Living Greener: Most news adds nothing to our lives

THIS column talks about ways we can simplify our lives and I occasionally go from doing that physically — re-using things, growing food and so on — to ways we can simplify the mental environment as well.

For example, I’ve talked about how difficult it is to avoid celebrity gossip these days, and how harmful it is. It gives us false standards of beauty, wastes our time and emotions on people who don't care about us, and makes voyeurism and other ugly human impulses seem normal.

In that spirit many people I know avoid such things, instead watching the international news and other alleged sources of serious journalism. Unfortunately for them, most ‘real’ news is also less useful, and more damaging, than most people realise.

Don't get me wrong — local newspapers like this one are as important for an area as police or fire departments and should be bought by everyone. They do what news should do, expanding our understanding beyond what we experience in our face-to-face conversations, employing experts to sift data and conduct interviews, and bringing our attention to issues that we would not have otherwise known about.

Local news, however, is fundamentally different from most of the news we see. It deals with places and people we know, issues that affect us and that we can change, and politicians we could write to personally or vote for or against.

Most of what we call news, though — international news articles, newscasts and, these days, social media links — adds nothing to our lives. In the space of a few moments, a reporter can explain that "fighting broke out" in a country you've never heard of, but they cannot convey any understanding of the issues involved.

In short, you come away with no information of value, nothing that you can affect or that makes your life better. If you avoided watching that bit of news, you would have a bit less stress and a few moments of your life back and would have lost nothing.

As author Rolf Dobelli points out, most national and international news misleads us into focusing on the wrong "risk map" of the world, by focusing on things that are loud or flashy rather than things that present an actual chance of affecting us.

Terrorists and serial killers make the news, even though the danger from them is almost non-existent; real threats like diabetes or social breakdown — difficult to convey in a few seconds of footage — are neglected.

Such news acts like sugar for the brain, offering no nutrition but a momentary and addictive high from the exciting or lurid nature. It also causes us stress, however, triggering the kind of hormones that our Stone Age ancestors felt when under attack.

The omnipresence of news, on every pub television or internet feed, stretches such addictive but stressful stimuli across a human lifetime. Dobelli wrote ‘News consumers risk impairing their physical health.’ Most of us can’t remember the top news stories from a month ago that are no longer in the news today. They wasted our time, caused us stress, continued our addiction, made us feel helpless and passive, interrupted our thoughts, and then disappeared without adding anything to our lives.

When you do want to know about a story in national or international news, start by asking: Is this story important? Does this story sound plausible, given what you know of human nature? Check the facts: if a public figure is quoted as saying something, check the original footage to get the full context. Select your issues carefully and read up on their background.

No matter what your political leanings, read the same story from different angles: right-wing, left-wing, including views you disagree with, to get the full picture. Read stories from other countries and see how they cover the same issues. Finally, read news articles from fifty or a hundred years ago, and see how they covered the equivalent issues in their day.

By doing all these things, you’ll stand a much better chance of putting the burning usual of our nightly newscasts into perspective and being informed on the issues that matter.