I was in Australia over the New Year. As I’m sure you know, there are huge bushfires that have consumed huge stretches of land there, destroying natural habitats, and displacing thousands of people.
We saw the smoke when we were there. We rode a train through the Blue Mountains and saw acres of charred forests. On our first day in Sydney, the pollution level was the same as a small coal-mining Chinese city… i.e., toxic to even be outside. We talked to the locals in Adelaide about the burnt wine country. But all in all, it was like anywhere else I’ve been after a disaster: it’s sad, but life goes on. People are getting on with it.
Then I started getting emails and messages from friends and family back home. “Are you OK? Have you been hurt?” They said, “You should come home! It’s not safe!” I looked up from my phone: sunny skies and beautiful beaches. What in the hell were they going on about?
I was then subjected to what I could only call insanity. News headlines claiming that Australians’ way of life is forever lost, that everything is burning, that over a billion animals (an absurd number) have been killed. One article even went so far as to imply that the entire country will soon have to be abandoned.
This map is fake. But that didn’t stop it from being posted on approximately eight billion news sites.
I’m as alarmed as anyone about climate change, but come the fuck on.
Every few months it seems as though there’s something like this. Whether it’s Brexit or Trump’s impeachment or the Amazon burning or China’s internment of a million Uighurs—we live in the Age of Hyperventilation.
But while there’s an endless stream of tragedy in the world, there is so much that the news never teaches you or shows you.
The news doesn’t show you how bad humans are at predicting the future. How pretty much every projection, scientific or not, ends up incredibly inaccurate. It doesn’t tell you that we’ve been predicting civilization-leveling catastrophes since pretty much the dawn of human thought—and every time, we have been wrong.
The news doesn’t teach you that technology doesn’t develop linearly—how it comes in unexpected leaps, and then trounces prior assumptions under the weight of its efficiency.
The news doesn’t tell you that natural disasters are just that: natural. Yes, they may be occurring slightly more often and be more severe, but they are, and have always been, the rule, not the exception.
The news doesn’t show that the vast majority of people are good. They will help if they can. They care even if they’re confused about how to care or why. The news doesn’t teach you that most people won’t hurt you and even if they do, you will recover and be fine and be stronger than before.
But most of all, the news doesn’t teach you that moral outrage, while strangely satisfying, gives people a sense of accomplishing something without actually accomplishing anything. Posting on social media or writing a scathing op-ed may feel as though it’s contributing to some grand movement, some great push for humanity, but that push is, more often than not, grounded in nothing.
Nowadays, I briefly check a handful of news sites, maybe once a week. I read maybe five news articles in total. They are articles I choose, based on my own perception of what’s important and what matters. The rest is books, blogs, and podcasts.
Months ago, my friends felt sorry for me. They worried that I’d be out of touch, that I’d lose my connection to society and the world, and that I’d become disempowered to change it.
But the opposite has happened. I have realized that it is they who are out of touch, disconnected, and disempowered.
And this is the ultimate failure of the news media as currently constructed: it creates a passivity, a false feeling that we’re not somehow part of the narrative that we are also watching unfold. It lulls us into thinking that we don’t—that we can’t—have some role to play in the drama. It convinces us that our obstacles are too great, that our fears are too deep, that we are incapable of overcoming the same challenges of the thousands of generations who have come before us.
And this is what was lost. The town crier was never meant as a mere announcer. He was an instigator. He was a call to arms to leave our domestic safety and take up the business of the world that is ours. He reminded us to not simply receive the news but to go out and be the news as well.
What news will you be?