Lawfare honcho Ben Wittes provides “A User’s Guide to Following the News.” The premise:
I’m going to give you seven principles for following the rest of the news emerging from the first week of the second Trump presidency—and, more generally, the flood of news that emerges from a presidency that is all about attention.
The whole essay is worth reading but I want to highlight two, related, points from it.
Principle #1: Slow Down.
The news actually doesn’t care if you follow it. Not a single one of the president’s executive orders, nominations, pardons, or statements would have been worse if you had ignored it, come to it a few hours later, or stressed about it less. Your emotional reaction to the news actually affects it not one whit. Stressing about the news doesn’t make the news better. It just makes you feel worse.
Not only does your anxiety not accomplish anything productive, it actually inhibits productive thought on your part. How are you supposed to think creatively about what you might do about Thing A if you finished worrying about Thing A four hours ago, because you’ve already motored through Things B, C, D, and E and you’re currently fretting about Thing F? What if you had spent those four hours baking a strudel with Thing A vaguely on your mind instead? You might have had a great idea of something useful to do about Thing A during that time—and you’d have a strudel.
You need to accept that you can’t follow all the news. There’s too much of it. It’s coming too fast. And a lot of it requires genuine expertise to understand.
I am about as sophisticated a consumer of executive power news as there is. I do it for a living. I have a team of professionals that I’ve set up to do it with me. And I can’t follow it all either. The most I can do is follow certain discrete streams of news, assign others to follow other discrete streams of news, and ignore the rest.
Principle #2: Feel Free to Ignore Important News
There’s an important principle that follows from not being able to follow all of the news: You have to ignore some of it.
Grant yourself this indulgence. If you follow everything, you follow nothing well. Allow yourself to specialize. You’ll be better at the stuff you do follow.
Note that ignoring the rest does not mean deciding the rest is unimportant. Far from it. The rest is very important. But I don’t do tax policy. I don’t do health care. I don’t do environmental policy. I don’t do basketball. The rest may be the most important things in the world, but they are someone else’s job.
The first trick to staying sane is deciding which part of the news is your job to follow and which part is not.
While I’ve failed in these first few days of the new administration to fully follow Principle #1, I’ve done pretty well with Principle #2 and the others. There’s really no value in doomscrolling social media or constantly checking your favorite outlets to see what the latest outrage will be. They will, sadly, keep.
There will inevitably be accusations of privilege since it’s a lot easier to calm down if you’re not personally worried about, say, being deported or losing one’s job because they’re in a category not favored by the new administration. My wife and I are both Federal employees, which means we could well be impacted by new policies, but armed agents aren’t going to kick our doors in. Probably.
But, honestly, Wittes’ advice is actually more salient for those in targeted groups. There’s no value and real harm from panic and scattered thinking. That time and energy would be better spent contingency planning and researching one’s legal options.
