I Didn’t Pay Attention to the News This Week

I am a news junkie. I do my best to stay on top of current events, a habit which started early in my life. My family got a morning and evening newspaper. We watched the Today Show and the 5 o’clock news — we were Midwesterners, after all.

When I left the greater Chicago area to go to college in New York state, I transferred my newspaper loyalty to the New York Times. When I returned, briefly after graduating, I read the Watertown Daily Times, the Milwaukee Journal, and then eventually, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner.

Current Events

I share all this because in this day and age of electronic media, I am still reading the New York Times, now digitally of course, and somehow keeping on top of a daily dose of curated information on events happening around the world. Every Friday (or sometimes Saturday), the Times runs a feature, “The News Quiz”. The prompt is, “Did you follow the news this week? Take our quiz to see how well you stack up with other Times readers.” I can’t pass up the chance to see how smart I am, especially when compared to all those Times readers!

The Times kindly provides the answers as well as a statistical analysis of performance in comparison to other readers. I take a bit of pride in pretty regularly placing in the top 10%. But recently, over the past month or so, my average has been dropping.

Today was a wake-up call. I didn’t even get half the answers right and my overall average is, well, average! After licking my wounds and consoling myself, I reflected on just how and why I have pulled back from paying attention to current events. It was an eye-opening exercise.

Shared Sources

One of the first realizations is that shared sources of information are few and far between. “Did you see so-and-so’s column in the paper today?” used to be a failsafe conversation starter. Now everybody is reading something different on different platforms and at different times. The shared commonality of the experience of getting news has changed dramatically. Now comments go directly to the website or page rather than filtering among friends, co-workers, and colleagues.

Second, I have grown tired of the same soundbite showing up in not even modestly altered ways in the different sources I read and listen to. HCR is parroting what has been said on MSNOW and CNN. Fox is more like a Greek Chorus, with the same script distributed from the morning shows to the late-night comics. Local print news, which used to be called the “paper of record”, no longer prints obituaries or legal notices – both one-time sources of both humor and tragedy.

Third, I am just tired of chasing information. The level of trust that once existed between revered institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and was reserved for esteemed journalists like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, Huntley and Brinkley, has evaporated. News agencies struggle to put journalists in the field, pay them a living wage, and keep them alive — and they do so without allies, because we have all grown comfortable taking at face value whatever appears on Facebook or TikTok.

Capacity and Reason to Care

I realized it’s not that I don’t care about current events anymore, it’s just that I don’t have the capacity to embrace all that is now available and I don’t have an efficient way of collecting it and integrating it into what is my lived experience.

This was the most important insight for me. My world is pretty small at this point in my life. My activities more and more are centered around maintenance and stability, rather than growth and development.

The Importance of Routines

What matters on a daily basis has much less to do with world events and more on keeping to a regular routine. It’s not that I am not curious about these things, or that I don’t have firmly held opinions about them. It’s that I have little power or influence over changing them, except among my immediate community of friends. And the kicker here is that the folks with whom I am deeply connected are pretty much all of the same mindset.

This week’s NYT New Quiz asked questions about things happening in Russia, sports events like the up-coming world cup, stock market offerings, the California elections and other things. All of which had been stories in the paper over the past week. I certainly had scanned them, because my morning routine includes scanning the headlines in the Times, but the fact is, I didn’t read the stories because none of them involved me. This is not a criticism of the paper; it is an admission that what I am focusing on is vastly different.

What Am I Focusing On

I am still engaged with the California primary election results. This matters because I am invested in the politics of my community, specifically around what politicians I am going to have to harangue in the coming years about meeting the needs of aging adults.

I am focused on healthcare issues that will impact how much money I have left over every month to cover expenses. I need to keep up with all the backroom wheeling and dealing going on that too often is buried in government reports, but receives little coverage in the news because, quite frankly, of the ageism that pervades all these institutions.

I am focused on housing and food insufficiency as too many of my neighbors and people I know in my community are struggling to get these everyday needs met. The amazing thing is how incredibly creative my community is in finding workarounds to the barriers, intentional and unintentional, put in their way and just showing up for one another.

I am focused on sharing what I know with people who will be able to use that information to have a positive change in their lives, be able to advocate for themselves and other family members, and ultimately reduce the ignorance and fear that pervades our systems of care.

A New Era of Sharing

The irony of all of this is that I am sharing these thoughts with you on a platform that only exists because of the very upheaval I’ve been describing. Without the internet, none of this reaches you — and none of you reach me. I am grateful for both.

So here is my question for you: What are you paying attention to these days? What has stayed on your radar — and what have you quietly let go? I’d genuinely like to know.