Forough's notes on Stop Reading The News

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body: appetising, easily digestible and extremely damaging. The media is feeding us titbits that taste palatable but do nothing to satisfy our hunger for knowledge. Unlike books and well-researched long-form articles, the news cannot satiate us. We can gobble down as many articles as we like, but we will never be doing more than gorging on sweets. As with sugar, alcohol, fast food and smoking, the side effects only become apparent later.

As soon as a piece of news is in the world, it becomes public knowledge and you will not enjoy an advantage in knowing about it. You will, however, gain a huge advantage over your peers and competitors if firstly you have a deeper awareness of the background context and secondly, if that context is not widely disseminated. And you will only reach this awareness through intensive reading and thought.

The relationship between relevance and media attention seems inverse: the greater the fanfare in the news, the smaller the relevance of the event. Over the years I've come to the conclusion that the items journalists don't report on are usually the very things you actually want to know!

To the media, what's relevant is anything that grabs attention. This is the racket at the heart of the industry's business model. The news they supply us is irrelevant, but it's sold as relevant. 'The relevant versus the new': it's the fundamental battle facing us today.

We ought to try and understand the 'generators' underlying these events. We ought to be investigating the 'engine room' behind them. Sadly, shockingly few journalists are able to explain these causal relationships, because the processes that shape cultural, intellectual, economic, military, political and environmental events are mostly invisible. They are complex, non-linear and hard for our brains to digest. This is why news corporations focus on the easy stuff: anecdotes, scandals, celebrity gossip and natural disasters. They are cheap to produce and easy to digest.

Bad news is perceived as more relevant than good news. Negative information has twice the impact that positive information does. In psychology, this is called negativity bias, and it can be observed in even one-year-old infants. They respond more sensitively to negative stimuli than to positive ones. Adults are no different. A stock falling by ten per cent makes us twice as unhappy as a stock climbing by ten per cent makes us happy. Negativity bias is innate.