.
What I keep coming back to, though, is how transient and unimportant all of this is, and how much that contributes to making everybody crazy. It’s incredibly hard to resist, though— I’m still much too active on Twitter, even though I know that most of the content being fired at me is just ephemeral nonsense.
It does help a bit to be consciously aware of it, though. When something starts burning up my timeline, I can often force myself to ask “Wait, what’s the actual time scale of this?” If it’s an instant outrage over something that’s going to drag on for weeks or more, knowing that can make it a little easier to step back a bit, and not get so invested in something that’s going to turn out to be just an artifact of news aliasing.
If this is the sort of thing you would like to read at irregular but maybe too-frequent intervals, here’s a button you can click:
If you think somebody else needs to read this, here’s a different button:
And if you’d like to suggest a convenient way to get higher-quality news than what I’m doing now, the comments will be open.